Above Time: Emerson's and Thoreau's Temporal Revolutions

Above Time: Emerson’s and Thoreau’s Temporal Revolutions

JAMES R. GUTHRIE

University of Missouri Press

ABOVE T I M E

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ABOVE T I M E Emerson’s and Thoreau’s Temporal Revolutions

JAMES R. GUTHRIE

University of Missouri Press COLUMBIA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2001 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 05 04 03 02 01 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Guthrie, James R. (James Robert) Above time : Emerson’s and Thoreau’s temporal revolutions / James R. Guthrie. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8262-1373-1 (alk. paper) 1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882—Views on time. 2. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862—Views on time. 3. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Time in literature. I. Title. PS1642.T5 G88 2002 810.9'384—dc21 2001040986 ⬁ ™ This paper meets the requirements of the 䡬 American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Text design: Elizabeth K. Young Jacket design: Susan Ferber Typesetter: Bookcomp, Inc. Printer and binder: Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Typefaces: Rotis

Acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) © 1957 by The University of Chicago.

For Tyler and Lincoln

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CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 1.

A History of Time: Emerson and Lyell, Agassiz, and Darwin 6

2.

“My Carnac” and Memnon’s Head: Temporal Reform and Timely Memorials in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers 46

3.

Circles and Lines: Emerson’s Parade of Days 92

4.

The Walking Stick, the Surveyor’s Staff, and the Corn in the Night: Thoreau’s Alternative Temporal Indices 131

5.

Answering the Sphinx: The Evolution of the Emersonian Metamorphosis 173

6.

Inches’ Wood: Thoreau’s Re-membered Cultural Landscape 201

7.

Extemporaneous Man, Representative Man 235

Works Cited 253 Index 259

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the Faculty Development Committee at Wright State University for making it possible for me to write this book during a sabbatical year. I would also like to thank Gustaaf Van Cromphout for his sympathetic and informed reading of the manuscript, as well as for his encouragement. Thanks also go to Robert Hudspeth for his insightful and helpful commentary. Finally, many thanks as usual to my wife, Rebecca Cochran, for her support, patience, and fortitude.

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ABBREVIATIONS CE The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Centenary edition, 12 vols. Ed. Edward W. Emerson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904. CW The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Robert E. Spiller, et al. 5 vols. to date. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1971–. J The Journals of Henry David Thoreau. 5 vols. Ed. John C. Broderick. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981–1997. JMN The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 16 vols. Ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth, et al. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982. J TA The Journals of Henry David Thoreau. 14 vols. Ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. Reprint, 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1962. W Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. WK A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Ed. Carl F. Hovde et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. WR The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Concord edition, 5 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906.

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ABOVE T I M E

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INTRODUCTION We ordinarily understand the term transcendentalism to mean a favoring of idealism over materialism, or an emphasizing of ideas rather than things. Yet for the American transcendentalists, at least, the term also denoted a transcendence of temporality. Consequently, their larger philosophic and literary project incorporated, especially in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, a probing critique of the nature, significance, and structure of time. During the decades in which the transcendentalists were active, the times themselves were ripe for raising such issues. The still-nascent republic’s pervasive spirit of reform was proving receptive to all sorts of new ideas—even, or perhaps especially, those touching upon fundamental assumptions about how life was to be lived. Within their lengthy agenda for personal and societal improvement, then, Thoreau and Emerson included temporal reform, a term we might interpret as comprehending such allied concepts as change, memory, and history. The transcendentalists’ reconsideration of temporality received added impetus from contemporary scientific discoveries that were inevitably beginning to contradict traditional notions of chronology long promulgated by Christian orthodoxy. In a sense, the responsibility for determining the origin, duration, and meaning of time was gradually shifting away from the church to the sciences. This trend culminated in the 1859 publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, in which time was effectively transformed from a rationalization for man’s being and development to a vast, directionless, and impersonal mechanism within which the twin cogs of accident and competition meshed to produce man, his predecessors, and potentially even his successors. A new uncertainty about the earth’s true age and doubts about whether time reflected any sort of telos tended to refocus the transcendentalists’ attention upon the immediate moment. Rather than concerning themselves overmuch with a neat, linear sequence of past, present, and future, Emerson and Thoreau began reenvisioning time as an endless series of present instants, or what Carlyle, in Sartor

