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Sunrise on Walden Pond

Interchange – The Radical Democracy of Henry David Thoreau: A Conversation with Branka Arsic’

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What may seem surprising as you listen is the way in which Thoreau’s understanding of death and life can inform our own considerations of what it means to live by an ethics of inclusion and acceptance of differences and to eschew what is given to us politically and socially as measured, hierarchical, and standardized forms of “knowing.” All this is revealed in Branka Arsić’s latest book, Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau which takes the death of Thoreau’s brother as its entry point into the radical nature of Thoreau’s thinking. Because of this she focuses primarily on his neglected first book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which was a kind of memorialization of the Thoreau’s brotherly relationship. Bird Relics discusses the radical way in which Thoreau related mourning practices to biological life by articulating a complex theory of decay, and proposing a new understanding of the pathological.

Part One: We jump in by considering the notion that Thoreau was a misanthropic egoist who faked his so-called self-reliant stay in a cabin on Walden Pond.

Part Two: We closed the previous segment thinking about anonymous life that Thoreau memorializes in his journal by writing obituaries about ordinary people of which he had no personal knowledge, but he also wrote an obituary for an elm tree.

I have attended the felling and, so to speak, the funeral of this old citizen of the town, — I who commonly do not attend funerals, — as it became me to do. I was the chief if not the only mourner there. I have taken the measure of his grandeur; have spoken a few words of eulogy at his grave…How have the mighty fallen! Its history extends back over more than half the whole history of the town. Since its kindred could not conveniently attend, I attended. Methinks its fall marks an epoch in the history of the town. It has passed away together with the clergy of the old school and the stage-coach which used to rattle beneath it. Its virtue was that it steadily grew and expanded from year to year to the very last. How much of old Concord falls with it! The town clerk will not chronicle its fall. But I will…

Part Three:
We close the show with Arsić’s assertion that Thoreau’s understanding of life stands in opposition to any conception of “disability” and that it absolutely negates any conception of eugenics. But first I asked Arsic to consider of one of Thoreau’s most often repeated opinions:

I hate museums. There is nothing so weighs upon my spirits. They are the catacombs of nature. One green bud of spring, one willow catkin, one faint trill from a migrating sparrow would set the world on its legs again. The life that is in a single green weed is of more worth than all this death. They are dead nature collected by dead men.

GUEST
Branka - resized_0Branka Arsić is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Professor Arsić specializes in literatures of the 19th century Americas and their scientific, philosophical and religious contexts. She is the author, most recently, of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard University Press, 2016); On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Harvard UP, 2010); and a book on Melville entitled Passive Constitutions or 7½ Times Bartleby (Stanford UP, 2007). She is currently co-editing (with Kim Evans) a collection of essays on Melville, entitled Melville’s Philosophies (Bloomsbury, 2017).

RELATED
Henry David Thoreau’s Magical Thinking by Branka Arsić

Christoph Irmscher: Against Complacency: Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”

MUSIC
Six Melodies by John Cage, performed by Annelie Gahl (violin) and Klaus Lang (Electric Piano)

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Board Engineer: Jonathan Richardson
Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

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