(no subject)

[proximoception]

Guiltily reading Walden for the first time - consecutively - and actually annotating it. I'm loving most of it, but he's almost as disorganized as Emerson; a bit to his detriment, too, as he's less consistently memorable and burying his gold in a book-length work. Emerson's disorganization is usually a strength, permitting not just digression but discovery. And rediscovery, toward the end. I hate the word 'leitmotif' but it's not dissimilar to the peak effects in Tristan. Maybe Thoreau will get some of that going himself as the book progresses?

Only one perfect paragraph so far (1/3 in), the one I already knew was perfect:

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

The bird disappearing behind a cloud I happen to know he will use again.

The house sections of "Economy" and "How I Lived" do connect to the magnificent passage near the end of "Walking", to me still his greatest moment - so far. I wonder if he's just pretending to not be organizing. How good is Thoreau? I don't yet know. If he's like Chekhov he'll keep flooding out my estimates no matter how I update them.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I just heard that Proust really wanted to translate Walden, but someone beat him to the punch.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Fascinating - it's like his roots were seeking Wordsworth without his quite knowing the man existed, via all available prose mediators: Hardy, Eliot, Ruskin, Thoreau.

Because people just don't know, do they? Even among native English readers so few know. Maybe even among Wordsworth scholars.