Reorienting his writing required reorienting the pattern of his daily life. Thoreau’s new protocol required a high degree of focus and discipline, for its value depended on consistency: going out every day, and every day pressing language to find something new to see, making studies, noted an early biographer, “as carefully and habitually as he noted the angles and distances in surveying a Concord farm.”66 Thoreau developed the practice of walking with pencil and paper and scribbling notes on the spot, brief names and phrases that he wrote up the following morning in long, often lyrical Journal entries—sometimes, when he got backed up, writing out two or three days’ worth at a time—then setting out that afternoon for another three- or four-hour walk. “In the forenoon commonly I see nature only through a window—in the afternoon—my study or apartment in which I sit is a vale,” he wrote in October 1851, after the experiment had become routine. Sometimes he varied it, walking abroad in the morning and writing in the afternoon; sometimes he unsettled his senses by walking before dawn or staying out well past midnight. But he must go out, he told Channing, every day, to see what he had caught in his traps set for facts; as Emerson remarked, “The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing.”67
Thoreau usually walked alone, but often Channing came along, though Thoreau could be impatient: “In our walks C. takes out his note-book some times & tries to write as I do—but all in vain. He soon puts it up again—or contents himself with scrawling some sketch of the landscape. Observing me still scribbling he will say that he confines himself to the ideal—purely ideal remarks—he leaves the facts to me.” Channing’s criticism pushed Thoreau to articulate what he wanted with those heaps of “facts”: not mere data, but “material to the mythology which I am writing”—or, more largely, “facts which the mind perceived—thoughts which the body thought with these I deal.” Thoreau’s walks became a form of meditation, a spiritual as well as physical discipline. He worried about walking bodily into the woods without getting there in spirit, some piece of business in his mind literally blinding his eyes. “I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would return to my senses like a bird or beast. What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods.” Animal minds became a model for him; he strove to walk like a fox, mind and senses wholly open. As he said of a muskrat: “While I am looking at him I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different sort of man, that is all.”68
On November 26, Thoreau walked through the drizzle and mist melting an early snow to sit down with a group of Penobscot Indians, camped in tents on the river. Just as he had done with the French Canadian family a few weeks before, in their farmhouse on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, so now did he sit with this family in their home on the banks of the Concord, asking them questions and recording their answers: How do you live? he asked. How do you hunt, cook, make canoes, boil water, cradle your children? As they showed him, he wrote down their words: “Kee-nong-gun or pappoose cradle,” “Jeborgon or Jebongon?” or sled—where we get our word toboggan. And, for the first time, he drew the things they showed him on the Journal page. “The pencil is the best of eyes,” said Louis Agassiz, who drew at the blackboard during his popular lectures. The books on Indians Thoreau was taking notes from were full of drawings, too, and Thoreau had started to copy them. Now, sitting down with the Penobscot, their tents holding off the November drizzle, he was seeing not just with his eyes, but with his ears and hands as well.69
What Thoreau couldn’t carry away in his notebook, he often carried away in his pockets. Thus it was that the Yellow House attic became a kind of material memory, the place that held and preserved his expanding mental universe: notebooks, journal volumes, books, maps, charts, tables, natural history specimens, and curiosities. The townspeople started to bring him things, too. In December 1849, a neighbor, annoyed by a large hawk killing his hens, shot it out of the sky—but instead of tossing the carcass into the woods to rot, he brought it to Thoreau. What Thoreau did next was also remarkable: he brought it to the Boston Society of Natural History, to show Samuel Cabot (brother of James Elliot Cabot), their curator of birds. Remarkable indeed, agreed Cabot—it was a rare and beautiful American goshawk. Thoreau’s donation allowed Cabot to settle a controversy, for it was clearly a new species, unique to America, and not, as Audubon had claimed, the same as the European goshawk. Cabot skinned the bird, now officially a scientific specimen, dissected and measured it, preserved the remains in alcohol, and stuffed the skin. It occurred to Emerson that Thoreau was providing a real service to the town; indeed, every town needed someone like Thoreau, a practical naturalist on a par with the village doctor or lawyer, who could be provided with microscope and telescope and who in return would answer questions—“What bird is this? What hyla? What caterpillar?”—rather like a park ranger.70
Thoreau also caught a useful lesson. “Science applies a finite rule to the infinite.— & is what you can weigh & measure and bring away,” he journalized after bringing the goshawk to Cabot. “Its sun no longer dazzles us and fills the universe with light.” The second lesson came a year later, when Cabot notified Thoreau that in honor of his goshawk, the BSNH had elected him a corresponding member, “with all the honores, privilegia, etc., ad gradum tuum pertinentia” (or pertaining to the grade of membership), without having to pay an annual subscription. In return, Thoreau was “to advance the interests of the Society by communication or otherwise, as shall seem good.”71 From then on, Thoreau’s trips to Boston meant at least two stops: one at the Harvard Library, where he and Thaddeus Harris could talk nature over the history books, and one at the rooms of the BSNH, the center of science in Boston, where he could conduct research in the collections and talk over his findings with some of the era’s leading naturalists.
