This Week, I'm Reading...

Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau, edited by Andrew Blauner

I have a little bit of a crush on Henry David Thoreau. Walden came to me at just the right moment: the end of my sophomore year of college. Spring was arriving, I was turning 20, I was in a relationship head-and-shoulders above previous dalliances. I felt as if my life was finally beginning. It was also the spring when a classmate of ours was murdered in a terrorist attack on the Rome airport. I had a lot of questions about life and the world. Enter Thoreau. I have returned to Walden many times since, to teach it and to read it again. So, this collection of essays, published in 2021, in which writers share their own encounters with Thoreau, feels a little bit like a dinner party with a bunch of interesting people who get me when I say, “I have a little bit of a crush on Henry David Thoreau.” Even when they criticize him—because I sometimes do that, too. So far, I’ve read the first seven of 27 essays, grouped in a section titled “Excursions Near and Far.” Yesterday I read one by Megan Marshall, whose biography of the New England Transcendentalist writer and editor Margaret Fuller was a favorite read a few years back (Margaret Fuller: A New American Life). Marshall writes here about three lonely months she spent in Kyoto during which she discovered the writings of “the Thoreau of Japan,” Kamo-no-Chōmei, who lived in a portable hut of wood panels, bamboo poles, and thatch on a bluff at the confluence of two rivers in the early 1200s. Yup, 600 years before Thoreau.

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