I’ve been harvesting unwanted books for the word ‘by.’ I get the feeling the word is on its way out, or at least it appears many times in the writing of Thoreau and ‘old-timey’ books like The Name of the Rose, but is scarce in the more modern books I’ve been combing through.

It’s a good little word, a hard worker and quite useful. Other prepositions may supplant it. Maybe all the disparaging of the passive form has killed it. Any newspaper editor will tell you, don’t write ‘he was assaulted by a scoundrel,’ write ‘a scoundrel assaulted him.’ (You’d be asked to change ‘scoundrel,’ too.)

“He was motivated by a higher principle”
“By looking in the mirror I lost my mind”
“Dad was bitten by a thick, two-toothed snake”

I confess I found The Name of the Rose boring, even after giving it a second chance. I didn’t mind shredding it. But why was Thoreau on the discard pile? It’s true he shouldn’t be but I’ve read most Thoreau and assumed I didn’t need to read him again. He writes wonderfully but always seemed like a narcissist, and the story (myth?) about him living his solitary life on Walden Pond but having his mother do his laundry conjures all the snark in my heart.

Nevertheless I was combing the essays for ‘by’ and came up often in some interesting and beautiful phrases. I was distracted by the content of the text. Close an eye to century and circumstance and Thoreau has relevant things to say. He died in 1862 of TB, a few months before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

We dream of foreign countries, of other times and races of men, placing them at a distance in history or space; but let some significant event like the present occur in our midst, and we discover, often, this distance and this strangeness between us and our nearest neighbors. They are our Austrias, and Chinas, and South Sea Islands.

That’s rather how I’ve felt through the past weeks, watching everyone react in different ways to politics and inequality and ideas.

Anyway, I cut Thoreau up and tossed the scraps. But I also felt like I was ingesting the essays. I have since spit some of it back out in various collages.