Has a White Page Ever Made You Weep?
Two Conversations across Two Centuries
I always held a special love in my heart for books that take me on a walk. Not necessarily travelogs, although those I like too, but books that use the act of walking through space and time to explore very personal relationships of an author to history, biography, philosophy. Jean Giono’s Provence comes to mind. Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines. José Saramago’s A Journey To Portugal. But also, Umberto Ecco’s A Walk in the Fictional Woods.
Two remarkable new additions to this oeuvre have recently caught my eye, and I feel they deserve a wider reading. Both books take us onto walks through space and time. The first, A Black Forest Walden by David Farrel Krell, centers on a twenty-two-years-and-counting, sporadically interrupted, retreat into the dense woods and steep mountains of Southwest Germany as the author rewinds and reexamines a hero of 19th century American philosophy. The second book, Letters to Camondo by Edmund De Waal, invites us on a series of very quiet and extended walks through a historic mansion in Paris, a building that holds its hidden relationship to the author tight to its chest.
To have known, hiked, conversed, shared meals with a brilliant person, might make one feel smarter than one has any right to be. At least I have found that true for myself at times. And I’m reminded of this as I follow David F. Krell on the literary-philosophical trail he forges with his latest book, A Black Forest Walden: Conversations with Henry David Thoreau and Marlonbrando.
Krell lives in the mountains and writes. He is a professor emeritus at DePaul University, Chicago, and is especially renowned for his Nietzsche scholarship. He also has spent the last two-plus decades in a small cabin in the mountains of Southwest Germany, where he now resides full time.
It’s been fifteen years since I walked with Krell through those mountains. Having read only very little of the author’s work in philosophy at that point, I had travelled there to talk to him about a dramatic writing project of his that interested me. We were introduced by a mutual friend and former student of his, who happens to be one of Germany’s finest literary translators, a master in his own right.
It does not take long upon meeting Krell for the magic to work on you. This will happen to anyone regardless of who they are, I’m told. For Krell possesses the skill of all great thinkers to suggest that his abilities—i.e. to make the invisible visible, to separate the magical and profound from the plain and obvious and to point out connections in the seemingly unconnected—will from now on, as if by alchemy, be your skills, too. Except, they won’t. As the encounter recedes into the past, you realize the brilliance you felt in your conversation fades too. It was entirely his.
Luckily though, Krell’s insights are now readily accessible in A Black Forest Walden.
Krell’s project with his new book seems straightforward enough: to share insights and experiences from his life as a forest dweller, profound and trivial and everything in between, using On Walden Pond as a North Star of sorts.
If you have not read Henry David Thoreau’s On Walden Pond, Krell’s book comes with good news: you don’t have to. Krell has done the heavy lifting for you. Better yet, he quotes broadly enough from Thoreau that you don’t even have to Thoreau’s book, if all you are after are a few nuggets of wisdom from the 19th-century master.
The back cover of A Black Forest Walden promises “a work of philosophical reflection, nature description and sly humor.” And Krell delivers on all three fronts. While the sly humor could be described as an easy hike around the lower meadows of philosophy, the reflections represent the few risky but necessary, and thrilling, traverses across rough and tricky terrain without which no true hike into the mountains will feel complete. Finally, the nature descriptions provide the vistas. They are my favorites by far, and strongly remind me of the magic Krell cast upon me on that short half-day excursion up the Große Belchen.
The back cover continues: “Insofar as Krell compares his experiences with those of Henry David Thoreau, who serves as both inspiration and irritation, the book could be described as critical commentary on Thoreau’s Walden.”
I’m not a philosopher or a philosophy student. But the question must be asked: is A Black Forrest Walden indeed the critical commentary the publisher promises? Or is Krell after something else? Entire passages could be read as a wholesale take-down of Walden, an unceremonious assault intended to irritate those who have installed Thoreau as a pillar saint of American philosophy. Reading on, I see clearer. What we find here is neither critical commentary from a well-behaved philosopher toting the line, nor a takedown of a foundational figure by a later-born, possibly irritated peer. No, what we find here is a good old philosophers’ brawl. Except, it is not Popper vs. Wittgenstein this time, or Sartre vs. Camus, but a slugfest across a gap of a hundred and twenty years.
So, let’s get ready to rumble. I’ll be your referee.
Henry David Thoreau spent a comparatively short two years, two months and two days on Walden Pond before he returned home. Twenty-six months. Yes. That’s all. One can’t even finish a degree in that time. Yet the ghosts of Thoreau’s sojourn have haunted Anglo-Saxon academia ever since, milked for more than a century and a half beyond the author’s natural life.
