Birds were never far from Thoreau's mind. They wing their way
through his writing just as they did through his cabin on Walden
Pond, summoned or dismissed at whim by his whistles. Emblematic of
life, death, and nature's endless capacity for renewal, birds offer
passage into the loftiest currents of Thoreau's thought. What
Branka Arsic finds there is a theory of vitalism that Thoreau
developed in response to his brother's death. Through grieving,
Thoreau came to see life as a generative force into which
everything dissolves. Death is not an annulment of life but the
means of its transformation and reemergence. Bird Relics traces
Thoreau's evolving thoughts through his investigation of Greek
philosophy and the influence of a group of Harvard vitalists who
resisted the ideas of the naturalist Louis Agassiz. It takes into
account materials often overlooked by critics: his Indian Notebooks
and unpublished bird notebooks; his calendars that rewrite how we
tell time; his charts of falling leaves, through which he develops
a complex theory of decay; and his obsession with vegetal
pathology, which inspires a novel understanding of the relationship
between disease and health. Arsic's radical reinterpretation of
Thoreau's life philosophy gives new meaning to some of his more
idiosyncratic habits, such as writing obituaries for people he did
not know and frequenting estate sales, and raises important
questions about the ethics of Thoreau's practice of appropriating
the losses of others as if they were his own.
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