Thoreau as Triangulation

Some nice thoughts on reading Thoreau’s journal from Vertigo:

As Damion Searls, who abridged this volume down from the original 7,000 pages, writes in his fascinating Introduction, “The Journal is not literally what Thoreau wrote each day: he often wrote up entries days later, from notes, and … he would also go back years later and make further additions and connections.” So when we read in consecutive paragraphs (as we do on February 3, 1852) about Thoreau’s visit to libraries in Cambridge and Boston, musings on the nature of sunsets, an evening walk, a quick investigation into the origins of the word “selenite” (a stone), questions about the color of the night sky, and a final paragraph about the nature of a “forcible writer,” it’s easy to see this not as the flow of a single personality but the facets of a many-dimensional puzzle.

This is, of course, just what the depiction of a human should be, the depiction as a writer like Ford Madox Ford understood it. For more on Thoreau’s journal, read The Quarterly Conversation’s review of Searls’ abridgment. We also have an interview with Searls about a very different abridgment he made of another famous American text of that period.

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