I worked a few years in Washington DC and a familiar lunch-time walk along Massachusetts Avenue was to Kramerbooks near Dupont Circle. I was then very enamoured of Henry David Thoreau (I still am but it is more like an old marriage now); one day under his marvellous spell I brought the two quarto volume Dover Publications edition the
The Journal of Henry David Thoreau (the fourteen volumes bound as two). This bookshop still exists but now is linked to a coffee shop. The Dover Thoreau cost me quite a bit and as I lugged it back to my office I chided myself for being too infatuated with HDT and too indulgent with my money. Now this book is not really one you would open and read for entertainment. It is a monument to be savoured on the shelf and a reverential dipping-in book. You dip into the entries which read mostly like an extraordinary naturalist's note book with painstaking and minute descriptions of the natural world around Concord. The exception to this are the earlier years when Thoreau is more 'philosophical'. To slurp up these digressions I have another small Dover book called
The Heart of Thoreau's Journals which contains his philosophical extracts. For many years now I only open my Thoreau journals on Christmas Morning when I am in a nostalgic mood charged by the numinous expectations of secular Christmas Day. This takes me back to my three years in Washington and how I have travelled since then. If I wish to see how Thoreau spent his Christmas for any year I am usually disappointed for Christmas seems the briefest interlude between his rambling in the woods. I surmise Christmas was a more restrained event then and the Thoreau family might have just gathered around the table for a special meal and some exchange of small presents. This was a more dignified and wholesome age in which the festive day existed for the ordinary folk and not for the industrial complex and its garish and profane manipulations of appetites.
