material items;
questions arising from writing history from material items; and the role of museums in the
generation of knowledge claims. Recent books are Paintings and the Past: Philosophy, History,
Art (2019), and (as editor with Sarah Anne Carter), The Oxford Handbook of History and
Material Culture (2020).
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mindprints: Thoreau’s Material Worlds, and reported the following:
Page 99 of the book plunges the reader into a discussion of “Artistry.” The first paragraph concludes an account of the similarities and differences between Thoreau and his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson regarding the “useful arts.” Thoreau concurs with Emerson that craft skills can be beneficial but fears that “men have become the tools of their tools,” a demeaning state. He concludes that “The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.” In the paragraph that follows, the reader sees how Thoreau imagined what it might be for an artist to free himself through uncompromising devotion to the pursuit of artistic perfection. Thoreau consistently appealed not only to the classical tradition of Greek and Roman letters in which he had been educated, but–most unusually in mid-nineteen- century America–to orally transmitted Native American knowledge, Chinese Confucian texts, and Hindu scripture. On page 99 the reader will find Thoreau’s presentation of a parable drawn from the Hindu Visnu Purāna. From page 99:Learn more about Mindprints at the University of Chicago Press website.The object of the artist’s pursuit was a perfect wooden staff, and his concentration and determination were such that “time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him.” While the artist determinedly sought a suitable stick and eventually fashioned it, his city of Kouroo disappeared, its ruling dynasty died out, and the polestar—which … lasts a day of Brahma, or 4,320,000,000 years—was replaced by a new polestar. On completing the staff, in Thoreau’s words, “it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions.” Thoreau concludes the parable: “The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?” Thoreau’s tale of uncompromising artistic creation toward the end of his scriptural book, Walden, encapsulates an unrealizable ideal of artistry, but it is an artistry that takes a practical item, a wooden staff, as its means of world renewalPage 99 of Mindprints advances the book’s overarching theme of tracing the role of aesthetics–notably everyday and environmental aesthetics–in Henry David Thoreau’s thought. Like nearly every other page in the book, it includes quotations from Thoreau’s writings: not only from Walden, but, most especially, from his extensive journals, one of the richest documents of observation and reflection in American letters. Appropriately enough, readers may conceive of this exercise–turning to page 99–as an act of divination akin to the Chinese I Ching process of random selection. Indeed, as I discuss later in Mindprints (page 143), the composer John Cage, an admirer of Thoreau, created Lecture on the Weather (1975) for “twelve speaker-vocalists (or -instrumentalists)” by–in Cage’s words–“subjecting Thoreau’s writings to I Ching chance operations to obtain collage texts.” The Page 99 Test works!
--Marshal Zeringue
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