STANLEY CAVELL
I have no new proposal to offer about the literary or biographical source of these symbols in perhaps his most famously cryptic passage. But the very fact that they are symbols, and function within a little myth, seems to me to tell us what we need to know. The writer comes to us from a sense of loss; the myth does not contain more than symbols because it is no set of desired things he has lost, but a connection with things, the track of desire itself.
THE JOURNAL: 1 APRIL 1860
The fruit of a thinker is sentences: statements or opinions. He seeks to affirm something as true. I am surprised that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, not forethought, so that I occasionally wake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I never consciously considered before, and as surprisingly novel and agreeable to me as anything can be.
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And yet we did unbend so far as to let our guns speak for us, when at length we had swept out of sight, and thus left the woods to ring again with their echoes; and it may be many russet-clad children, lurking in those broad meadows with the bittern and the woodcock and the rail, though wholly concealed by brakes and hardhack and meadowsweet, heard our salute that afternoon.
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Solitude, reform, and silence.
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In A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers Thoreau wrote: Mencius says: If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of the heart, he does not know how to seek them again. The duties of all practical philosophy consist only in seeking after the sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all.
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Duke Hsuan of Qi arranged his skirts and assumed a serene face to receive the philosopher Meng Tze, and who knows how many devils had come with him? The magicians had drilled the air around the gates with incessant drumming, and the butlers were burning incense.
The duke could see wagons of millet on the yellow road. The philosopher had apparently travelled in some humble manner. From the terrace he could see no caravan. There was no commotion among the palace guard.
Sparrows picked among the rocks below the bamboo grove.
A merchant was handing in a skip of persimmons and a string of carp at the porter’s lodge. The weather was dry.
The philosopher when he was ushered in was indeed humble. His clothes were coarse but neat, and his sleeves were modest. He wore a scholar’s cap with ear flaps.
They met as gentlemen skilled in deference and courtly manners, bow for bow. The duke soon turned their talk to this feudal baron or that, angling for news. There had for years been one war after another.
— And yet, Meng Tze said, the benevolent have no enemies.
Duke Hsuan smiled. Philosophers were always saying idiotic things like this.
— The grass, Meng Tze continued, stands dry and ungrowing in the seventh month and the eighth. Then clouds darken the sky. Rain falls in torrents. The grass, the millet, the buckwheat, the barley turns green again, and grows anew. Nothing we are capable of can control this process of nature. And yet men who ought to be the caretakers of other men kill them instead. They are pleased to kill. If there were a ruler who did not love war, his people would look at him with longing, loving eyes. It is in nature to love the benevolent.
So there was to be no gossip about Hwan of Ch’i, or Wan of Tsin. So the duke asked politely:
— How may a ruler attain and express benevolence?
— He should regard his people as his charges and not with contempt.
— Am I one, the duke asked slyly, who might be so benevolent?
— Yes.
— How?
— Let me tell you about a duke. I had this from Hu Ho. A duke was sitting in his hall when he saw a man leading an ox through the door. The duke asked why, and was told that the ox was to be slaughtered to anoint a ceremonial bell with its blood. Just so, said the duke, but don’t do it. I cannot bear the fear of death in its eyes. Kill a sheep instead.
— This is a thing I did, the duke replied. You have learned of things in my court.
— Yes, Meng Tze said with a smile. And I see hope for you in it. It was not the ox but your heart you were sparing.
— The people thought otherwise. They said I begrudged an ox. Qi is but a small dukedom, but I can afford the sacrifice of an ox. It had such innocent eyes and it did not want to die.
— And yet you sent for a sheep. You knew the pity you felt for the ox. How was the sheep different?
— You make a point, the duke said. You show me that I scarcely know my own mind.
— The minds of others, rather.
— Yes. You are searching for compassion in me, aren’t you? In The Book of the Odes it is written the minds of others I am able by reflection to measure. You have seen why I spared the ox and was indifferent to the misery of the sheep. I did not know my own mind.
— If, Meng Tze said with great politeness, you will allow me to play that lute there by the bronze and jade vessels, I will sing one of the most archaic of the odes, as part of our discourse.
The duke with correct deference asked him by all means to sing it.
Meng Tze, finding the pitch, sang:
The world’s order is in the stars.
We are its children, its orphans.
Cicadas shrill in the willows.
It is not fault, it is not guilt
that has brought us to this. It is
disorder. We were not born to it.
The autumn moon is round and red.
I have not troubled the order,
yet I am no longer in it.
In the first waywardness we could
have gone back. In the second we
began to confuse lost and found.
Had we been angry to be lost,
would we have taken disorder
for order, if any had cared?
Cicadas shrill in the willows.
There was a time we had neighbors.
The autumn moon is round and red.
Men without character took us
into the marshes, neither land
nor river, where we cannot build.
Order is harmony. It is
innovation in tradition.
The autumn moon is round and red.
Elastic words beguiled our ears.
What is the courage worth of fools?
Cicadas shrill in the willows.
Fat faces and slick tongues sold
us disorder for real estate.
The autumn moon is round and red.
