Bird Relics

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 Arsić 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 It takes into account materials often overlooked by critics: his Indian Notebooks and unpublished bird notebooks; his calendars that rewrite how we tell time; his charts of falling leaves, through which he develops a complex theory of decay; and his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.

Arsić'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.

    Abbreviations
    Introduction: On Affirmative Reading, or The Lesson of the Chickadees
    Part I. Dyonisia, 467 BC: The Mythology of Mourning
        Introduction: Perpetual Grief and the Example of the Fish Hawks
        Literal Sounds
        Homer’s Music Box
        Aeschylus’s Paean
        Cemeteries of the Brain
        Pindar’s Doubles
        Odysseus, the Lyric, and the Call of the Dead
        The Sound Dream
        Coda: Melville’s Seafowls
    Part II. Cambridge, Massachusetts, circa 1837: The Science of Life
        Introduction: Harvard Vitalism and the Way of the Loon
        Birds
        Fossils
        Stones
        Photographs
        Swamps, Leaves, Galls: A Treatise on Decay
        Coda: Antigone’s Birds
    Part III. Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts, 1845: Epistemology of Change
        Introduction: On Embodied Knowledge and the Deliberation of the Crow
        Toward Things as They Are
        Thinking with Geological Velocity
        How to Greet a Tree?
        Contemplating Matter
        The Noontime of the Mind
        Thinking with the Body 1: Walking
        Thinking with the Body 2: Sitting
        Personhood: Who or What?
        Coda: Benjamin’s Seagulls
    Part IV. Ossossané Village, Ontario, 1636: Acts of Recollecting
        Introduction: The Ethics of Communal Mourning and the Flight of the Turtle Dove
        Deathways of Things
        Ragged Fragments and Vital Relics
        The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead
        Coda: Pythagoras’s Birds
    Appendix I. Freud and Benjamin on Nature in Mourning
    Appendix II. On Thoreau’s Grave
    Notes
    Acknowledgments
    Index