Word spread to Washington, DC, and early in 1853 Thoreau was elected to membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He accepted the invitation and returned their questionnaire promptly, listing as his particular interest the “Manners & Customs of the Indians of the Algonquin Group previous to contact with the Civilized Man”—“that poor part of me which alone they can understand,” he qualified in his Journal. In fact, he declared proudly to himself, “I am a mystic—a transcendentalist—& a natural philosopher to boot,” a combination he didn’t expect the AAAS to understand. At year’s end, he wrote again to decline the renewal of his membership, explaining that he could not attend the meetings.72 For Thoreau, science made the most sense on the local level, among friends who would accept that he was the scientist among poets, and the poet among scientists—the one person in America who could make poetry and science not two things but one.
“The captain of a huckleberry party”
Thoreau was now living his life on two tracks, one visible and one hidden. The visible Thoreau was the busy town surveyor, village naturalist, active lecturer, and publishing writer who helped out with the family business. “The independent of independents,” Alcott proclaimed him, “indeed, the sole signer of the Declaration, and a Revolution in himself.”73 Emerson, though, was disappointed to see his friend, now well into middle age, making so little of himself. He “will not stick,” he complained. “Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding Empires, but not, if at the end of years, it is only beans.” Into his notebook Emerson scored the bitter words his eulogy would pound home: “I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party.”74 Not until after his death would Emerson, reading Thoreau’s Journal, glimpse the breathtaking ambition of the hidden Thoreau, whose “oaken strength” and “field-laborer’s” hands performed intellectual feats that were, acknowledged Emerson, beyond his own, like seeing his own “initial grapplings & jumps” continued by a gymnasium full of youths who “leap, climb, & swing with a force unapproachable.”75
Cultivating that force unapproachable was Thoreau’s pr
imary task all through 1851. His published Journal for that single year fills 446 pages, which sparkle and dance with a giddy sense of expanding power. Back in November 1850, just two weeks into his experiment, he had what might be described as a mystical vision: low sunlight falling on a distant angle of the woods affected him singularly, “a place far away—yet actual and where we have been . . . like looking into a dream land—It is one of the avenues to my future.” Suddenly a flash like “hazy lightning” flooded all the world “with a tremulous serene light which it is difficult to see long at a time.” He could see two hawks sailing over the water perfectly still and smooth, yet “I do not see what these things can be. I begin to see such an object when I cease to understand it.” “But I get no further than this,” he added in frustration.76 The paradox simmers through the winter and spring: to “get further” means knowing, but also letting go of what one knows. Only then does one reach true knowledge, what Thoreau defined as “a novel & grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we had called knowledge before. An indefinite sense of the grandeur & glory of the Universe. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun.”77
