Thus begins the entry in Henry Thoreau’s Jour­nal for July 5, 1845. Since March of that year, Thoreau had been build­ing a cabin near Walden Pond on land that Ralph Waldo Emer­son had bought the pre­vi­ous year. (RWE paid $8.10/acre for eleven acres of pas­ture and $125.00 for three or four acres of adja­cent woods.) Thoreau had bor­rowed an axe and cut down a few of the white pines from Emerson’s wood­lot to frame his ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin. In May, some friends had come out from Con­cord and helped him raise the struc­ture. He used the boards from a shack he’d pur­chased for roof and siding. “It is dif­fi­cult to begin with­out borrowing,” Thoreau tells us, with absolute accu­racy, in Walden.

We know the rest of the story: for two years and two months, Thoreau lived in his Walden cabin to get back to the root of things:

I went to the woods because I wished to live delib­er­ately, to front only the essen­tial facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, dis­cover that I had not lived.

What few people real­ize, how­ever, is the extent to which Thoreau’s jour­ney out to Walden Pond was tied up with his own for­tunes and fail­ures as a pro­fes­sional writer.

For years I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that public radio’s This Amer­i­can Life was ready for a take­down. Some aspir­ing social critic would come along and dig a dirty nail into the rind of every hipster’s favorite radio show, peel it to show how mawk­ish, vain, and gaw­daw­fully sen­ten­tious the whole pro­duc­tion can be, and even pos­si­bly con­vince some­one at NPR or APM or wher­ever they make these things that yes, in fact, you might be able to do better than Ira Glass. After Curtis White went after Fresh Air and n+1 attacked McSweeney’s, TAL seemed the only low-​hanging fruit left for the knocking. 

Well, here it is, cour­tesy of Michael Hirschorn at The Atlantic.

And though I wish it were oth­er­wise, I can’t say I’m impressed. Forget the coarse and unhelp­ful cat­e­gory of “quirk” (Jonathan Safran Foer shar­ing oxygen with Wes Ander­son?) and the for­mu­la­tions (”TAL…is really the oppo­site of doc­u­men­tary reportage. It’s more like sociology,” ”that hoary emo­tion called sentiment”) that sound as silly as TAL’s own self-​congratulations (”what we’re doing is apply­ing the tools of jour­nal­ism to every­day lives”). The major prob­lem is that Hirschorn only scratches where he ought to maim. As Emer­son told Oliver Wen­dell Holmes: if you strike at a king you must kill him.

Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Mael­strom of Amer­i­can Mod­ernism won a 2007 Ban­croft Prize. Also well worth your time are Richardson’s Emer­son: The Mind on Fire and Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind.