Thoreau or How To Make Me Queasy

Back in high school I had a range of complicated, frequently bitter, relationships with my English teachers. There was Mr. Blanchard, who I loved, but to whom I nonetheless felt compelled to remind that "those who can't do teach," which I'm sure forever endeared me to him. There was the unfortunately named Mr. Rodd, who was so pleased with the obituary I wrote for Willy Loman that he agreed to overlook the fact that I hadn't really gotten around to reading Bartleby the Scrivner. And then there was Mrs. Hart, who hated me from the minute I turned in my first Heart of Darkness critique. She was also the assistant softball coach, and when she wasn't hating me in the English classroom she was hating me on the softball field.

We read a lot of books in Mrs. Hart's class that I should probably go back and read again, now that I would no longer be using every essay in English class to write long disguised missives on how I hated everything Mrs. Hart had assigned, and, by extension, hated her. Mrs. Hart attempted to fail me for writing an essay about how I hated Faulkner. I contested the grade on the basis that it was a well-constructed essay, just not on a topic that Mrs. Hart agreed with, (certainly making her love me all the more) and got it changed to a passing grade.

We also read Walden Pond in that class. I've sometimes thought about trying to go back and read Walden Pond, because after all I now write memoir, and Thoreau was one of the original American memoirists. But even though it has been nearly 20 years since Mrs. Hart's English class, I still can't think about the word "Walden" without the bile rising in my throat. And then, the other day, I discovered that Thoreau has a blog.

So I've been reading the blog. And while sometimes DHT has some beautiful turns of phrase, a lot of the time he's just writing down long boring dream sequences. Also he uses too many commas. But most of all, he's kind of a pussy. I mean, the guy uses a stone to get chestnuts off of a tree, and then writes sentence after sentence about how he feels sorry for the tree. "I trust that I shall never do it again," he writes. Yes, Henry David. Much better to go to the store and BUY your chestnuts, so you don't have to think about how someone hurt a tree in the chestnut procuring process. Because what's his plan? To never eat chestnuts again? What about the starving people in Africa? I'll bet you they are eating their chestnuts.

But even more annoying than the fact that Thoreau is a pussy is that this journal would never, in a million years, be published today. Editors would read it and say something like:

"I love Henry's voice -I found it very relatable - but in the end I am going to have to pass. While I enjoy his musings, Henry comes across a little bit like a trustafarian with way to much time on his hands. I don't really see much of an audience for this, and of course the memoir genre is already so crowded that without a strong differentiating factor (i.e. if Henry decided to become a cannibal, or was a victim of child abuse) it would be a hard sell. Thanks for sending it my way and I hope we can work together in the future!"

And eventually HDT would be forced to sell his manuscript to a tiny all-recycled-paper press, and the return to his life as a management consultant.