Erika Mitchell

Why Thoreau? I happened to attend a lecture last spring by Tom Slayton on Thoreau. After the lecture, I said to myself: 'I’m going to read all of Thoreau this summer.' It was one of those intuitive impulses that you know you have to follow through on, although you don’t know why. But I would never have made such a vow if I had ever known the enormity of the task I had just set myself.

I set the start date for my Thoreau project as June 21, the first day of summer. A few days in advance, I visited the library to get copies of Thoreau’s books. Looking at my pile, the librarian commented "Looks like a lot of Thoreau." I explained my plan to read all of Thoreau. He asked “What about the journals?” I said, “Yes, I’m going to read the journals, as soon as I finish these.” “Well, there are a lot of journal volumes,” he remarked. I had seen 7 journal volumes in the stacks. It would take a while for me to read them, but I figured it was still possible to reach my goal of reading all of Thoreau’s works in a single summer.

But two weeks later, when I went to get the journals, I was overwhelmed—I hadn’t noticed that those 7 volumes I had seen before were just the beginning of the set, and that the series continued onto the shelf below. This was the Riverside edition, published in 1905, in 14 volumes of more than 500 pages each. Vol. 1 was missing, so I gulped, took vols 2-8 to the front desk, and asked for a month-long loan. I began reading Vol. 2 as soon as I got home. By the time I reached the bottom of the first page my heart leaped with utter joy—this was the best, most exciting writing I had encountered in Thoreau’s works to date. It was simple and hones--Thoreau speaking directly to his best friend of all, his journal.

Every spare minute of the remainder of my summer was spent wading through the Journal. (Afterwards, I heard that the Journal contains some 2.5 million words!) But I never considered giving up the project--it was so enjoyable. Indeed, I came to the end of Vol. 14 not with elation, but regret that there were to be no more volumes. It was especially poignant to see how in the year before his death, Thoreau seemed to have finally acquired enough background knowledge about the natural world through his years of observations to make astounding new hypotheses about ecology. He was on the verge of phenomenal discoveries when he contracted the illness that led to his death. It was incredible to follow his intellectual development day-by-day through 10 years of journal entries, in which he details not only field observations, but also methods of study and the thoughts the study brought to mind.

I completed reading vols 2-14 of the Riverside edition of the Journal by Labor Day, but I wasn’t yet satisfied that I had read everything by Thoreau. I still needed to find and read Vol. 1, as well as the essays. In a local college library, I found the Princeton edition of the journals—imagine my dismay when I discovered that the years covered by Vol. 1 of the Riverside edition are in 3 vols of 650 pages in the Princeton edition. But I finished all 3 of those Princeton edition vols, as well as the essays in the next few weeks. I might indeed, have finished reading Thoreau by the end of summer, but there was still the Correspondence, which I had to request by interlibrary loan. While waiting for the book to arrive, I read Channing and Sanborn’s biographies of Thoreau, Harding’s Thoreau Handbook, and studied Gleason’s photographic images of Thoreau Country. When the Correspondence finally came, I was delighted to read Thoreau’s distinctive voice once more.

From the outset, I expected my Thoreau project to be a weighty academic exercise, dull at times, but perhaps worthwhile. Instead, it has been the most exciting reading I have ever undertaken in a lifetime of devouring books, a life-changing experience.