Note added, October 5, 2023. At the end of this post, from sunny days in the first spring of the Covid pandemic, I take up Anacreon’s poem “The Thracian Filly,” translated as “To a Colt” in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Anacreon was from Teos, whose ruins I have visited. Thoreau may not be sensitive to the sexual connotations of the poem. First I review Thoreau’s book, noting in particular:
- The book is written, like my blog posts, to please the author, who would rather do without money than sell stuff to get it.
- The author’s relative indifference to human affairs in the face of nature is becoming less tenable, when a Pacific island inhabited by 40 persons and visited once a month by a boat (and once for all, probably, by a travel writer) is losing its palms to an invasive beetle.
Other books discussed or mentioned (and in my physical library) are
- Bean, Aegean Turkey;
- Collingwood, The First Mate’s Log;
- Lawson, The Drinkers’ Guide to the Middle East;
- Schalansky, Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands;
- Thoreau, Walden;
- Trypanis (ed.), The Penguin Book of Greek Verse;
- Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life.
Polytropy 