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Documentary producer Ken Burns has just released a 3-hour film on 19th-century author Henry David Thoreau, one of my heroes when I was a younger man and more easily caught by enthusiasms.

With a bit of hesitation, I tuned in to watch it on PBS and was instantly disappointed. It was the Standard Authorized Version, with almost nothing new to say. It was the Thoreau you might get on a network morning chat show — all surface, all cliche. Its language is largely that of 21st century pop psychology, while Thoreau’s own words are saturated with 19th century Romanticism.

When Burns came out with his monumental series on the Civil War in 1990, it was groundbreaking and original. It was also a huge hit and deserved every accolade it received. He has directed and produced some epical series since then, but I’m afraid it has mostly been downhill from then. He has parodied himself and his once-innovative style, with its narrator, and its Hollywood celebrity voice-overs and vintage photographs lovingly caressed by the slowly moving camera.

Walden Pond

And so, this series on Thoreau doesn’t offer much new or insightful. It does attempt to make the 19th century writer seem more 21st century than can convincingly be done — more social justice warrior and less tedious cataloguer of birds and ferns. To be fair, Thoreau was, in terms of his day, quite progressive, an abolitionist and environmentalist, and some of his writing has had tremendous social and political impact on the century that followed him. But the series gets the balance wrong, more in favor of things we value, and less so for the more Transcendentalist trends of his era.

And it glosses over the fact, that in addition to being a great writer and social activist, he was also a world-class loon. He didn’t play well with other children, as they say. He liked his loneness, didn’t comfortably interact with others, and while he was a proto-environmentalist and a fervent abolitionist, he also maintained many prejudices of his age, including a romanticized view of Noble Savage Native Americans. His political views could line him up pretty well with current anti-tax Tea Party Republicans. Some have outright called him an anarchist. Recently, others have placed him on the Asperger spectrum. Others have questioned his sexuality, or lack of. At any rate, Henry Thoreau was not what is typically considered normal. If not a loon, at least a very odd duck.

Emerson wrote of him, “He was bred to no profession. He never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. When asked at dinner what dish he preferred, he answered, ‘the nearest.’”

Walden, of course, chronicles his time spent in a cabin he built on the glacial lake of that name, where he lived for two years in an attempt to leave civilization behind and grow his own beans. Thoreau became the patron saint of environmentalism in the 1960s, and that despite the fact that in 1844, he personally destroyed a whole forest by, like Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon, “doubtless being careless with matches.”

Yes, he marched to the beat of a different drummer, but had little sense of rhythm.

I have read most of what Thoreau wrote, including his 14-volume journals. I feel safe in saying there were four basic periods in his writing life. Early on, he was a student, and like many such, mimicked his models to the point of too often simply quoting them endlessly. He had a habit of gathering shorter piece he had composed and editing them together into longer, rather discursive pieces.

Then came his journeyman period, where he had largely found his voice, but still had some problem making the whole cohere. This was the period of the book he wrote while at Walden Pond, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which told the story of the boat trip he made with his brother, John, 10 years before. They sailed a dory down the Concord River and up the Merrimack, and attempted to climb Mount Katahdin in Maine, where he had a transcendental vision. After John died, Henry wrote the book as a memorial to his brother.

Reproduction of the interior of Thoreau’s cabin

It is a wandering volume, mostly about the boat trip they took, but also about pretty much everything else the young writer could pack into it, still with lots of allusive quotes. Perhaps he was imitating Montaigne, whose work is likewise punctuated.

He had it published at his own expense, and when it failed to sell, he wound up with all the remaindered books delivered to his home. “I now have a library of nearly nine-hundred volumes,” he said, “over seven-hundred of which I wrote myself.”

The high point came with Walden or A Life in the Woods, which he began in his lakeside cabin and finished later on. It is one of the best written books I have ever read, if taken sentence by sentence. It is delicious to peruse. I fell in love with Thoreau’s prose style, with its biblical heft and Shakespearean metaphor.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.” How can you write better than that? You can’t.

Illustration of Heritage Club edition of “Walden” by Thomas Nason

His later books were cobbled together from magazine articles he had published. They are still a delight to read. The Maine Woods and Cape Cod — neither as sustained as Walden, but still solid writing.

