Of Nature, Maine, and Meaning: or “The Pageantry of Peas” and the Poetics of Adversity

Abstract

Andy agreed with his mentor Henry: “In our culture of gadgetry and the multiplicity of convenience, [Thoreau’s] cry of ‘Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!’ has the insistence of a fire alarm.”¹ It comes as no surprise, then, that in preparing to leave Forty-eighth Street, New York City, for Allen Cove, Maine, White devotes an essay—which receives pride of place in the selected Essays—to the difficulties of letting go. “It is not possible to keep abreast of the normal tides of acquisition,” he writes, “in this age of additives.”² Morality is involved, as Henry knew, and Andy acknowledges that “I have too weak a character to throw” away one memento after another.³ Still, he presses on, the melancholic fit descending.

The way life should be.

—“Welcome to Maine”