The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau

by Henry David Thoreau

  The essay begins, then, reminding us of our “quiet desperation” in the fallen present. Thoreau wakes our dissatisfaction and uses it to lever us out of the present and into the heights, the second stage of this journey. Here, we see the world below with new eyes. The historian of religion Mircea Eliade once suggested that when evil days are upon us, the sacred survives by camouflaging itself within the profane. To recover it, we must develop the eyes—some sort of night vision or hunter’s attentiveness—that can discover the shapes of the sacred despite its camouflage. Prophets speak to us at the intersection of time and eternity, and if we join them there, we are given that vision, that sight. “It is much easier to discover than to see when the cover is off,” says Thoreau, but that is the job at hand. He means, I think, that it is one thing to disclose the world, quite another to see what it means. The prophetic voice is apocalyptic: it doesn’t just uncover the world; it uncovers the eyes. Then, as we walk, we see blossoms that we never saw before, though they were always there.

  I have suggested that the prophetic voice is spoken in the extended first person. When we identify with such a speaker, we are led to imagine our lives differently. We have, for a moment, two lives, the one we actually lead and a concurrent imaginary one. The second is not imaginary in the sense of “invented,” however. If the prophet is speaking of things that will be true tomorrow because they are true in all time, then that second life is real even if it isn’t realized. The prophetic voice juxtaposes today and eternity to make it clear that the latter may inform the former. It sets the mundane against the imaginary so that we might see whether or not they match up. Where they are congruent, we discover the true value hidden in the everyday; where they are incongruent, we discover what we may abandon. In either case there is a reevaluation, a redemption. You look at your work, your loves, your children, parents, politicians, and, as at a funeral or birth, you see what matters and what does not.

  In the final stage of his essay, Thoreau returns to home ground. He claims at the outset that the walker must be ready to leave home never to return, but nonetheless, in his final pages we find him sauntering home with the sun “like a gentle herdsman” at his back. A true walk changes the walker, not the walker’s hometown. We read in books of some distant past when there were giants on the earth, or of some future when they will return. The prophetic voice seeks to have us see that the golden age is not in the past or the future. It is here. We who have been “saunterers in the good sense” return to find the Holy Land in the Concord we left behind. Where before we and all our townspeople looked like infidels, now we see that each might be a hero. “This [is] the heroic age itself, though we know it not.”

  There is yet another stage to the prophetic excursion, though it takes place after the prophet falls silent. The prophetic voice doesn’t necessarily push us into action. It is more declarative than imperative, more revelatory than moralizing. And yet where revelation succeeds, we suddenly see paths that were obscure before. “It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way.” Most of us live in a world of almost paralyzing free choice. In America at least, it is difficult to buy the right brand of cell phone, let alone find the right way. But under the spell of the prophetic voice, we can, sometimes, sort the true from the false and begin to move. We find ourselves in a story that makes sense, and such stories engender action.

  You quit graduate school, rent a room somewhere, and start to read in earnest. You hunker down in your pointless job and paint at night. You go back to the family farm and begin the fifty-year job of reclaiming the spent land. You leave a hopeless marriage or rededicate yourself to a good one. You resist an immoral war and go to jail. The heroic age will not be with us unless we will be its heroes. Great cold air masses gather over the North Atlantic and slide slowly toward the shores of America. Sometimes late at night you get an unexpected whiff of that salt air. You had forgotten that you live in a city by the sea, and now you remember.

  II. IGNORANCE

  If the prophetic voice is apocalyptic, if it uncovers and opens the eyes, then what exactly is revealed? What do we see once the cover is off?

  Just southwest of Walden Pond the Sudbury River widens to form Fair Haven Pond. In February 1851 Thoreau recorded in his journal a memory of things seen there:

  One afternoon in the fall … , I saw Fair Haven Pond with its island and meadow; between the island and the shore, a strip of perfectly smooth water in the lee of the island; and two hawks sailing over it—(and something more I saw which cannot easily be described, which made me say to myself that the landscape could not be improved) … .

  Yet I do not know what these things can be; I begin to see such objects only when I leave off understanding them … . But I get no further than this.

  How adapted these forms and colors to our eyes, a meadow and its islands! What are these things? Yet the hawks and the ducks keep so aloof, and nature is so reserved! We are made to love the river and the meadow, as the wind to ripple the water.

  There is observation here, and description of things, and then some limit. where description fails and, oddly, seeing begins.

  Thoreau had a recurrent interest in such moments or, more globally, a concern with what might be perceived should we ever get beyond understanding and utterance. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ends with an ode to silence (a book, he says, being but a rock “whereon the waves of Silence may break”), and in “Walking” he urges us to learn the value of “ignorance” (“We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge … . Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance”). This is a theme Thoreau also addresses in the opening pages of Walden, where he says that his neighbors are so busy that the laboring man “has no time to be any thing but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge?” A few pages later, he cites Confucius to the effect that true knowledge amounts to knowing what we do not know, then remarks, “When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.”