The young lord’s trees are tender green.
Saplings grow to be useful wood.
Hollow words are the wind blowing.
Cicadas shrill in the willows.
There was a time we had neighbors.
The autumn moon is round and red.
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The dove is over water in Scripture: over the flood with an olive twig in its beak, the rainbow above; over the Jordan with Jesus and John in it, upon the sea as Jonah (which name signifieth dove), up out of the sea as Aphrodite (whose totem animal it was). It was the family name of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.
The horse is the body, its stamina, health, and skills. The hound is faith and loyalty. But symbols are not sense but signs.
Mencius’s Chinese cock (tail the color of persimmons, breast the color of the beech in autumn, legs blue) and unimaginable Chinese dog have become under Concord skies a biblical dove, a Rover, and a bay horse. The one is a pet, one is a friend, one is a fellow worker.
We lose not our innocence or our youth or opportunity but our nature itself, atom by atom, helplessly, unless we are kept in possession of it by the spirit of a culture passed down the generations as tradition, the great hearsay of the past.
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Thoreau was most himself when he was Diogenes.
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One ship speaks another when they pass on the high seas. There is a naval metaphor in the paragraph (misprin
ted as spoken to in modern ignorance). Thoreau and his brother John had sailed around the world in August of 1839, all on the Concord and Merrimac, and you could see him in his sailboat on the Concord with a crew of boys, or the smiling Mr. Hawthorne, or the prim Mr. Emerson.
CONVERSATION
The mouse, who left abruptly if Thoreau changed from one tune to another on his flute, was a good listener.
— A man who is moral and chaste, Mr. Thoreau said to the mouse, does not pry into the affairs of others, which may be very different from his own, and which he may not understand.
— O yes! said the mouse. But the affairs of others are interesting. You can learn all sorts of things.
— The housekeeping of my soul may seem a madman’s to a Presbyterian or a bear.
The mouse twitched his whiskers. Offered a crumb of hoe-cake, he took it, sitting on Mr. Thoreau’s sleeve, sniffed it, and began a diligent chewing.
The mouse knew all about the lead pencils and their inedible shavings, the surveyor’s chain, the Anakreon in Greek (edible), the journal with pressed leaves between the pages, the fire (dangerous), the spider family in the corner (none of his business), but it was the flute and the cornmeal that bound him to Mr. Thoreau. And the friendliness.
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The man under the enormous umbrella out in the snow storm is Mr. Thoreau. Inspecting, as he says. Looking for his dove, his hound, his horse.
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Diogenes was an experimental moralist. He found wealth in owning nothing. He found freedom in being a servant. He discovered that owning was being owned. He discovered that frankness was sharper than a sword. If we act by design, by principle, we need designers. Designers need to search. Mr. Thoreau discovered that the dove is fiercer than a lion when he sat in the Concord jail, like Diogenes. Why should a government come to him to finance its war in Mexico and pay a clergy he could not listen to? Let them find their own money. Let them write laws an honest man can obey. He would write his sentences. That was his genius. Others might find them as useful as he found Diogenes’s. The world is far from being over. When Mr. Emerson came to the jail and said, Henry, what are you doing in here? and he replied, Rafe, what are you doing out there? the words slipped loose like a dove into the spring sky, and were remembered in a London jail by Emmeline Pankhurst, in a South African jail by Mohandas Gandhi, in a Birmingham jail by Martin Luther King, and cannot be forgotten.
MEADOW
I remember years ago breaking through a thick oak wood east of the Great Fields and descending into a long, narrow, and winding blueberry swamp which I did not know existed there. A deep, withdrawn meadow sunk low amid the forest, filled with green waving sedge three feet high, and low andromeda, and hardhack, for the most part dry to the feet then, though with a bottom of unfathomed mud, not penetrable except in midsummer or midwinter, and with no print of man or beast in it that I could detect. Over this meadow the marsh-hawk circled undisturbed, and she probably had her nest in it, for flying over the wood she had long since easily discovered it. It was dotted with islands of blueberry bushes and surrounded by a dense hedge of them, mingled with the pannicled andromeda, high chokeberry, wild holly with its beautiful crimson berries, and so on, these being the front rank to a higher wood. Great blueberries, as big as old-fashioned bullets, alternated, or were closely intermingled, with the crimson hollyberries and black chokeberries, in singular contrast yet harmony, and you hardly knew why you selected those only to eat, leaving the others to the birds.
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This text has been written first with a lead pencil (graphite encased in an hexagonal cedar cylinder) invented by Henry David Thoreau. He also invented a way of sounding ponds, a philosophy for being oneself, and raisin bread.
W.E.B. DUBOIS
Lions have no historians.
WITTGENSTEIN
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
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Fear not, thou drummer of the night, we shall be there.
August Blue
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On the way to school, just past the bird market, there is one of the largest fig trees in Jerusalem. It was believed by some to be as old as the temple and to have a special blessing on it whereby its figs were fatter and sweeter than any others in the world, except, of course, those in the Garden of Eden. They were, in color, more blue than green. The milk that bled from its stems when you pulled one of its figs cured warts, the quinsy, and whooping cough.
