Word: thoreau
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...Port of New York became my Walden Pond," Lewis Mumford recalls in this luminous autobiography. It still is. With unflagging energy and unfailing memory, Mumford, 86, assumes the tone of an urban Thoreau, ransacking the familiar for overlooked truths. His principal turf is the city; his main object of study, himself. Born in 1895 in Flushing, Queens, raised in the precincts of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, educated at City College and the New York Public Library, Mumford was ideally prepared to become one of the great critics of the modern metropolis. He is also one of the most prolific...
Where no dreams appear to whet his analytical appetite, Edel proves to be a literary journalist of great skill. His chapter on Henry David Thoreau as Mamma's boy and great American freeloader is a model of concision and balance. So are his pieces on James Joyce as "injustice collector" and "unfinished genius," Tolstoy as a "prodigy of self-inhibitions" and "self-indulgence," Yeats as a hero of "creative aging," and T.S. Eliot as a successful battler against will-sapping depression...
...with the subtlety and irony needed to drive the point home poses a somewhat more difficult problem. Perhaps for this reason, few essayists burn in the memory as writers of the first class. It is no cheapening of imaginative literature to assert that for every Orwell or for every Thoreau or for every Montaigne there may be a dozen great novelist: instead, it merely points up the frailty of the unaided intellect and the fantastic power of the imagination...
...answer which rises out of The Tugman's Passage is a very qualified yes. Hoagland has a small measure of that extraordinarily rare common sense... the kind which seems so utterly obvious once we have encountered it and cannot image the ignorance we bore earlier--which one senses in Thoreau, Orwell, and occasionally, E B White Hence. Hoagland's best stuff in The Tugman's Passage, the two essays "The Ridge-Slope Fox and the Knife Thrower" and "Women and Men," sparkle...
...manic overstimulation of American culture also makes excellence rarer. The great intellectual flowering of New England in the 19th century (Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, Longfellow, et al.) resulted in part from the very thinness of the New England atmosphere, an under-stimulation that made introspection a sort of cultural resource. America today is so chaotically hyped, its air so thick with kinetic information and alarming images and television and drugs, that the steady gaze required for excellence is nearly impossible. The trendier victims retreat to sealed isolation tanks to float on salt water and try to calm down...