Got an email from Gloria a couple of days ago, saying Ham has prostate cancer. I emailed her immediately back saying how sorry I was, trying to give her hope by telling her how she could help Ham not to try to "tough it out." It was all I could think to say. Then this morning, having got a brave, frank reply from her, I 'mailed her again, making no direct reference to Ham's affliction, but telling her in some detail of the constrictive horrors of existence in the "criminal shelter," and expressing hope that the amusement she must feel at hearing of my suffering might divert her for a little from her own "sorrows and tribulations." Well, I try to be tactful, and not to add-to the sufferings of others.

Reading now more Thoreau criticism, holding to my own infallible Gaydar-intuition, I note that the second contemporary (April 2, 1849) anonymous (pseudonymously styled "Timothy Thorough") criticism of Walden cited, contains the following female point of view (purportedly "Mrs. Thorough's"):

"...The young man is either a whimsy or else a good-for-nothing, selfish, crab-like sort of a chap, who tries to shirk the duties whose hearty and honest discharge is the only thing that entitles a man to be regarded as a good example....Nobody has a right to live for himself alone, away from the interests, the affections, and the sufferings of his kind. Such a way of going on...is not living, but a cold and snailish kind of existence, which is both infernal and internally stupid."

Need I say more?

Doubtless I don't need, but on October 21st, 1854 another review of Walden was published in the Boston Atlas, from which I excerpt the following:

..."He differs from his brother moralizers simply in this:--they think and speak of mankind as being themselves units of the many, participators in the heritage over which they mourn:--he fondly deems himself emancipated from this thraldom, and looks upon them as an inferior tribe....It is difficult to understand that a mother had ever clasped this hermit to her breast; that a sister had ever imprinted on his lips a tender kiss...[He has] written a volume treating expressly of human life, which exhibits..an utter dearth of all the kindly, generous feelings of our nature....Did he never people that bare hovel, in imagination, with a loving and beloved wife...or did he imagine that to know what life is he must ignore its origin?...He has much to say to men, and tells them bitter truths; but there is not one recognition of the presence on this earth of woman. There is not a word of... pure, constant, suffering woman's love...."

And women wonder why men despise them.