10/03/2024
Henry's family has a more important tombstone with all of their names on it, but his grave marker in Concord, Massachusetts is actually as humble as it gets. My memoir, Small Plots, honors one of my favorite American writers, Henry David Thoreau, with a short essay entitled HENRY. It was written more for Italian readers, as I knew, in 2017, that my book was headed in their direction and they might not know him so well. As my book Mezzo Giariniere (Half Gardener) was being translated by Manuela Vittorelli and about to bulge over 200 pages, HENRY had to be cut out.
Manuela wrote in an email (that I cannot find this morning) that deciding not to include HENRY was one of the hardest decisions she and Daniele Mongera, the editor, had to make, as she loved HENRY and felt that I might be one of the last transcendentalists alive, but it was unfortunately one of those "aside" chapters that weren't fundamental in the story.
C.L.
HENRY
“Do what you love. Know your own bone;
gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”
Henry David Thoreau
Few writers encapsulate my life philosophy and an American love of Nature like Henry David Thoreau. This love (or reverence, if I have been over-using the L word), is not to be confused with what I understand is a Shintoist worship of nature: the worship of trees, streams, rocks, places or even people where spirits abide. These forces may be found in all forms of Nature, and are known as “kami”. Instead of worshiping spirits in Nature, Henry and his fellow transcendentalists seem to have believed that God could be found through Nature, for those who contemplated Her - and themselves – long enough. They believed (if I get the gist of their not-always-easy writings) that all of humankind and Nature are one and are inherently good, and that the problems arise with the formation of society and politics. I couldn’t agree more.
A lot of people find Henry sanctimonious, his reclusiveness a sign of bitter misanthropy rather than benign self-examination. His asceticism, I'll agree, is often tinged with disdain for the ordinary and disgust for what he thought the world had become. I haven't read through his two million words in twenty-four years of journal writing, but I can imagine how he is considered boring these days, especially when he only recounts what he sees or does each day – when his writing slides from grand ideas or philosophy into mere observations. Yet I find the observations that I've read some of his greatest work. The simplicity - one might even say nothingness of his Nature writing - is as calming as the nothingness, or "mu", of a swept sand garden in Chiran, Japan.
How dare I call one of America’s greatest men of letters by his first name? Because I think he would have asked me to, if I had walked over to the shed he built in the woods near Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau retreated from society, and, during his two-years, two-months and two-days' stay there (4 July 1845 - 6 September 1847), he immersed himself in Nature. It is clear from his writings that, while he treasured solitude and his private life there, he also delighted in visits. You don’t keep chairs in your little hut if you don’t want anyone to come in and sit down.
What gives me the idea that we could have been friends – had I only been born 145 years earlier and in a different state – is the fact that he, too, was a half-gardener. It’s true! Henry was a cultivator of crops, a cutter and stacker of wood, an excellent canoeist, a forest walker, a lover of animals, a teacher, and a private tutor to the children of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry is described as an essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, evolutionist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, editorial assistant, repairman and gardener.