But as Thoreau got older, he began to lose the metaphorical fire that had made Walden so memorable. He became more concerned with collecting data, precise taxonomy and recording detailed observations.

You can see these stylistic periods in the journals, which begin with lots of quotations, rise to metaphorical heights as the years progress, and then devolve into quotidian daily notations perhaps of scientific usefulness, but no longer designed for the pleasure of reading.

He published a final travel book that demonstrates the kind of exhaustion Thoreau was facing. It was published in 1866, after his death and called A Yankee in Canada. It begins, “I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen much; what I got by going to Canada was a cold.”

I have read it all, from A Week to Walden to Maine Woods to The Dispersion of Seeds, which is one of the first meaningful explications of plant succession. But not the poems. Gott im Himmel, not the poems. Thoreau wrote the most poetic of prose, but the most prosaic of poetry.

This he shares with his mentor. Thoreau lived for a while with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a celebrity and public intellectual who wrote reams. Emerson was more widely and systematically read and educated than Thoreau and he explained a good deal of German philosophy to the American public. Emerson was a better philosopher than Thoreau, but Thoreau was the better writer.

Both shared an aphoristic style, where individual sentences are hugely quotable. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines,” Emerson wrote in Self Reliance.” And, “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”

(Compare with Thoreau in Walden, where he wanted “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”)

Thoreau’s Cove, at Walden Pond

The difference between them is that Emerson strings these aphorisms one after the other like shunting boxcars bumping into each other. There is often little sense of continuity. You admire each sentence but they pile up rather than add up. Thoreau has the aphorisms, but also the talent, at his best, to make them flow together melodically.

I first went to Concord and Walden Pond more than 50 years ago. I can not accurately recall the number of times I have made it back; they all blur together. I’ve been there in spring and in fall; I have had the place all to myself, and I have had visits I had to share with busloads of tourists; there were moments when I felt I was communing with the eternity that Thoreau found there, and moments that were bound by the clock — I had elsewhere to get to before dark.

But the climax of a visit is circumambulating the pond, i.e., walking the perimeter of the water, a distance of roughly a mile and a half. At the one end is the swimming-hole beach used by the residents of Concord, Mass., and at the far end are the railroad tracks of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s Fitchburg Line commuter train.

Reproduction of Thoreau’s cabin

On the way, you pass the site of Thoreau’s cabin, marked by stones where the tiny building used to be (a modern replica can be see on the other side of the highway that passes the pond, at the parking lot; yes, there is now a parking lot.)

The pond is just another kettle lake in a landscape made by their number into Swiss cheese on the map of New England. But it has a resonance built into it because of its adoption by Thoreau, a resonance that is now felt by countless acolytes for whom Walden is, if not a holy book, then at least a baedeker for self-discovery.

I may have shorted Thoreau as a political thinker. His essay on Civil Disobedience has been especially influential on reformers, from Mohandas Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. And his scientific essays, written later in his career, have sometimes been well ahead of their time.

But shifting the emphasis from the nature writings to the political and moral writings, as the TV series seems to do, equally distorts the life he is profiling.

He became a prophet in the hippie 1960s, but that era was too louche to fully capture him. The informality of Whole Earth Catalog would have been foreign to the Harvard educated Thoreau, who read ancient Greek and quoted Aeschylus, and believed in “higher” thoughts and endeavors. He believed in a kind of intellectual hierarchy that our postmodern world mistrusts.

“He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “So many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig.”

We get very little flavor of the man, outside the comfortable mythos, from the TV series. Perhaps that is all the use we can get from him in an era of text messaging and Instagram when reading seems as antiquated as blacksmithing.

Fall leaves reflected in Walden Pond

We should, no doubt, honor the work that has immediate practical value in the world, but what ultimately gives Henry Thoreau his immortality is the writing, the words. At his best, he was one of America’s greatest writers. I wish the TV series had more of that.

Condemned to repeat

October 3, 2022

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There are two great crossing shadows that have darkened the lives of those of us born near the end of the Second World War.

The first was cast by the mushroom cloud. I was one of those elementary-school boys who was herded down to the basement of my school to lean against the wall over the poor crouching girls huddled underneath to protect them from a potential nuclear blast. We had a siren in our town that went off to alert volunteer firemen they were needed, but the siren was also supposed to let us know that an air raid was immanent. Every time the siren went off, kids my age all feared it would be “the big one.”