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Resartus, called “the everlasting now.” Emerson took up the topic of a perpetual present in “Self-Reliance,” joining his overall theme that the strength of the individual originates in self-trust to the desirability of learning to live in a continuously elapsing present, such as Nature knew. The following passage in “Self-Reliance” concludes with the phrase from which this study’s title is drawn: These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. (CW, 2:38–39)

Emerson’s phrase “above time” falls at the end of a trajectory of carefully chosen temporal tropes. In referring to the rosebushes, he begins with the relative pronoun “These,” generating a rhetorical illusion of real time in which he, in the act of writing, simulates the immediacy of the roses’ presence beneath his window. The rosebushes’ vertical growth is implicitly contrasted with the posture of man, who too often turns backward to lament the past or “stands on tiptoe” to foresee his future. Unlike man, the rose does not exist in time—at least not as we conventionally comprehend it, that is, as the sum of past and future. By living always in the present, the rose exists anterior to time, or “above” it, so that the rose’s actual, vertical growth becomes integral to its upward transpiercing of time itself. Any one stage of the rose’s development is not a means to an end; rather, growth merely represents a series of changes, with each stage expressing the rose’s entirety. Nature, Emerson says, does not concern herself with time, but only with the rose, which, by satisfying its own nature, also satisfies Nature. Thus any man who could cultivate the quality of self-trust might also be able to perceive not only his own cognitive growth, but also his authentic role in nature. On one level, at least, Emerson’s predication of a kinship joining man to rose merely exemplifies the transcendentalists’ impulse

Introduction

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to discern “correspondences” in nature. These correspondences they formalized as symbols or “hieroglyphics” that could be decoded to discover the animating presence of eternal laws. Yet the transcendentalists hoped to go beyond merely understanding nature to achieving a kind of passionate identity with it, and they believed that such a union could be achieved only by overcoming both materiality and time. In their essays and poems, Emerson and Thoreau adopt a series of philosophic, psychological, and rhetorical strategies (such as those we see Emerson employing in the passage above) designed to jolt their readers out of conventional perceptions of time. Emerson represented his task as being to “invite men drenched in time to recover themselves and come out of time, and taste their native immortal air” (JMN, 7:272). Yet Emerson’s and Thoreau’s own ideas about time continued to evolve over the course of their literary careers, and an examination of their major works reveals that they too occasionally puzzled over the significance of time, particularly as it was being redefined by contemporary science. They were as deeply impressed as anyone else by the discoveries being made by naturalists such as Sir Charles Lyell and Louis Agassiz. Lyell’s new uniformitarian geology indicated that the earth was much older than anyone had imagined, and Agassiz demonstrated that ancient global catastrophes such as the expansion of polar ice had marked the earth indelibly. In the biological sciences, Goethe and Lamarck had already written extensively about organisms’ responses to time’s presence through the linked processes of metamorphosis and heredity. The net result of all these scientific inquiries was to render time considered as a whole increasingly abstract and meaningless, so that the individual’s experience of temporality was reaffirmed and validated. The transcendentalists’ emphasis upon the present moment also necessarily called for a reevaluation of the past, both as it was constructed culturally (as history) and individually (as memory). Thoreau, who was an amateur local historian as well as an amateur local natural historian, did not deny the importance of the past; nevertheless, he questioned its trustworthiness as harbinger of the present or the future. In a journal entry for June 7, 1851, he wrote: We believe that the possibility of the future far exceeds the accomplishment of the past. We review the past with the commonsense—

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Above Time but we anticipate the future with transcendental senses. In our sanest moments we find ourselves naturally expecting far greater changes than any which we have experienced within the period of distinct memory—only to be paralleled by experiences which are forgotten— Perchance there are revolutions which create an interval impassable to the memory. With reference to the near past we all occupy the region of common sense, but in the prospect of the future we are, by instinct, transcendentalists. We affirm that all things are possible but only these things have been to our knowledge. I do not even infer the future from what I know of the past. I am hardly better acquainted with the past than with the future. What is new to the individual may be familiar to the experience of his race. It must be rare indeed that the experience of the individual transcends that of his race. It will be perceived that there are two kinds of change—that of the race & that of the individual within the limits of the former. (J, 3:246–47)