  That is an enigmatic declaration, I suspect, unless one has had a chance to learn the terms by which the American Romantics imagined human consciousness. In 1690 John Locke had published An Essay concerning Human Understanding, arguing that all we know comes ultimately from the senses, from contact with the world, and not from any innate ideas, inborn intuition, or Platonic memory. The mind at birth is a blank slate that maturation slowly fills with the script of experience. A century later, in Germany, Immanuel Kant had replied to Locke, arguing that the mind must bring certain things to experience (a sense of time, for example, or of cause and effect). In his ethics, Kant added “conscience” to his list: the feeling of right and wrong is a law of the heart, not something learned at school.

  Kant’s portion of this philosophical argument eventually reached New England by way of an 1813 book on German culture by Madame de Staël and an 1829 American edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection. Responding to Locke and following a somewhat muddled version of Kant, these writers imagined the mind as composed of two primary faculties, Reason and Understanding. Here is how Ralph Waldo Emerson explains the distinction in an 1834 letter to his brother:

  Reason is the highest faculty of the soul—what we mean often by the soul itself; it never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives; it is vision. The Understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues, near-sighted but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present the expedient the customary.

  Reason is spontaneous rather than willed, imaginative rather than empirical, poetic rather than practical. Intuitive and supersensuous, it transcends the senses so as to apprehend larger patterns and unities (it transcends the senses; thus those who value it are transcendentalists). “The senses give us representations of things,” Emerson elsewhere says, “but what are the thing
s themselves, they cannot tell.” If one wishes to know what are those hawks at Fair Haven Pond, or to know the spiritual world, the purposes of life, the larger meaning of things, then one must nurture Reason.

  In Thoreau’s version of this psychology, “Reason” does not much appear (happily so to the modern ear, for if “Reason … never reasons” it should have some other name). He speaks instead of “genius,” or of a demoniacal “wisdom,” or, most often, of “imagination”:

  My genius makes distinctions which my understanding cannot—and which my senses do not report.

  It is much easier to discover than to see when the cover is off … . Wisdom does not inspect, but behold … . He has something demoniacal in him, who can discern a law or couple two facts.

  I witness a beauty in the form or coloring of the clouds which addresses itself to my imagination—for which you account scientifically to my understanding … . What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding but robs the imagination?

  Such are the terms Thoreau prefers, at any rate, but it was always part of his artistry to go beyond the inherited nomenclature and evoke these things descriptively. It is in his imagistic elaborations of our faculties of mind that we shall get a fuller sense of what they were for him, and come back to what he means by “ignorance.” In “Walking,” having praised ignorance for both its use and its beauty, Thoreau writes:

  The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before … . It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun.

  Though this last image has its corollaries in mystic literature, Thoreau draws it from his own experience. When a young man, he once spent a night alone on top of Saddle-back Mountain, near Williamstown, Massachusetts. He woke early to see the sun rise, but as the day came on, he discovered himself to be above the clouds. The entire valley below was brimmed with mist, which, as the sun crossed the hidden horizon, slowly filled with light. “There was not a crevice left through which the trivial places we name Massachusetts or Vermont or New York could be seen … . I found myself a dweller in the dazzling halls of Aurora.”

  Thoreau usually becomes aware of the insufficiency of knowledge by way of unusual kinds of light. In this case it is sunlight caught in a mist sufficient to erase the sun itself and all the “trivial” things that light would usually reveal. In other cases it is the light of the moon. For many years, whenever there was a full moon—especially in summer—Thoreau would walk for several hours at night, recording his impressions in his journal the next day. Here is an entry that follows the full moon of June 13, 1851:

  After walking by night several times I now walk by day, but I am not aware of any crowning advantage in it. I see small objects better, but it does not enlighten me any.

  And early in August of the same year:

  As the twilight deepens and the moonlight is more & more bright, I begin to distinguish myself, who I am & where … . The intense light of the sun unfits me for meditation, makes me wander in my thought—my life is too diffuse & dissipated—routine succeeds & prevails over us—the trivial has greater power … .

  I am sobered by the moon light—I bethink myself … . Nature broods us, and has not left our germs of thought to be hatched by the sun.

  I introduce this image of Moonlit Knowing not so much for the ways it can be matched with Imagination or Reason but because Thoreau’s night walks are so suggestive of what may lie beyond such categories. If Sunlit Knowing encompasses the received conventions by which we understand our lives (all the social knowledge that is, in “Walking,” “an excess … of informing light”), then going out by moonlight is an exercise in quitting those conventions so as to recover sight again.

