We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, we spoke with acclaimed journalists Michael Pollan (A World Appears, How to Change Your Mind) and Elizabeth Kolbert (Life on a Little-Known Planet, The Sixth Extinction) about the “sheer pleasure” of reading Henry David Thoreau and the “gutsy” writing of Rachel Carson.
Michael Pollan on Henry David Thoreau
Why did you want to discuss Thoreau?
Thoreau has been a really important writer to me for a very long time. I read him first in college and wrote about him and then did a master's thesis on him in graduate school. There’s a vitality to his prose that I really admire. If you look at his prose at a really granular level, he draws much more on Anglo-Saxon words than Latinate words, and Anglo-Saxon words tend to be more vivid, metaphorical, they have more music to them. They're less abstract. And Latinate words, or Greek words, tend to be abstract. And I'm one of the relatively few people who had to learn Angle-Saxon and had to be able to read Anglo-Saxon when I was in school, and so I was sensitive to that. And he keeps going back to those words.
Anglo-Saxon words tend to have some concrete metaphoric core. So, a “truth” is deeply metaphorical. The words for truth and tree (trēow and trēowþ) have a real connection. And the language has very few abstract words, because it was a warrior culture. They didn't have bureaucracies, and that's what we drew on from Latin—all those abstract words from bureaucratic things. So there's a wonderful vividness about his language, sentence by sentence. I would always encourage my students that given a choice between a Latinate and an Anglo-Saxon word, you're going to get more punch from that Anglo-Saxon word, and he really understood that. His sentences are beautiful.
He was working during an era of many notable writers, but his work has really stood the test of time more than most of his contemporaries. Why do you think that is?
For some of the literary reasons I'm describing—just the sheer pleasure of his prose. Great writers add something to the language, and I think he did—lots of memorable sentences.
Also, though, some of his concerns remain our concerns. Civil disobedience—we are now in the throes of nationwide civil disobedience. I think he's particularly relevant now, as he was in the 1960s during the anti-war movement. You see his relevance and his stock rising when we are at politically contentious moments, and particularly when the government is acting in unethical and immoral ways, as it was in his time around slavery. And also, there were imperialistic wars he was fighting against. I think him and Gandhi and Martin Luther King are in this line of great political thinkers, all advocating nonviolence, and accepting the consequences of your actions. Which some protesters today forget. But that's a big part of nonviolence. His willingness to go to jail—walking the talk.
As you said, he was a person of action. He was a conductor for the Underground Railroad and was very engaged with all these social problems and issues. What do you think his example tells us about the role of the writer?
I think his message to the writer is get out from behind your desk and test your ideas in the crucible of experience. And I think that's really useful. The contrast with Emerson is very interesting. Emerson was much more of a desk guy. And brilliant—a lot of his ideas inform Thoreau's, and vice versa. Read Emerson's eulogy for Thoreau, which is a beautiful piece of writing—but it clearly has lots of annoyance in it. I can't imagine hanging out with the guy more than for a short amount of time. There’s this character Thoreau creates on the page that's just incredibly vivid and annoying. He's really righteous, and he drove people crazy in his time.
But yeah, I think that's his message: that you only see part of the world at your desk—or at your computer—and to put yourself in the throes of things and test yourself. What are you willing to go to jail for? Where's your line? We're all dealing with this right now. Where is your line before you give up whatever you thought was important and start acting politically, and what gets you out on the street? He's challenging us on those questions, and that makes him very timely.
Elizabeth Kolbert on Rachel Carson
What draws you to the work of Rachel Carson?
I think anyone who writes nonfiction about the environment in the 21st century is indebted to Rachel Carson and has been profoundly influenced by her. She set the gold standard, I guess you'd say, and we're all struggling to try to... I don't even want to say live up to her, because that's kind of impossible, but to use her as a standard against which we judge ourselves. Silent Spring showed the power of documenting something, and environmental writers cling to this in an age when books are under threat; when reading is under threat.
And another thing that's really interesting about Silent Spring is that she didn't want to write it. She tried to get E.B. White to write it. She had gathered all this evidence on the danger of dousing the world in these pesticides—the one that stands out is DDT, but there are all sorts of synthetic pesticides and organic chemicals—and she wrote it because she felt it had to be written, not because she wanted to write it. And I think that is something that everyone who writes about the environment struggles with: How do I tell this story to have an impact? There's so much noise in the world right now. And Silent Spring succeeded in breaking through its own magical way.
Does a writer or journalist have a responsibility to try to make such an impact?
I don't want to speak for writers of any kind, honestly. I think there are all sorts of reasons to write. They can be private. They can be very personal. They can be to create something beautiful or fascinating or interesting or provocative, and those are all, to me, really legitimate reasons to write. If you're a journalist, you tend to gravitate toward the proposition that what you're writing about matters, and that you're trying to be part of a sort of civic or public conversation. But there are also all sorts of journalists. There's journalism about cooking. I'm not sure if you're a food writer that you think, “Oh, it's essential that I'm bearing witness to something.” But I think it is what draws people to environmental writing, especially at a moment of environmental collapse.
She has that fable at the beginning of Silent Spring which is so haunting, where everyone is like, what's going on here? And then I think the last line of it is, “But they had done it to themselves.” That sense that we are all sleepwalking into these disasters of our own collective making. She was one of the first people to really see the scope of what we were doing.
What should writers learn from her?
One thing that I really admire about her is that she was very gutsy in a writerly way. She tried a lot of different things. Her voice and methodology in The Sea Around Us is very different. I have another book sitting here, Under the Sea Wind, which I used to teach when I taught an environmental writing class or a nature writing class, where she actually tries to tell the story of the sea through these sort of vaguely anthropomorphized creatures, which was very gutsy. She was trying a lot of different things. She was trying different ways of reaching people, to tell a story—in both these cases, it's the story of the sea—and really take something that's very hard for people to get their minds around—the life of the sea—and make it vivid and bring it home to people. So one thing, I think, is just to try a lot of things.
An another message that I think she can impart to writers is that if a story is so important—the story of Silent Spring, which, as I said, she did not want to write, tried to get out of writing, tried to get someone else to write—and you really feel that there's something about it that's speaking to you and saying, “This has got to be written, someone's got to write this,” probably you ought to listen to that.