Here Thoreau affirms the validity of time experienced subjectively, saying that even by most objective standards, the past has not proven a dependable guide to the future. To a greater extent than Emerson, Thoreau employed his senses, his knowledge, and his art to transfer the immensity of conventionally constructed linear time to the intensely experienced present moment, an activity he figured in his journal and in Walden as enlarging the “nick” of time. Moreover, he reconceived memory itself as a network of personal experiences, factual discoveries, and relationships to nature, all of which found an answering “correspondence” in the appearance of the landscape itself, so that rather than having memories, we could be thought of as inhabiting them. In the sense that Thoreau’s vision of organic time received confirmation from the material world through which he moved, his temporal revolution may be construed as having been somewhat more successful than Emerson’s, which represented an attempt at some level to salvage Christian teleology, even after Christianity’s outward forms, symbols, and ceremonies had been discarded, as having become outmoded. Nevertheless, Emerson’s spiritual intensity gives his endorsement of the present moment a rhetorical power and pathos that his more scientific disciple’s somewhat more detached observations achieve only rarely and partially. In hopes of generating a dialogue between the two great transcendentalists, I have devoted alternating chapters to each. I have also or-

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ganized this book chronologically (as befits, it seems to me, an inquiry into time), proceeding from Emerson’s and Thoreau’s earlier works to their more mature productions. In the first chapter I have tried to lay out the historical and cultural groundwork upon which the rest of this study implicitly or explicitly depends, especially contemporary developments within the sciences. Chapter 2 examines Thoreau’s displayed animosity toward time in his first extended literary effort, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Chapter 3 addresses Emerson’s recurring figure of the processing day, an image that I suggest may have been rooted in his reading and in personal experience. Chapter 4 focuses upon three interconnected temporal images in Thoreau’s major canonical works Walden and “Walking,” namely, the walking stick, the surveyor’s staff, and “the corn that grows in the night.” Chapter 5 examines an important Emersonian concept integrally related to his predications of time’s illusoriness: the metamorphosis, or change experienced beyond or outside of time. Chapter 6 treats the last phase of Thoreau’s life, when his outlook became increasingly quantitative and scientific while nevertheless remaining continuous, I argue, with his previous, more conventionally “literary” interests. Chapter 7 consists of a shorter and more subjective essay in which I examine how Emerson and Thoreau may have interpreted (or misinterpreted) each other as “extemporaneous men,” that is, as exemplars of temporal reform.

1 A HISTORY OF TIME Emerson and Lyell, Agassiz, and Darwin Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know. —Plotinus, epigraph to Nature, 1836 edition A subtle chain of countless rings The next unto the farthest brings; The eye reads omens where it goes, And speaks all languages the rose; And, striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form. —epigraph to Nature, 1849 edition When Emerson asserted, during a stretch of exceptionally fine weather in the fall of 1833, that there had to be some explanation for “this attractiveness which the face of nature has for us . . . renewed this 2nd day of November in the 6000th year of the world” (JMN, 4:95), he was being facetious. Few educated people still subscribed to the traditional biblical chronology first calculated by St. Jerome in the fifth century and later refined, to a famously precise degree, in the seventeenth century by Archbishop James Ussher.1 By the end of the eighteenth century, the idea that the earth had existed for only 1. Working with biblical dates provided originally by Eusebius, Jerome assumed that roughly two thousand years had elapsed between Adam’s birth and Abraham’s, to which he added all the years accounted for in the Old Testament. In 1658 Archbishop Ussher adopted Jerome’s system and proposed, in The Annals of the world deduced from the Origins of Time and continued to the beginning of the Emperor Vespasian’s Reign, and the total Destruction and Abolition of the Temple and Commonwealth of the Jews (or Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti), that the earth had been created precisely 4003 years, seventy days, and six hours before the birth of Christ. For a succinct summary of how the Mosaic chronology was calculated, see Glyn Daniel, A Short History of Archaeology.

