A recent “New Yorker” carries a hatchet job on, of all iconic Americans, HenryDavid Thoreau.
In her contemptuous “What have we been thinking?” attitude toward the last 150 years of treasuring Thoreau, Kathryn Schulz comes across as more of a solipsistic crank than she construes Thoreau to be. Useful literary criticism starts with understanding why we are bothering to discuss a given writer at all. Why a book matters. With the exception of a bit of grudging praise of his nature observation, she appears never to have experienced what there is about Walden that has attracted generations of admirers.
Schulz doesn’t get Thoreau and doesn’t get the masses of quietly desperate who have found refreshing and inspirational the act of building the iconic cabin as we know about it from the writing. She seems alienated from the culture which found and finds Thoreau, weird bird though he admittedly is, a creative, infectious evoker of the ills of capitalism and lives lived under it—of alienated labor, of consumer culture, of philanthropy as a facet of capitalism which as much as anything exposes its shortcoming. Her failure to be attracted to that critique would seem to make her equally puzzled by and unsympathetic with the surge of support for Bernie Sanders.
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