Schoolboys could see this great fig tree. A red wall, however, kept them from helping themselves to the occasional fig, even though Roman law said that a traveler, or a child, could pick an apple, pear, or fig, for refreshment, without being guilty of theft, and the Torah was equally lenient and understanding of the hunger of travelers and boys.
On a fine morning in the month of Tishri, Daniel, Yaakov, and Yeshua, having inspected finches and quail in cages, and leapfrogged in the narrowest streets, shouted at by merchants, gave their usual longing looks at the fig tree.
— If only figs, Daniel said, knocked down like apples, and if we had a pole.
— But they don’t, Yaakov said. And they wouldn’t fall in the street, anyway.
They sighed, all three.
— Figs and dates smushed together with ewe milk, and roasted barley sprinkled on top, Yeshua said.
— Figs and honey, Daniel said.
— Figs just so, juicy and ripe, said Yaakov.
— What do you say to the donkeys? Daniel asked.
It was a game of Yeshua’s to stop along the way to school and whisper into donkeys’ ears, something quick and confidential, with a knowing smile. The donkeys never failed to quicken, lift their ears, and stare at him.
— Behold the grandfather of all jackrabbits! he would say out loud.
— I tell them something they think I don’t know, Yeshua said. I spoke to the quail, too.
— Yeshua’s meshuggeh.
— Want a fig? Yeshua said. One for each of you. Close your eyes and hold out your hands.
— You’ve got figs for recess?
— No, I got them off the tree back there.
Daniel looked at Yaakov, Yaakov at Daniel.
— So don’t believe me, Yeshua said.
With a flourish of his hand he showed them a plump blue fig in his fingers. He gave it to Daniel. Another twirl and wiggle of fingers, and there was a fig for Yaakov.
— Holy Moses!
— Don’t swear, Yeshua said. There’s Zakkaiah looking up and down the street for us.
They ran to the school gate, herded in by their teacher, Zakkaiah, whose beard was combed and who smelled of licorice. They sat on cushions on a clean wooden floor, in a semi-circle before Zakkaiah, who sat on a stool.
— Alef, Zakkaiah said.
— It’s an ox, said Daniel.
— It comes first, a boy named Nathan said.
— So listen, said Zakkaiah.
He explained the derivation of alef from the old Phoenician alphabet, and talked about the versatility of a set of signs that could graph speech, contrasting it to the barbarous syllabaries of the Egyptians and the Assyrians.
— Greek is an even further advance. Their alpha, however, is not our alef. They have letters for their vowels, and use their alpha for one of them. Micah, what letter comes next?
— Beth.
— Yeshua! Zakkaiah said, are you chewing something?
— A fig.
— And what kind of manners is it to eat figs when we are learning the alphabet?
Nathan, who had just been slipped a fig by Yeshua, tucked it inside his blouse and looked innocent. Amos, who was also eating a fig passed back to him by Yeshua, swallowed his whole.
— And what is beth, Micah?
— But Teacher, Yeshua said, we have not learned what is to be known about alef, and here we are hastening on to beth.
Zakkaiah’s mouth fell open.
— So? he said. You want me to forget that you were having a late breakfast rather th
an paying attention to the lesson?
— Oh no, Teacher.
— I’m listening to what you have to say about alef, if you’re quite through eating figs.
Yeshua worked his fingers in the air until there was a fig in them.
— Have a fig for yourself, O Teacher. And another. And yet another. They are from the great tree down the street, and are the juiciest and tastiest figs in all Jerusalem.
Zakkaiah stood with the three figs in his cupped hands, staring at Yeshua, speechless. He looked at the figs and he looked at Yeshua.
— My father sent them to you, O Teacher. They are good for the bowels, he says.
A silence.
— I will thank him when I see him, Zakkaiah said in a soft voice.
— Alef, Yeshua said. I will recite about alef.
There was an uneasiness in the class. Zakkaiah was obviously thinking several things at once.
— Alef! Yeshua said in a voice pitched bright. In the alef there’s a yud up here, and a yud down there, with a line between. As with all boundaries, this line both joins and separates. The yud above is the Creator of the universe, of the earth, the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars. The yud below is us, the people. The line between is the Torah, the prophets, the law. It is the eye for seeing what we can of the Creator. He is evident in his work, the world.
— You are reciting a commentary, Zakkaiah said, but whose?
— I’m making it up, Yeshua said. The Creator made us creators, too. Look at the spider knitting its web and at the bird building its nest. Every work has a maker.
— Is it the blessed Hillel your father has taught you?
— Who is Hillel? The alphabet is all pictures. You can look at them and see what they are: a house, a camel. The alef is a picture of the whole world. Cool water on dusty feet, that’s a grand thing, and the smell of wood shavings and a crust dunked in wine, and honey, and dancing to the tabor and flute. These good things belong down here, but they come from up there. That’s why there’s a line between the top yud and the bottom yud. Everything has a fence, so we can know where it is. A house has rooms, a garden has a wall.
The Guy Davenport Reader Page 20