The first step to true knowledge was learning everything he could. Through 1851 Thoreau continued to read voraciously in the sciences, above all Asa Gray’s botanies, the scientific explorers Humboldt and Michaux, and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. Seeing through their eyes turned his world into a “faery land.” “I wonder that I even get 5 miles on my way—the walk is so crowded with events—& phenomena. How many questions there are which I have not put to the inhabitants!”78 When his eyes were exhausted, he walked by moonlight and navigated by touch, hearing, and odor, startling small creatures in the dark who startled him back. Or he plunged into the river, trying “to get wet through,” lying on the sandy bottom amid the weeds, drowning all thought, letting the air and water plant seeds in him which he brooded and hatched.79 How much was in the germ! “Here I am 34 years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded,” he exclaimed. The scale was too great for human life, but so what? “I am—contented. . . . Let a man step to the music which he hears however measured.” His ultimate question: “With all your science can you tell how it is—& whence it is, that light comes into the soul?” Impatient as he was to find an answer, the scale of his inquiry was too great to waste any of his time in hurry. Urgency warred with ecstasy: “But this habit of close observation—In Humboldt—Darwin & others. Is it to be kept up long—this science—Do not tread on the heels of your experience Be impressed without making a minute of it. Poetry puts an interval between the impression & the expression—waits till the seed germinates naturally.”80
His only excursion that year was local, and alone. Though it produced no essay, it was unusually satisfying. On Friday, July 25, Thoreau set off to Plymouth Harbor, intending to see for himself where the Pilgrims landed to found New England’s first colony. From Boston he ferried to Hull and walked down the South Shore, practicing his explorer’s eyes, noting down everything—weather, local customs, buildings, flora, the shapes of eroding islands—a Darwin turned loose on the way to Duxbury. At Cohasset he lingered for a day, studying sea and shore, bewildered that no trace remained of the St. John wreck two years before. He called again on Joseph and Ellen Sewall Osgood, and on Captain Snow, who still remembered how fishermen “fitted out at Thoreau’s.”81 On Sunday, Jean Thoreau’s grandson continued to Scituate, visiting Ellen Sewall’s father—such significant memories in that home—and reaching Duxbury that afternoon through sunbreaks and thundershowers. Legend has it that Thoreau, too much the landsman to know the dangers of tides, was confident he could reach Clark’s Island, three miles away over the tideflats, with a bit of wading. Just as the treacherous Plymouth tide was about to sweep him away forever, a passing fisherman plucked him out of the waves and landed him on the island. Or perhaps this is apocryphal: with more poetry and less embarrassment, Thoreau told of setting sail at sunset in a mackerel schooner, which obligingly dropped him off.82
There, where the Pilgrims had first anchored the Mayflower in the bleak December of 1620, Thoreau was met by “Uncle Ned” Watson, sailor, farmer, poet, and philosopher, born on Clark’s Island and third in line to own it since it was deeded to his family in 1690.83 Uncle Ned rarely left the eighty-six-acre island, and for four days they explored it together while Thoreau scribbled his copious notes. Ned one-upped Thoreau’s old Harvard professor Benjamin Peirce by giving Henry his first lessons in ocean navigation—first taking a turn down the harbor, then sailing over to Plymouth so that Henry might step ashore onto Plymouth Rock, just as the Pilgrims had done 231 years before. After taking Thoreau bass fishing in the ocean, Ned dropped him off in Plymouth, where Thoreau walked the mile or so to “Hillside,” the famed home of Ned’s nephew Marston Watson and his wife Mary, partners in creating Old Colony Nurseries, one of the century’s great orchards and arboretums.