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six millennia had been roundly refuted by pioneering paleontologists and geologists such as Cuvier in France and Hutton in Britain. Their discoveries were beginning to open up entire new vistas and territories of time, ultimately blazing a path that would lead to Darwin’s and Wallace’s subsequent discoveries about species change, close to the middle of the nineteenth century. This is not to say, however, that the dust raised over the issue of the earth’s antiquity had yet settled by the time Emerson penned his journal entry. In that very year the third and final volume of Sir Charles Lyell’s magisterial Principles of Geology was being published in London, and other prominent naturalists, notably the great Swiss zoologist Louis Agassiz, were still stoutly resisting Lyell’s new uniformitarian geology, which held that geologic changes worked continuously at uniform rates over vast epochs. Yet all observers were agreed that seemingly within the span of a single generation no one knew anymore how old the earth was, and this uncertainty provoked larger questions among scientists and laymen alike about the nature of time itself. At the heart of the entire controversy lay a new view of time that was becoming progressively more secular and ahistorical. The immense quantity of time geologists were now predicating to have elapsed upon earth before the appearance of Homo sapiens effected an estrangement of man from time analogous to the way astronomers had already separated man from space. After Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, and especially after Le Verrier determined the position of Neptune in 1846, it became plain that the known volume of space was going to expand, perhaps infinitely. Similarly, the calculable age of the earth was rapidly receding backwards into the mists of time and showed no signs of stopping. Scientists, philosophers, and theologians were being driven to reassess humankind’s centrality in the grand scheme of creation, and in their debates they began focusing not upon the abstract theories and elegant equations of astronomy, but upon the comparatively young science of geology. Accordingly, this chapter will trace some of the major geologic theories and controversies that surfaced while Emerson was rising to prominence as an essayist, poet, and thinker. Emerson’s own scientific background was impressive, for a layman. He kept abreast of all the significant new developments among the sciences, and he was personally acquainted with some of the leading scientific authorities of the day, including Agassiz and Lyell. In his

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essays, Emerson wrestled particularly with the problem of reconciling time, as it was beginning to be redefined by the geologists and other naturalists, with history. Up until the early nineteenth century, time, history, man, and the planet had all been considered roughly contemporary with each other. The earth itself, according to Genesis, had been created only six days before Adam, so that heretofore, humankind’s existence had provided not only an index to virtually all time, but, because God had fabricated man and woman after he had already completed the rest of Creation, a telos for time, as well. Man was therefore instrumental not only to time’s origin, but also to its ends. Thus the new problem of determining the extent of time became inextricably entwined with the problem of determining time’s true “shape”—its orientation, rhythms, purpose. Western cultures have tended to view time as being either linear or cyclical, a symbolic dichotomy whose history Stephen Jay Gould traces in his book Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. Because Emerson’s treatment of temporality in his essays may be understood as a by-product of the concurrent cultural dispute about time, this chapter will draw frequently upon Gould’s scientific and historical rationales. Chiefly, however, I will be examining the extent to which Emerson’s knowledge of geology informs (or fails to inform) two texts that may be considered representative of the early and intermediate phases of his career, Nature and “Fate.” Emerson displayed a lively interest in the sciences as a young man. He botanized energetically and romantically, emulating his idol Goethe in criticizing scientists for concentrating too exclusively upon classification rather than upon seeking to establish bonds of sympathy between specimen and observer. In his late twenties Emerson also began reading avidly in astronomy, particularly John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, in which the British astronomer extols the virtues not only of his own field, but of all the rest of the natural sciences as well. Emerson subsequently admitted Copernicus and Galileo to his pantheon of intellectual heroes, and at least one biographer has tied his resignation of his Unitarian pulpit directly to a growing awareness of the theological significance of the Copernican revolution.2 At about the time he wrote Nature, Emerson was gravitating toward genetics and geology, with 2. Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 124.

