This book is a series of brief, casual meditations – excursions or ambles, Mooney calls them – on Thoreau as a “poet-philosopher” whose major achievement was a lifelong record of awe at the natural world. Mooney's Thoreau is a mystic of the ordinary: for him observation was a spiritual act. It took him beyond knowledge to experiences of “presence,” of valuing the world as it is.

What Mooney values in Thoreau is precisely this attitude of valuing. He thus attempts a Thoreauvian reading of Thoreau, “a venture in responsiveness and abandonment” that would convey Mooney's passionate experience of Thoreau's writing (13). He seeks to “deliver its presence and mood, the way it touches and envelops me, the way it effects changes in mood and attunement directly through intimate contact” (12). Contained within this impressionistic approach is a criticism of contemporary literary study, and specifically “that sort of critical thinking that only deflates, demotes, or translates into something else” instead of “establishing why we should bother to value the thing we ardently contextualize or scrutinize” (14, original emphasis).

There is some truth in Mooney's polemic. The humanities have felt great pressure to prove their seriousness to the scientific–rationalist university and larger culture. If, by some accounts, the question of value is the unique province of the humanities, their very justification for existing, then this can appear sentimental or decadent – unserious. The choice is stark: if the humanities are not science they must be religion, and they have opted for the former. Of course, to our unending chagrin, the humanities are neither. The demand for “knowledge production” in the humanities is a defense against the ambiguity of the domain of human value – “how to live, what to do,” to invoke Wallace Stevens.

While Mooney is refreshingly candid about his desire for value, he upholds the false choice between science and religion by advocating a worshipful approach to literature. Against rationalistic analysis that murders to dissect, Mooney proposes rapt description that would dignify the sheer presence or givenness of the text. While the folksy, personal tone of his musings is that of a self-proclaimed outsider, Mooney – a philosophy professor – might be surprised to learn that the gist of his argument is not as untimely as he thinks. The major trend in literary studies now is away from interpretation toward what Eve Sedgwick, by now famously, called “reparative reading.”Footnote ¹ While they couldn't be further from Mooney's humanism, the new approaches – affect theory, reenchantment, New Materialism, sociological reading, among others – nevertheless share with him a sense that there is something destructive about hermeneutics: that intensely analyzing texts is an act of aggression, a failure to respect the bare fact of their existence. Like Mooney, the new modes of criticism are descriptive in spirit, hands-off. Mooney writes, “in academia, we corral texts, push them through chutes to be tranquilized by theory and packaged as jargon” (32). Instead, we should “let artworks sing beyond all the reductive categories we invent to place and master them: let them be; let them bloom” (14).

Mooney's “letting be” often produces a sentence that sounds like Heidegger-lite: “Intelligence can also address us through odor and taste, and can shimmer ontologically as mood or climate, as allure, beauty, and as wonder” (11). I believe that Mooney feels something deeply here; but the clichéd terms, the italicizing as if to suggest profound meaning, and the lack of expansion or exfoliation of the terms commit the very jargonizing Mooney laments. Mooney's fear of interpretation leaves the reader with empty formulations instead of an experience of the beauty or wonder of Thoreau's text.

The idea that interpretation precludes valuing or respect – or even, God forbid, pleasure – is false. The great critics, precisely through their analytic intensity, their invention of concepts and taxonomies, pay tribute to texts. Rather than attitudinizing about the need for value and care, their attentiveness demonstrates it. Surely reductive readings are bad, but that's tantamount to saying that bad readings are, in fact, bad. The problem is not interpretation but bad interpretation.

The great desire of Thoreau's life was to experience what he called wildness. He didn't mean just the physical wilderness untouched by man. In a deeper sense he wanted to see through the trappings of civilization to the “raw material of life.”Footnote ² He wanted to be overwhelmed by life instead of anaesthetized to it. In writing, too, he valued “uncivilized free and wild thinking,”Footnote ³ or what he called extravagance; he spoke of his own “desire to speak somewhere without bounds.”Footnote ⁴ For Thoreau, as for Ralph Waldo Emerson, genuine criticism is a wild act, the making of a new object through the full resources of one's character and imagination. The great teaching of Emersonian reading – which both Thoreau and Nietzsche learned from him, and Adorno or Barthes, for example, learned from Nietzsche – is that criticism achieves adequacy through exaggeration, even willful misreading. “We aim above the mark, to hit the mark,” Emerson wrote.Footnote ⁵ The best critics have always given value through the extremity of their interpretations, their registering of a text's generative force. In such readings the narcissism of the critic and love for the text are indistinguishable. The power of the great books on Thoreau – Stanley Cavell's The Senses of Walden (1972) or Sharon Cameron's Writing Nature (1985), to name two classics – consists not in their adequacy to the Thoreau we thought we knew, but rather in the transfiguration of our idea of what adequacy to a text could even look like. Those exercises in wild thinking honor Thoreau's wildness; Mooney's excursions domesticate him.