I was so busy reading this issue that I might have missed an aerial view of the Grand Canyon if traveling buddy hadn't bonked me on the head and told me to look out the window!
So, last night I finished up "Pond Scum" about H. D. Thoreau. I didn't quite buy the author, Kathryn Schultz's premise that Thoreau was a curmudgeonly unlikable scumbag. She overreached in trying to prove her point. Certainly he was eccentric and probably autistic but others liked him, notably R. W. Emerson, and some unnamed friends who invited him to their engagements. It was interesting that one of my ancestors, R. L. Stevenson, wrote that his "valetudinarian healthfulness. . .is more delicate than sickness itself." And he would know about health/sickness, growing up in Edinburgh, Scotland, with its punishing climate.
His oft-quoted comment that "most men live lives of quiet desperation" was interpreted as a judgement on others by the author, but I have always seen it as a plea for compassion and a prescient view of the human condition. A point which the author leads up to but doesn't quite make is that Walden should not be read so widely by high school students as a model for a life. I agree with that. There are other Transcendentalists who would be better to read. But, like it or not, Thoreau is deeply embedded in the national culture and he's not going to disappear beneath the pond scum anytime soon.