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even more consequences for his theology and teleology. The cumulative effect upon Emerson of his scientific reading was nothing less than life-altering, as was the case for many of his contemporaries. In his retrospective essay “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” in which he traces the origins of the American transcendental movement, Emerson describes science’s impact upon his entire generation; nevertheless, the language in which he couches this observation remains peculiarly self-referential: . . . I think the paramount source of the religious revolution was Modern Science; beginning with Copernicus, who destroyed the pagan fictions of the Church, by showing mankind that the earth on which we live was not the centre of the Universe, around which the sun and stars revolved every day . . . but a little scrap of a planet, rushing round the sun in our system, which in turn was too minute to be seen at the distance of many stars which we behold. Astronomy taught us our insignificance in Nature; showed that our sacred as our profane history had been written in gross ignorance of the laws, which were far grander than we knew; and compelled a certain extension and uplifting of our views of the Deity and his Providence. This correction of our superstitions was confirmed by the new science of Geology, and the whole train of discoveries in every department. But we presently saw also that the religious nature in man was not affected by these errors in his understanding. The religious sentiment made nothing of bulk or size, or far or near; triumphed over time as well as space; and every lesson of humility, or justice, or charity, which the old ignorant saints had taught him, was still forever true. (CE, 10:335–36)

Emerson’s deployment of the collective pronouns “we” and “us” represents an only partially successful attempt to generalize his own determination to reconcile science and religion. With the possible exception of Thoreau, no other American transcendentalist’s philosophic method was so syncretic as Emerson’s. In addition, the particular philosophical-cum-rhetorical tool Emerson wields to effect such a synthesis was one for which he had a special fondness— Compensation. Thus his acknowledgment that astronomy had “taught us our insignificance in Nature” is mitigated by a concluding observation that none of the discoveries made by physical scientists finally invalidated man’s importance as a religious and moral creature, for his spiritual identity transcended material questions of “bulk or size . . . far or near,” time or space. While the old saints may have been “igno-

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rant” of the truths brought to light by contemporary science, Emerson says, they were not wrong. Still, the conscious historicity of Emerson’s adjective “pagan” in the first sentence generates a deep and contradictory irony that serves to rivet our attention on the harm that may result when ecclesiastic authority clings to an outmoded epistemology. Although the Church, which had arisen in “pagan” Rome, instituted a new system of belief that surpassed the old polytheism, it nevertheless continued to uphold the classical Aristotelian, or Ptolemaic, earthcentered cosmology. Emerson transforms the Church’s anachronistic adherence to a discredited and disproved cosmic order into a kind of anti-faith as distantly removed from “real” religion as pagan superstitions were from conventional Christianity. In a final irony, Emerson puts reactionary religion and transcendentalism on equal footing, implicitly equating the Church’s “error” in adopting the wrong cosmology to the transcendentalists’ in believing, at least initially, that man’s innate worth might somehow be compromised by his discoveries about the physical world. In effect, the transcendentalists had come to understand that Christianity’s “sacred history” had been written in ignorance of “laws,” a term which, to Emerson at least, participated equally and simultaneously in the domains of empiricism and ethics. His deliberate subversion of law’s conventional denotation, like his playful skewing of pagan, is symptomatic of the kind of deliberate linguistic provocations with which the transcendentalists in general liked to sow their critiques of mass culture. Emerson, whose faith could be characterized as being aggressively, even combatively, liberal, was apt to employ such linguistic subterfuges as a means of blurring the boundaries dividing religions, historical eras, and bodies of knowledge from each other. Accordingly, the term law, when it appears in Emerson’s essays and poems, is usually multivalenced and polysemous, signifying, sometimes concurrently, civic law, moral duty, and scientific principles. This confusion of frames of reference for the term works to suggest that all of them are linked by correspondences, thereby reifying, at least in the medium of language, Emerson’s characteristic position that because goodness is as tangible and ubiquitous a force in the universe as gravity, no difference is finally found to exist between ethics and physics. Yet a third rhetorical function of the word law in Emerson’s writings is more subtle, but it is nevertheless equally integral to his pur-