Plymouth had long been a virtual Concord-on-the-Coast: Emerson lectured there in 1834 and was drawn back by the stately Lydia Jackson, whose name he changed to “Lidian” (for the sake of euphony) upon their marriage in 1835. Lidian’s sister Lucy lived in Plymouth when she wasn’t in Concord, and her brother, the scientist Charles T. Jackson, made his home there, too. Mary Russell, Lidian’s childhood friend and now Marston Watson’s wife, lived there still. Marston heard Emerson lecture at Plymouth in 1835 and proudly counted himself one of the world’s first true Transcendentalists, and he’d been a dedicated naturalist ever since he and Henry helped found Professor Harris’s Harvard Natural History Club. One of Henry’s first acts at Walden had been to send Marston native berries and seeds for his thriving center of horticulture. But despite these numerous ties, this was Thoreau’s first visit. Over the next decade he returned often, sometimes with a lecture and once with his compass for a full-scale formal survey of the Watsons’ eighty-acre estate. That first afternoon they dug through the earliest Pilgrim records at the courthouse and inspected relics in Pilgrim Hall; at tea, Mary’s father reminisced about seeing as a child Ebenezer Cobb, who in turn had remembered seeing as a child Peregrine White, the first child born to the Pilgrims in New England. History, for Thoreau, was not dead in books but alive in people and places. From evening tea to the Pilgrim founders was but the span of three human lives.84
On his return to Concord, Thoreau made one more stop, at the BSNH, where the newly elected member pumped his new colleagues for information on jellyfish and the causes of sea fog. This was the pattern of his travel now: focused and intense field trips, taken with purpose in mind and notebook in hand, with guidebooks at his fingertips together with his map of Massachusetts, divided into four parts so he could take only the section he needed—why, he grumbled, did no one print a decent pocket map for the convenience of travelers?—plus his plant press and measuring tape, all tucked away in his custom-made waterproof backpack with pockets designed for easy storage.85 Home or abroad, from now on, his philosophy was the same: “Why not begin his travels at home—!” Imagine a traveler who began “with all the knowledge of a native—& add thereto the knowledge of a traveller . . . the world would be absolutely benefited. It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country—in his native village.” What he said in Walden was literal truth: “I have travelled a good deal in Concord.”86
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One night late in October 1851, Thoreau had the strangest dream: he was learning to sail, dragging his anchor far into the sea—he saw buttons off the coats of drowned men—he quoted poetry he didn’t know to Alcott—and he awoke to the thought that his body itself was a musical instrument, “the organ and channel of melody as a flute is of the music that is breathed through it. My flesh sounded & vibrated still to the strain—& my nerves were the chords of the lyre.” With “infinite regret” he recollected his body was “but a scuttle full of dirt after all”—but he knew the music would come again.87
Six weeks later, on November 30, 1851, Thoreau felt “a transient
gladness” at something he saw without quite knowing what it was—perhaps the stratified tier upon tier of white pines before him, or the squirrel who frisked in the tree behind him. It seemed he was asking nature to give him a sign. He was standing, he realized suddenly, on the site of his Walden house. “Where is my home? It is indistinct as an old cellar hole now a faint indentation merely in a farmer’s field . . . and I sit by the old site on the stump of an oak which once grew there. Such is the nature where we have lived.”88 The old manuscript he had put away two years before, discouraged and defeated, had been a book about nature. Now he was ready to write a book that would be nature, would be “the corn & the grass & the atmosphere writing.”
He had his sign. Soon after finding himself sitting on the oak stump by his Walden home, Thoreau got out the old pages, shook off the dust, and set to work.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Beauty of Nature, the Baseness of Men (1851–1854)
I walk toward one of our ponds, but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?
Henry David Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts”
Abolition and Reform after the Fugitive Slave Law
On the Fourth of July 1854, at one of the era’s largest and angriest antislavery rallies, the professed hermit of Walden Pond stepped onto a high lecture platform under a black-draped American flag hung upside down. In the blistering heat, before a crowd of some two thousand souls, the retiring philosopher opened his heart. “I walk toward one of our ponds”—by then, they all knew which one—“but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?” This question had tormented Thoreau for nearly four years, since passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 had brought slavery to his own backyard. Even as his creative springs were blossoming, even as he had completed the masterwork of his career—that very week, his publisher was binding the printed pages of Walden—he felt everything he stood for was being destroyed. “The remembrance of my country spoils my walk,” he confessed to the crowd. “My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.”1
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