Meanwhile David Farrell Krell—at press time—is going on twenty-two years in his Hütte (cabin) above the clouds on Barley Stalk Hill in the Black Forest of Germany. That’s nine times as long as Thoreau’s stint at Walden Pond. And an easy win for Krell. One that would grant him all the right in the world to sneer at the Thoreau text as a myopic indulgence, the expression of someone desperately wanting to be seen by his New England peers as more committed to seclusion and more sensitive to the natural world around him than his short time there justified.
As we get deeper into the second round, defying expectations, Krell does not seem interested in landing easy blows. Nor is he after a quick knock-out. Yes, he more than once, expresses annoyance with Thoreau’s braggadocio, examples of which he quotes amply and which he blames on the New Englander’s puritanism, machismo and inherited snobbery. But no, he does not trash On Walden Pond. He is much lighter on his feet. The punches he lands expose Thoreau as an unreliable voice full of contradictions, a young man who on the one hand offers valuable insights into the human condition, but on the other, spews so much offensive nonsense that the idea of worshipping or canonizing Walden seems absurd.
”I sit at my window and watch the mountains move. That is, from time to time I look up and see that they have moved — I never actually catch them in the act. They sometimes creep forward, advancing so close to the cabin that they seem but a flea hop away. And when I’m distracted or otherwise occupied, they slip away, so far away that when I look up I see hours and hours of trekking to the horizon.” (A Black Forest Walden – Chapter 50)
I’m certain anyone reading Krell’s aphorisms, especially those describing nature phenomena like the above, will agree that they are elegant, deeply moving and beautiful. Ice Wings, The River of Fog, Douglas the Fir, Fool’s Spring, Sea of Fog, Moving Mountains. These are titles of some of those chapters, which I guarantee, will stay with you long after you read them.
Krell may have made his home in remote mountains. But he is no extremist recluse, nor a Ted Kaczynski of Letters. He is a working philosopher who has decided to relocate his life of thinking and reflecting to the Black Forest mountains. And as is second nature for any philosopher, he quotes, alongside the 19th Century American Men of Letters, the voices of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Novalis, Goethe, Rilke, Derrida, Plato, etc.
In contrast to those European giants, Thoreau and his New England colleagues cannot but seem humorless and dour puritans. No wonder Krell, the American in Germany, makes sure to distinguish his work from the Americans, in substance and in style. He sprinkles his tales with irony and self-deprecating jokes; he presents all his aphorisms and observations, his extraction of existential meaning from seemingly mundane life stories of his neighbors and of the previous inhabitants of the Hütte, with a twinkle in his eyes. With Krell you get the opposite of dour; you get a sense of mischief.
The prime example of this are the eight hilarious conversations he has with Marlonbrando, the feral cat living around and sometimes in the Hütte, who moonlights as his shrink, but could also be read as Thoreau reincarnated precisely in order to challenge him.
Despite the above, I hesitate to call the joy of reading their respective books a win for Krell, mostly because the lightheartedness in A Black Forest Walden feels itself a bit like a project, a well planned strategy rather than something of natural lightness. As both works provide more reading pleasure in a chapter than many philosophers in multiple volumes, let’s call this round for both.
Krell would not be the sensitive observer of nature, animals and humans alike were he not able to distinguish between Thoreau, the 19th century influencer with a habit of boasting, and Henry David, the human being. Krell does so in an especially moving way, when he reveals the hidden cause and trigger of Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond, namely, the sudden death of Thoreau’s older brother John from lockjaw. This unexpected loss turned into an existential crisis for the surviving brother, although it is hardly mentioned by Thoreau himself.
That Krell dedicates multiple chapters to tracking the cause-and-effect between John’s death and Henry David’s solitude, and how Krell takes inspiration from Thoreau’s loss to examine the nature of mourning and death in general, made me think twice about Krell’s intention. Might his previous outrage about Thoreau’s braggadocio been nothing more than a dialectical ruse, a necessary small diss to obscure praise and admiration? Might Krell have a soft spot for Thoreau after all? Might the two philosophers actually be, if not brothers, at least cousins-in-arms? Late in the book, Krell concedes as much.
In the transcript of one of the most wildly amusing exchanges he has with Marlonbrando, the cat (Chapter 120), Krell allows for a direct comparison between himself and Thoreau—“He is hardier than I.”—and tackles the subject head-on.
Thoreau has “disappeared” from Krell’s book’s second half. The cat scolds him for this, and opines on the root cause of this omission: jealousy of the dead legend. Krell won’t have any of it:
“‘I admire Thoreau. He’s a cranky bastard, but he can write.’
‘That he can. That he can.’
‘Do you really think I resemble him?’”
Marlonbrando does not let that momentary vulnerability go by unnoticed and moves in for the kill, as only a cat can:
“Observe the nature descriptions. Look at the horrific puns. Note the desire to be trenchant. The desire to compete, defeat, and crow,” Marlonbrando tells Krell. Krell does not tell us if he blushed. But he might have.
This round goes to Thoreau via the cat. And marks the end of the battle. I call it dead even.