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poses. Law also implies the presence of judicial authority, transferred in Emerson’s writings from the civil court to the supernal, where it becomes the directing intelligence that shapes our ends. Although such a divinely ordained “legal” code may seem, at first glance, functionally indistinguishable from the law of Moses, valid upon earth as it is in heaven, the crucial difference is that for Emerson, as for most of the transcendentalists, God’s influence upon mortal lives is oblique, indirect, perhaps more accidental than providential. The distinction is the same as that which separates transcendentalist “correspondences” from Puritan typologies—although, as Perry Miller was among the first to observe, the former is lineally descended from the latter.3 This third construction of the term law in Emerson’s writings is especially puissant: law’s simultaneous participation in the secular domains of science and morality, and in the eternal realm of the divine will, works to suggest that the presence of a connection between the previous two is endorsed by the third. Thus Emerson lets his connotations of law spiral outward and upward, so that it finally achieves a kind of linguistic “correspondence” in its own right. But transcendentalist correspondences were also rooted in neoplatonic idealism, which held that earthly phenomena were imperfect imitations or copies of eternal verities. It was this “indirectness” of transcendentalists’ perceived correspondences that enabled them to sever the cord of causality in which they believed the church, whether Protestant or Catholic, had become fatally entangled. The Roman Church persecuted and prosecuted Galileo because it could not tolerate the implications of his empirical observations, yet Locke’s or Hume’s sensationalism, which limits itself only to what could be observed, was equally at fault. For Emerson and many of his fellow transcendentalists, these “errors in [man’s] understanding” could be dispelled through the exercise of romantic Reason, which, unlike the Understanding, did not rely solely upon the empirical to explain the facts of human experience. 3. See Perry Miller’s famous essay “From Edwards to Emerson.” It should be noted, however, that Miller was subsequently not entirely sanguine about being credited with this observation, and in his introduction to the essay in Errand into the Wilderness, he says that it has “been unhappily misconstrued by many readers,” and that for a time, he “regretted ever having published this speculation” (184). In an attempt to clarify and consolidate his thesis, he wrote, “Another way of saying this might, it is evident, be to define Emerson as an Edwards in whom the concept of original sin has evaporated. This would satisfy the textbooks . . .” (185).

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In “Historic Notes of Life and Letters,” Emerson acknowledges the influence upon him and his contemporaries of the “new science,” geology, and during the 1830s geology was indeed still young. Perhaps because it dealt with the very ground beneath our feet, it was then widely regarded as being a “dirtier” science, both figuratively and literally, than its more abstract and “cleaner” sister science, astronomy. At the end of the eighteenth century, geology was generally viewed, as scientific historian James Secord notes in his introduction to a modern edition of Lyell’s Principles, as being an “upstart science,” associated in the public mind with “infidelity and revolutionary atheism.” Not coincidentally, many of the era’s leading geologists and paleontologists, such as Cuvier, were French. But in Britain as well, the field tended to attract an especially heterogeneous group of enthusiasts: Geology was lively, popular, and controversial, a product of the more general transformation of the study of nature in the decades around 1800. Its practices had been freshly confected from cosmological theorizing, mineral surveying, natural history collecting, biblical exegesis and continental mining traditions. Like other natural history disciplines in the first three decades of the century, geology engaged a network of practitioners ranging from physicians and aristocrats to engineers and farmers. A focus on strata, as exemplified in the publications of the Geological Society of London, founded in 1807, gave these diverse constituencies a practical programme of research and a common goal.4

At base, however, geology’s perceived threat to the established order derived not so much from its attraction of adherents from diverse or slightly disreputable backgrounds as from its insistence upon divorcing time from religion, which had been, theretofore, the locus of authority for measuring, evaluating, and predicting time. According to the Bible, time was not only man’s contemporary, but it was also provisional, on both an individual basis and for all mankind. Associated with mutability, age, and death, time was part and parcel of our fallen condition; only the virtuous could hope to achieve timelessness, the Day of Judgment promising to put an end to time, for all time. Although some other cultures, particularly in Asia, envision time as a cyclical rebirth, Western civilizations have tended to favor a linear, 4. James Secord, introduction to Principles of Geology, xxiv, xi.

