DISCOVERIES

I to Myself

An Annotated Selection From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau

Edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer

Yale University Press: 528 pp., $35

“MY Journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1841. He began keeping a journal in 1837, when he was 20, and the volumes evolved -- over 25 years and 2 million words -- into something in their own right: “a life-work,” writes editor Jeffrey S. Cramer in his introduction, “that by which his life could be defined, and the creation of which was central to his existence.”

“Of all strange and unaccountable things, this journalizing is the strangest,” Thoreau remarks, explaining that, unlike a diary, a journal is a public endeavor, meant to be read aloud to friends and family. Thoreau seemed to think of it also as a place to argue with himself, to chew on things: In 1851 he wrote that “ ‘Say’s I to myself’ should be the motto of my journal.”

Cramer reports that Houghton Mifflin, in 1906, brought out for the first time “what was considered Thoreau’s entire extant journal.” This version was reprinted by Houghton Mifflin in 1949, by Dover in 1962 in two folio volumes, in 1969 by AMS Press and in 1984, “in a boxed 14-volume paperback edition,” by Peregrine Smith, with a “lost” journal appended. More than 20 selected volumes have also been published. Cramer describes his criterion for the present selection as an effort to depict “a man of contrary thoughts, wrestling and contradicting himself, arguing with himself and his neighbors, and ultimately observing and questioning. It was my intention in this volume to representatively portray a Thoreau who was neither a naturalist, philosopher, environmentalist, social reformer, nor Transcendentalist, but all of these at all times.”

So many selections of Thoreau’s work read like aphorisms. Cramer has here preserved the wanderings and rough edges: “Talk about learning our letters and being literate!” Thoreau fumed to himself in 1859. “Why, the roots of letters are things. Natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings, and yet American scholars, having little or no root in the soil, commonly strive with all their might to confine themselves to the imported symbols alone.”

“I am amused to see what airs men take upon themselves when they have money to pay me,” he groused in 1858. “No matter how long they have deferred it, they imagine that they are my benefactors or patrons.” In 1837, in the very first entry, he wrote, “I avoid myself.” It is highly doubtful that 25 years and 2 million words later he could have made the same admission.

--

Tight Lines

Ten Years of the Yale Anglers’ Journal

Illustrated by James Prosek

Yale University Press: 264 pp., $28

FOUNDED in 1996 by undergraduates James Prosek (author and illustrator of the unforgettable book “Trout: An Illustrated History,” published when he was 20) and James Furia, the Yale Anglers’ Journal plays the heartstrings. Its widely varied contents -- poetry, essays, letters, humor and adventure narrative -- seem to encompass the breadth and depth of human experience.

Fish stories have a bad reputation, in part because of the distance between the raw solitude of the experience and the sociable telling of the tale. As with no other genre, the reader/listener must be willing to suspend disbelief and enter the reflective mind of another human being as it focuses on its solitary goal.

“Fishing is really a catalyst for sharing what you’re working out, or to simply tell a good tale,” Prosek writes in the preface. Selections include essays by Jimmy Carter (“Fishing With My Daddy”), the dean of all angler-writers, Howell Raines (“Amare O Pescare”), and Steven Rinella, author of the hilarious “The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine” (“Jealous Fisherman Bares Soul”), plus several poems on fishing by W.B. Yeats. Scattered throughout are a few (not nearly enough) paintings by Prosek, whose work will outlive us all and then some.