To follow Krell through these woods as he locates the echoes of Thoreau in himself is a lot of fun. But to me, those portions of the book pale in comparison to the warmth and depth with which Krell narrates his own experience. There are chapters about death, about breaking up, about losing the world. He muses about the relationship of love and sadness, drafts a list of the best books for solitude, and explores the nature of smells. He shines especially bright when he drops every academic and narrative constraint and gives himself to the reader unplugged. Witness this bit from Chapter 91, which comprises a section of the book (from Chapters 91 to 98) about break-ups:
”The most terrible result of falling out of love, losing the love that once sustained us, is that we lose the person on whom we used to shower gifts. We gather sparkling stones at the beach, as in the old days, then mutter to ourselves, ”To whom can I give these, if no longer to her?” And the world seems empty, seems to have lost its entire store of beautiful things. Toss the stones!” (Chapter 91)
Towards the end of his book, Krell takes the reader along on his biannual departure from the Hütte, a melancholic shutting down of water pipes, the re-stacking of firewood, the closing of window shutters—a well practiced ritual performed whenever he had to return to academia (before his retirement) to face another generation of students, Ph.D. applicants, fellow professors and the ubiquitous, always demanding administrators. It’s in this Zen moment that makes me not only completely understand, but deeply feel the agonizing dilemma of any serious philosopher. How to observe the world without being part of it. How to define the ideal distance between both. With A Black Forest Walden, Krell might just have presented us with the answer: to live in both.
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If Krell ponders existential questions while walking and inhabiting a small corner of a German mountain range, the British author and potter Edmund de Waal does the same inside a mansion located in the 11th Arrondissement of Paris, the Musée de Nissim de Camondo.
The subtitle to A Black Forrest Walden suggests there will be conversations with Thoreau found inside its pages. But Krell never addresses Thoreau directly, not in his praise, nor with his criticism.
Edmund de Waal, on the other hand, in his book Letters to Camondo (2021), directly speaks to his subject, Moïse de Camondo (1860—1935), a wealthy Parisian Jewish businessman, philanthropist and art collector from a prominent family, who lived a full century before the writer.
Moïse de Camondo was a close friend of the Jewish branch of de Waal’s family. In 1936 Camondo gifted the City of Paris a mansion-turned-museum, in honor of his son Nissim, a military pilot who was shot down and killed in the waning hours of WWI and for whom Moïse had built the mansion in anticipation of a life after the Great War that never came for Nissim, and which Moïse had decorated with a remarkable eye for details and an innate feeling for the power of objects. Part of the gift was a stipulation that everything in the mansion to be kept as best as possible exactly how it was when the City of Paris received it.
Ostensibly pulled in by the magic of the unaltered interiors and objects from the past, de Waal wanders through the house almost a century later, experiencing it hardly changed, and describes what he sees and feels, in the process slowly telling a gripping family story that emerges from behind the objects—a story equally quiet and dramatic.
Letters to Camondo is not a novel. And despite having written a global bestseller with The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), another family memoir inspired by objects, de Waal does not live the life of a writer. He is primarily a fine art potter and sculptor, working in ceramics.
Yet this book, its voice, its observations, its quietude has been compared to the writings of Marcel Proust, and rightfully so. One floats through the book as if through the museum itself. One joins the whispered conversation de Waal has with Camondo, almost as a third party. And before one knows it, an entire lost world has been drawn for readers, resurrected from the past, welcoming us inside.
The magnitude of de Waal as writer, however, only becomes fully evident by the time we reach the Chapters XLIX and L. Here the narrative, up to then as light as a summer breeze floating through open windows into the well appointed mansion, suddenly and sharply turns dark ——
Very dark ——
Beyond bearable dark ——
How could I not have seen this coming? ——
How could I not have anticipated what I knew had to come —— had to historically come without any doubt?
How could I have been such a naive reader even two pages before the horrific turn of events, so mesmerized by the lives described and by how the writer does it, that I was certain a happy ending awaited everybody, or if not everybody, then at least these people. Surely the dark clouds would part. The sun would return. This time, surely, there would be a happy ending. There had to be one. But there wasn’t.
And de Waal not only does not shy away from the horrors, he manages to make them unexpected, blindsiding us with their utter cruelty. For that reason they are doubly as devastating, doubly as unfathomable as they always are when we encounter the darkness known as the Holocaust.
The effect of it is so powerful and sad that de Waal inserted an entire chapter of silence right after Chapter L, an entire chapter without any words, a white page of mourning, before closing the book with a handful of chapters of returned humanity, reflection and remembrance.
It’s that white page that, I’m not embarrassed to say, made me lose all composure, overwhelming me with a flood of uncontrollable tears and sorrow, as hard and shattering as I ever recall having had in a lifetime of reading.
Letters to Camondo may be the most emotionally powerful book I have ever read.
— Tobias Meinecke
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