Jan. 25, 1841 -- age 23
"We should strengthen, and beautify, and industriously mould our bodies to be fit companions of the soul -- assist them to grow up like trees, and be agreeable and wholesome objects in nature. I think if I had had the disposal of this soul of man, I should have bestowed it sooner on some antelope of the plains than upon this sickly and sluggish body."
Thoreau argues for improvement of the body as to create a body better capable of improving the soul, an idea found in Beat writings like Kerouac's Dharma Bums.
Jan 8, 1842 -- age 24
"What offends me most in my compositions is the moral element in them. The repentant never say a brave word. Their resolves should be mumbled in silence. Strictly speaking, morality is not healthy. Those undeserved joys which come uncalled and make us more pleased than grateful are they that sing..."
Thoreau eschews the "moral element" of his writings, and talks about how immorality can bring the greatest joys, something that the womanizing and boozing Kerouac would agree with.
undated, 1842
"Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it. If he had known so much as this, he would never have earned it."
This reminds me of the destructive element of excess wealth, expressed by Ginsberg's metaphor of Moloch in "Howl, pt 2"
Undated, 1850
"As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course."
The beats would agree with this, as they broke borders of sexuality and openness such as with Ginsberg's "Howl" and Burroughs' Queer, Junky, and Naked Lunch.
Nov 16, 1850 -- age 33
"In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is only another name for tameness. It is the untamed, uncivilized, free, and wild thinking in Hamlet, in the Iliad, and in all the scriptures and mythologies that delights us--not learned in the schools, not refined and polished by art A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvellous, ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen."
The beats works, especially Kerouac, to me anyway, is entertaining because of the wildness and cavalier nature of their lives, and this is what Thoreau is picking up on as a theme in the best literature.
Undated, 1851
"English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton included, breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but not so much of nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct. There was need of America."
On the same vein as the last quote, Thoreau talks of the "need of America." Whitman has a similar view ("America is the best poem"), and the beats helped the image of America as a wild, fresh place, despite the frontier of Thoreau/Whitman being long gone.
--David Vivian
David Henry Thoreau, much like Walt Whitman, is a prelude to the beat and post- beat writers found within San Francisco Literature. Thoreau’s ideas that the modern industrial word was intruding and destroying the natural world are reflected in works by; Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Brautigan. Brautigan’s “A Walden Park For Winos,” is in a direct conversation with Thoreau’s work. Also, Thoreau’s ideas that the individual could transcend the bondage of the modern world are reflected in Kerouac’s “Dharma Buns”. Finally Thoreau’s belief that the materialism of the modern world was polluting the human soul is reflected m in the beat idea of Moloch and Mamannison.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing these David and including your own thoughts about each.
ReplyDeleteAnthony, good textual connections.
- Trey
Another edition to this is the effect that Ralph Emerson had on the transcendental movement in which Throeau played a part and that is seen throughout works of Kerouac and other beat generation writers. Writers in both Emerson and Kerouac's time rejected societies norms and institutions in favor of nature, like Thoreau, Whitman, and Brautigan.
ReplyDeleteIn his essay titled "Nature", Emerson says,
"So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit."
The "endless inquiry of the intellect" reminded me of something that Kerouac would say, especially in a work like Dharma Bums.