Bird Relics

Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau

ISBN 9780674088474

Publication date: 01/04/2016

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 It takes into account materials often overlooked by critics: his Indian Notebooks and unpublished bird notebooks; his calendars that rewrite how we tell time; his charts of falling leaves, through which he develops a complex theory of decay; and his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

Praise

[Bird Relics] reorients our understanding of Thoreau’s materialist vitalism. Arsić’s reading of both canonical texts and understudied fragments uncover a radical philosophy of life—a vibrant ontology in which writing about what generates our experience also means blurring conventional distinctions between the realistic and the fantastic, animate bodies and inanimate ones, what it means to live and what it means to die. Readers compelled by turns to materialism, ecology, and ontology in recent criticism could hardly hope for a better introduction to lesser-known features of Thoreau’s idiosyncratic body of work…Bird Relics begins by unfolding a stunning, if also heartrending, theory of perpetual mourning that becomes the centerpiece of her approach to Thoreau’s philosophy of life.

—Mark Noble, Los Angeles Review of Books
Arsić constructs a subtle and exhilarating argument in which Thoreau’s take on vegetable and animal life, as well as his theory of mourning, becomes a radically novel understanding of nineteenth-century thought in the Americas. Bird Relics will have profound consequences for how we think about personal identity, the distinction between animate and inanimate, human and non-human, sacred and profane. We will never read Thoreau in the same way again.

—Colin Dayan, author of Haiti, History, and the Gods
This book will revolutionize the way serious scholars read Thoreau. Nothing like it exists or is likely to appear in the near future. The work is continuously and exceptionally original.

—Edward Mooney, Syracuse University
Arsić discovers in Thoreau’s corpus a man deeply affected by his brother’s death, but also a man who turns his brother’s death into the occasion for a renewed understanding of life’s vitality—of life as vitality. Her readings are fresh and original; they are also layered through and through with a depth of learning uncommon in contemporary scholarship. To borrow a word she uses in her account of Thoreau, I think this is a ‘stunning’ book.

—Lloyd Pratt, University of Oxford
In Bird Relics, Branka Arsić delves into Thoreau’s writings, with particular attention to the Indian Notebooks and unpublished bird notebooks, to trace the way his thinking about nature developed over the years into a kind of pan-vitalism, which sees the generative forces of life at work in death, disease, and natural decay.

—Robert Pogue Harrison, New York Review of Books