A Journalist Culls The Nature Writings Of A Literary Icon—

Thinking Of Thoreau Every Day

By Nancy K. Crevier

 “Who hears the rippling of the rivers will not utterly despair of anything.” —Henry David Thoreau, 12 December 1841.

Newtown resident, and a 25-year veteran reporter at The Hartford Courant, Steve Grant shares much in common with a man who walked the woods of New England 150 years ago.

Mr Grant has spent a good part of his life exploring nature and environmental issues. He is respectful of the natural world and marvels at the wonders that it holds. So did that early American naturalist and writer.

Mr Grant has written prolifically about the world around us, observing the connections between the natural world and today’s society. So, too, did the man from Concord, Mass., whose works Mr Grant respects.

But while Henry David Thoreau was known as a gruff loner, Mr Grant is an amiable family man eager to share his admiration of the man who endowed the world with perceptive observations of nature that have retained their relevancy through the years. So it should be of no surprise that Mr Grant’s proposal to the Thoreau Society to edit Henry David Thoreau’s thoughts on the natural world was selected as part of a three-book series published this year by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Daily Observations: Thoreau On The Days of The Year, edited by Mr Grant, features daily selections gleaned from Thoreau’s two-million-word Journal. “I come to this [publication] with a strong interest in nature and the outdoors and it is reflected in this book,” he explains.

A longtime fan of the quintessential environmentalist and nature writer, Mr Grant is also a member of the Thoreau Society, a Concord-based group. “It’s a nonexclusive group of people interested in Thoreau,” he says. “[It is made up of] people who love his writings and just want to further the appreciation of Thoreau.”

Most people are familiar with Walden Pond, Thoreau’s missive on his two-year experimental return to a simpler way of life and his experiences living as close to nature as was possible. This book, Mr Grant believes, is one of the more difficult of Thoreau’s writings to comprehend. He himself was not smitten as a teenager with Walden Pond, but subsequently grew to admire the writer upon reading The Maine Woods and Cape Cod, two books less known outside of the circle of Thoreau admirers.

An outdoor adventurer, Mr Grant’s first reading of The Maine Woods occurred in the 1970s following a canoe trip on the Allagash River and after climbing Mount Katahdin in Maine. “I loved it,” he exclaims. But it was upon encountering Thoreau’s Journal that he realized he had hit pay dirt.

“The Journal,” says Mr Grant, “has it all. It is essentially the rough draft of everything Thoreau wrote. It has Walden, but it has all the other things in it, too.”

He started reading The Journal in 1987, 10 to 15 pages a day. So impressed was he by the merit and thoughtfulness of the entries that he began using his newspaper’s internal email to send particularly intriguing excerpts each day to co-workers at the paper.  “It raised interest in others at The Courant,” he says, “and pretty soon I was being asked by others ‘Can you add me to the list?’ By the mid-nineties, when ‘real’ email became the norm, I was sending these quotes to other acquaintances outside of The Courant.”

He liked the response he got from his correspondents. Some took umbrage at Thoreau’s attitude, others took time to ponder and respond to Thoreau’s observations, while yet others simply accepted the daily communiqué at face value.

One of the daily quotes “leapt off the page when I read it,” Mr Grant says, and that quote from February 17, 1841, evolved into an entire essay published by The Courant. The quote remains, he believes, a powerful admonition even to the world of today: “Would it not be well for us to consider if our deed will warrant the expense of nature,” pondered Thoreau, 165 years ago.

Mr Grant marvels, “If everybody in everything they did kept that [quote] in mind, it would revolutionize the condition of our environment. In almost everything that we do, if we paid attention, it would make a difference: whether that trip to the store is necessary; whether a sweater is necessary or not; whether a fire is necessary in the fireplace.”

The positive response he received from sharing these bits and pieces of The Journal led him to believe that others would appreciate the opportunity to know Thoreau on a simpler level than what a whole book commanded. Thoreau’s famous quote, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” he says, seems to underscore what is of value today.

Editing a book as extensive as Thoreau’s Journal requires dedication and stamina.  Mr Grant spent the better part of a year researching and editing Thoreau’s writings, despite having amassed more than 700 quotes distributed to his friends over the years. He found that blocks of three to four hours at a sitting gave him the time he needed to focus on the massive amount of material.

“Editing,” says Mr Grant, “is arbitrary and objective. If you had 20 people editing a book, you would have 20 people with 20 different sets of quotations.” Other books had presented daily quotations by Thoreau, but Mr Grant chose to select just one quote from each day of the year, from that particular day in Thoreau’s Journal. The Journal encompasses 24 years worth of daily writings by Thoreau, so culling each entry, some of which are several paragraphs long, to find the pearl in the oyster, was a daunting task.

Working mainly from a 14-volume set of The Journal published in 1984 by Peregine-Smith Books and the as-yet-unfinished volumes printed by the Princeton Press, and one other full edition of The Journal based on the original 1906 edition, “I looked for the aphorisms by Thoreau,” says Mr Grant. “If something struck me, I’d underline it. Then I went back to every book and looked at the particular day.” Choosing from the interesting quotes, he says, was a challenge. “I had to sacrifice some great [quotes]. But then, there were days that were weak observations, too.”

In examining the words of Thoreau, Mr Grant came to realize that the stern, uncompromising personality commonly associated with Thoreau was only one aspect of the writer’s complex personality. “People often see Thoreau as a ‘scold.’ There is that side, but the great value of Thoreau and the way to read him is as a conscience of society. Look at it in that context,” recommends Mr Grant.

His reading dispelled the myth of Thoreau as a reclusive loner, as well. “He had many friends, and spent time with them and he was very close to his family,” maintains Mr Grant. “I don’t think I knew how humane a guy he was. Thoreau was an abolitionist. He raged against slavery in his writings and his home was on the Underground Railroad.”

Looking out on the quiet, snow-covered woods that surround his home, Mr Grant muses that in spite of bucolic scenes common to our town, were Thoreau to find himself in 21st Century New England, he would find the overall condition of the planet “very troubling. In his own time, Thoreau was disappointed with the treatment of the environment.” He would, however, Mr Grant believes, find some good in the things we have done to protect our environment today.

Through Daily Observations, the editor hopes that people will discover that Henry David Thoreau had many interesting things to say and that the man from Concord is far more accessible than people tend to think.

“And I hope,” he adds, “that people then might turn to some of his works in full.”