Thoreau: A Sublime Life is a short, evocative comics biography by French team, writer Maximilien Le Roy and A. Dan (Daniel Alexandre). It’s not a mere chronological biography—it’s too short for that—but even if it were twice the length they wouldn't have been interested in that. What they wanted to do is create a comics portrait of Thoreau through images and ideas, snapshots more than film, poetic images more than an in-depth philosophical biography. It’s their image of Thoreau.
I know Thoreau’s work, or did, and I bet most of you are familiar with him and can say a few things about him. Walden, “On Civil Disobedience.” I have a picture book of him called Henry (in part because I have a son, Henry) that I like, too. I've read a lot of his work, as I have Emerson. The transcendentalists!
This bio of Thoreau features some quotations from him, some of which I was unfamiliar. For instance, Thoreau taught for a short time in the Concord School. He hated the regimentation, the required discipline, so he schooled kids in his home, with his brother: “We came up with new approaches to education, outings in nature, more active participation with students, no more corporal punishment.” I’d like to know more about his approach, but we only get this glimpse. But you can build a whole educational philosophy based on that glimpse! And many have done just such a thing based on principles similar to the ones he articulates here.
“I just want everyone to explore their own path.”
You can see how young people in the sixties might have embraced him. And how his and Emerson's work might have been the precursor to the anti-philosophical American Pragmatism Of William James, W.B. DuBois and Jane Addams.
And on the environment and man’s historical ignorant rapacious use of it: “If a man walks in the woods for love of them, for half the day, he is in danger of being a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods, and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
“Wanting to be famous means wanting to be contaminated.”
He read as deeply into Buddhism and Hinduism as Christianity. “The Brahmins understood that possessions end up possessing us.”
Thoreau was more spiritual than political, in general, though he was adamantly opposed to slavery, he hated the US-Mexican War, and he wouldn’t pay taxes to a government that thrived from such activities. He was also an anarchist of sorts, preferring the road less travelled and improvisation to authoritarian structures. He was an ecologist, and environmentalist, and we need him again, as always.
Michael Granger’s short essay on Thoreau completes the book, which I liked very much. The art from A. Dan, who studied biology and ecology, is great.