And I remember watching film on TV of Nevada atomic bomb tests where we would see houses blown away by the shock waves or crumble in flames. It seemed very real and very soon. We all had dreams with mushroom clouds in them and talked about “the A-bomb.”

And there were maps in newspapers and magazines showing circles of destruction if a nuclear bomb hit New York and I looked anxiously to see whether our town was inside the circumference. And it usually was.

It was a background anxiety for most of my childhood and is still there, somewhere at the margins of my psyche.

But the other shadow was the Holocaust. I recently watched all six-and-a-half hours of the Ken Burns documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, and I felt the cheeriness drain from my cheeks. And that second shadow all came back. It was something I knew about way too young to be able to process. Now I am 74 and still can’t adequately grasp it.

I remember, from the age of six or seven, when early television was still struggling to find content, and often filled out Saturday mornings with industrial films or films made by the Army or State Department. Particularly a show called The Big Picture, and on it — at that tender age — I remember seeing film footage of the liberation of the death camps and the piles of skeletonized bodies piled up and the hollow-eyes survivors shaking with cold and hunger, and it is a kind of measuring stick I have, morally, on the depth of human evil. Because of how that footage burned its way into me from childhood, I was sensitized to the horror and outrage. It trips a button in me — this is what humans do to humans.

Such scenes are permanently playing somewhere in the back of my head, never too far submerged, and seeing the Burns documentary brought it all back into the front of my awareness.

It is not merely because of the grim nature of the documentary, but because of its historical ripples, forward and back in time. The series tells two different but parallel stories. The first is about Hitler and Nazism and the results of rabid anti-Semitism; the second is about America’s response to all that.

The first is unsettling because of the many resonant parallels between the National Socialist political plan and the current Republican plan — not merely Trump (or “Moose-a-loony” as I call him) (Or as Stephen Colbert called him, “the Count of Mostly Crisco”) — but the whole of the Republican party, which seems to have cynically chosen transparent lies, xenophobia and racism, not as a belief, so much, but as a strategy. There may be a few true believers, but most of them know what they are doing.

The second, perhaps even more disturbing, is the American public’s willingness to absorb these lies, xenophobia and racism. Before World War II, the isolationist mood of the electorate was quite clear, and the rhetoric used is the same as that used today. “America First” is not a new slogan.

The old news photos of Madison Square Garden “America First” rallies are hard to distinguish from Trump rallies. The same flags, the same slogans. There were Nazi supporters in both crowds. The prefix “Neo-“ doesn’t help. Hitler’s National Socialist party didn’t have more than a third of the vote before he became chancellor — it was a minority party when it took power — and now Republicans (Trump with less than a third of the vote) are figuring out how they can get and keep power without majority support.

I grew up in New Jersey, in a place that has half Protestant, half Catholic and half Jewish, and no distinctions were made, anymore than if someone were Irish, or German, or blond or redheaded — just an interesting bit of fact about your friends. And so, the idea that you would murder a few million people because they were Jewish was not simply horrifying, but made absolutely no sense at all. It was crazy, and perhaps the craziness of it was the scariest part: People don’t act through thoughtfulness or rationality, but are easily led to adopt absolutely insane ideas.

And, of course, we’re seeing it all over again with Trump supporters. And seeing it quite literally, not just a faint echo. Word for word.

So, when I speak of “ripples” both back and forward in time, I remember not just the Holocaust, but also the Holodomor, Babi Yar, Katyn, the Armenian Genocide, the massacres of Native Americans, 250 years of race slavery, the Sichuan Massacres in China in 1645, the 100,000 killed by the Spanish Inquisition, Cambodian genocide, Rwandan genocide, not to mention the pyramids of skulls created by Tamerlane or the biblical command to murder all “the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites,” and to “save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction.” God could sound almost human in his viciousness, as in 1 Samuel 15: “Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”

One of the most important books I have read in the past 10 years is Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, about Poland, Ukraine and Belarus and the death and devastation under first Stalin and then Hitler. It seems the book has not ended and we see its sequel in Ukraine right now.

History is an endless tale of woe.

And so, at the end of Burns’ documentary, when he tells, again, the story of Anne Frank, and quotes her famous line, “in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart,” the irony is absolutely unbearable.