  There is a long tradition of seekers after knowledge who begin with exactly such refusals of the accepted sense of things. The anonymous fourteenth-century English author of The Cloud of Unknowing was one such, his advice being to do what Thoreau had done on Saddle-back Mountain, that is, to get yourself into a mist sufficiently thick to obscure the things you thought you knew. A century later, in Germany, Nicholas of Cusa suggested that those who wish to know God should give up seeking Him directly and take instead the via negativa, the path by which one refuses, item by item, all the categories and ideas the Church has employed to describe the divine. Grace, predestination, original sin, omnipotence—drop all of it, forget it; it only makes you think you know something when in fact you don’t. As Cusa wrote:

  We may be compared to owls trying to look at the sun; but since the natural desire in us for knowledge is not without a purpose, its immediate object is our own ignorance. Nothing could be more beneficial for even the most zealous searchers for knowledge than this being in fact most learned in that very ignorance which is peculiarly his own.

  But once we have become learned in this ignorance, what should we do? How shall we poor owl-eyed beasts come to see more fully? It would seem, to follow out the image, that we have several choices. We might try to improve the eyes we have or try to acquire new ones better fitted to their objects. Or perhaps we already have such eyes, which is to say we might search out some as yet undiscovered organ of sense or faculty of mind. Finally, if none of this will do, if there is no way to improve the dazzled owl, and if no better eyes are yet to be unlidded, then perhaps we can learn to look by indirection, as viewers of a solar eclipse look not directly at the sun but at its reflection in a pail of water.

  My suggestion, in any event, is that it helps to read Thoreau under the assumption that his interest in ignorance draws him toward experiments such as these. He regularly gets himself into positions where he might see by indirection (lit mist and the moon both offer sunlight dilute enough for human eyes). He has a genius for perspective, for getting or imagining himself into situations where common things can be seen from uncommon angles.

  In the first chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, for example, he comes upon a dam across the Concord River and immediately assumes the fish’s-eye view, considering how the thing must appear to the salmon, shad, and alewives that formerly migrated up that stream. (“Poor shad! where is thy redress? Still wandering the sea in thy scaly armor to inquire humbly at the mouths of rivers if man has perchance left them free for thee to enter.”) Or, to give a second instance, what interested him in retrospect about his night in the Concord jail was the novel view it offered of his home ground. (“It was like traveling into a far country … , to lie there for one night. It seemed to me that I never had heard the town clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village.”)

  This urge to get outside the ordinary marks a large portion of Thoreau’s pursuits. We see it in his endless reading of travel books, his interest in Native Americans, his temporal and spatial fantasies (imagining Concord by way of Rome, for example, or from some distant star), and above all in his going to nature, as this collection testifies from the first essay, where nature is salutary because it lies beyond “religion, literature, and philosophy,” to the last, where we cannot know wild apples until we have eaten them in the fields and in the wind.2

  If such experiments with altered perspective do not help us see what lies beyond our ignorance, then perhaps we must attend to the organs of perception themselves, purifying them or waking them up. Thoreau’s walking by moonlight was, in addition to all the rest, an experiment in the renewal of sensation: “In the night the eyes are partly closed or retire into the head. Other senses take the lead … . The senses both of hearing and smelling are more alert.” Despite his fabled bachelorhood, Thoreau was a great sensualist (note how, in “Ktaadn,” he picks up the scent of a cornfield a third of a mile away), but his was a sensuality with a future tense, one that leaned on the promise of perception rather than its limitations. The five senses “are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become,” h
e once wrote. They are “divine germs” that we must “educate and develop.”

  And should the education fail, should we be unable to purify the senses we have, then all that’s left is to become learned in our ignorance, front the world with it, and wait. Wait under the assumption that there are things to be known if we have cleared a space for knowing and that there are faculties of mind beyond understanding and imagination, ones that exist potentially, though we do not have them in fact.

  One of Thoreau’s journal entries will help me explain what I mean. On October 26, 1851, Thoreau wrote out a long and complicated dream that ends with him walking in a meadow and meeting his friend Bronson Alcott. They fall to speaking lines of poetry to each other:

  I quoted one which in my waking hours I have no knowledge of, but in my dream it was familiar enough. I only know that those which I quoted expressed regret, and were like the following, though they were not these, viz.:

  “The short parenthesis of life was sweet,”

  “The remembrance of youth is a sigh,” etc.

  It had the word “memory” in it!! And then again the instant that I awoke, methought I was a musical instrument from which I heard a strain die out—a bugle, or a clarionet, or a flute. My body was the organ and channel of melody, as a flute is of the music that is breathed through it … . I awoke, therefore, to an infinite regret—to find myself, not the thoroughfare of glorious and world-stirring inspirations, but a scuttle full of dirt.