I think of the lines by Yeats, written in a much lighter context, but still relevant here:

The thought comes over one that perhaps the planet would be better off without the scab of humans on its surface, that perhaps we should just let it run its course, let Putin set off the back-and-forth of our missiles passing his on the way across the oceans to mutually assured destruction. The earth could get on with being the earth — a new start.

But I have a son and a daughter, and two granddaughters, whose lives are cantilevered into the dark chasm of the future, and I cannot wish that on them. Like every generation before, we have failed them again.

A civilized TV series

January 7, 2014

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Without the cosmos, there would have been no civilization.

But, without Civilisation, there would have been no Cosmos.

Bettany Hughes

And probably no Civil War or Jazz. And no jobs for all those BBC presenters, from Bettany Hughes to Michael Wood.

And Michael Palin would have been merely another retired Python.

Sir Kenneth Clark’s 1969 BBC television series is the granddaddy of all BBC and PBS high-culture series, where an engaging personality teaches us history or art from a personal point of view. For anyone who remembers seeing Civilisation when it was first broadcast in the United States in 1970, seeing it again, now on DVD, will be a revelation.

First of all, the film quality is excellent. Unlike other old series, presented in grainy, contrasty aged versions, Civilisation looks mahvelous, just as crisp and bright as when it was first broadcast.

The series was initially filmed in color, and on 35mm stock, making it visually stunning. The BBC has remastered the original films onto HD and they are now available on Blu-Ray, at least in Europe. (One hopes that an American Blu-Ray version is soon in the offing).

Second, it is a much better, more nuanced view of its subject than you probably remember. If you recall it as Clark, with the British public-school back-palate drawl, talking about the “great masterpieces” as if he were an Oxfordian tour bus guide, you will be in for a surprise: His view is much more subtle than that.

Certainly, since the series was made, the general view of art and history has broadened, and the view of Western civilization as the be-all and end-all of human existence has been tossed out on the rubbish heap of ideas. Deconstructionists have shown us how our aggrandization of certain fetish items of cultural history has merely served to legitimize a particular ruling elite.

Yeah, yeah, yeah — we know that. But Clark’s view isn’t so simple. It is true that he exemplifies an old-fashioned “great man” view of history, and for that we have to listen to him with a grain or two of sodium chloride, but he is not merely the smug purveyor of status quo. He makes a serious attempt to discover just what civilization might be, and uses the past 500 years of European history to make his discovery.

“Writers and politicians may come out with all sorts of edifying sentiments,” he says in the series, “but they are what is known as declarations of intent. If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a minister of housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings.”

And look at the buildings, we do. That is a third surprise in the series: Clark’s willingness to shut up for long periods of time while the camera shows us the art, the building or the landscape, so we may discover it for ourselves and not just take Clark’s word for it. He is more interested in sharing something with us than pounding us with his point of view.

We could do worse than consider his point of view, for it isn’t just about justifying power, but about seeing the results of how we view ourselves and our culture.

Civilization, Clark says, is energetic above all, always making something new. It is aware of the past and supremely confident and willing to plan for a future that will extend beyond our lifetimes, and therefore has a belief in permanence. It also has a firm belief in self-doubt. It fosters compassion and is willing to consider other points of view.

It is this last that the current wave of deconstructionists has failed to notice: Deconstruction itself depends on one of the supreme ideals of Western culture.

Charlemagne reliquary

The full title of the series, with its British spelling, is Civilisation: A Personal View, and we should never forget — and Clark never forgets — that it is a single take on the subject. It is an opening statement in a conversation, not a final word to close off discussion.

And carping critics who complain that Western civilization — and post-Classical civilization at that — is hardly the be-all and end-all of civilizations in the world — well, Clark admits he has enough on his plate to cover Charlemagne to Monet. We wait for his counterpart to give us a similar personal overview of China, India, Africa or the New World. Clark has given us the template. Have at it.

The BBC took a chance when it made its first full-color TV series. It ultimately proved so popular that it was followed by Jacob Bronowsky’s The Ascent of Man and a host of others, from James Burke’s Connections to Ken Burns’ Civil War. It has proved a durable genre, but this release shows the first of its type remains one of the best of its type.