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unidirectional chronologic model. The basis for this model was the Jewish and subsequently Christian belief that all time was sequential and that it led to a definite end, interpreted either eschatologically or apocalyptically. As Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield observe in their book The Discovery of Time, [Israel’s] standing as a nation depended on the promises made by God to Abraham at a particular moment in [the Jews’] past history, and their hopes for the future were bound up with the fulfilment of this covenant. The resulting conviction, that the course of historical events had a profound significance, was the most important single legacy passed on by Judaism to Christianity. It has helped to shape the whole European tradition, contributing to that strain of moral earnestness and concern which is characteristic of so much European thought, even those systems which are nominally anti-religious, like MarxismLeninism. So, from the very beginning, Christianity was a ‘historical’ religion, seeing the world as a stage for divine action, and the life of Christ as God’s supreme intervention in its affairs.5

Or, to use J. T. Fraser’s phrase, history stopped being “just one thing after another” in the West, and became instead “an intricately interwoven series of events that progressed from a well-defined beginning to an appointed goal.” From this idea of “salvation history,” Fraser says, “the idea of linear time was born.”6 A faith in this perceived linear orientation to time encouraged early Western naturalists to ascribe geologic phenomena to a priori causes, among them, most notably, the Flood. Features in the landscape looked the way they did because the Flood had deposited them there. Interpretations of geologic features were also constrained by an inclination to view creation as falling under the province of God, not of the earth itself. Consequently, recognizing the power of an ongoing geologic agent, such as volcanism, to determine much of the earth’s physical aspect could be construed as suggesting that creation was not yet finished, despite biblical affirmations to the contrary. Yet a belief that the earth’s creation was essentially complete did not have to be validated by scripture alone. In 1795, when geologist James Hutton proposed, in his book Theory of the Earth, that the earth “repaired” itself via continuously operating geologic processes, an Enlightenment-era faith in the 5. Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time, 56. 6. J. T. Fraser, Time: the Familiar Stranger, 21.

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perfectness of creation caused many readers to greet his theories with skepticism or outright derision.7 Moreover, most eighteenth-century commentators upon the earth’s physical aspect, be they Methodist, Deist, or rationalist, tended to concentrate upon the issue of utility, or what Emerson calls in Nature, “commodity.” The earth told no stories; rather, it existed, providentially, for mankind’s sustenance and profit. In Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, Stephen Jay Gould reflects upon the power of geologic models and metaphors to dominate cultural constructions of time. He dichotomizes traditional Western views of human and natural history into the two paradigms that provide the title for his book. The metaphor of “time’s arrow” represents time as being linear and progressive, although punctuated by unique events— a construct roughly similar to “salvation history”—and “time’s cycle,” which represents time as being periodic, recursive, and virtually devoid of historically determinative moments. Gould, probably our own era’s most eminent evolutionary theorist, ultimately rejects this dichotomy and asserts that time should properly be viewed as exhibiting both linear and cyclical characteristics. For this reason he devotes the majority of his book to discussing and refuting the insistently linear model of time implicit in the dominant geologic model established by Lyell in his Principles of Geology. Nevertheless, Gould prefaces his comments upon Lyell with a discussion of temporal paradigms appearing in the works of two geologists antecedent to Lyell, James Hutton and Thomas Burnet. In so doing, Gould retraces the development of Western thinking about time over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Burnet, an Anglican clergyman and chaplain to King William III, outlined the earth’s geologic history in his Telluris theoria sacra (Sacred theory of the earth), a book that earned the praise of Newton, among others.8 For Burnet, of course, geologic time was still delimited by Genesis and Revelation; nevertheless, Toulmin and Goodfield call Burnet’s book “the first thorough attempt to retell the Biblical story of the world in terms of the new discoveries of seventeenth-century physics.”9 Correspondingly, Burnet represented time as a grand cycle 7. See Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, 65. 8. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 27. 9. Toulmin, Goodfield, Discovery of Time, 92.

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within which the planet passes, after Creation and before the Fall, through a period of perfection; then a transitional period of chaos, during the Flood; then an interim of time between catastrophes during which the world appears as we know it; a consuming fire; another period of perfection once sin has been burned clean from the planet; and a return to the cauldron of Creation, as the earth finally becomes a star.10 Through his discussion of Burnet, Gould shows that a cyclical view of time remained immanent in Western thinking even while the genealogically determined eschatological and linear format of both the Old and New Testaments was in the ascendancy. Yet despite the cyclicity of Burnet’s cosmology, Gould also discerns in it “time’s arrow,” for Burnet represents time as being divisible into discrete epochs, even as, seen from a larger perspective, time returns to its point of origin. Furthermore, Burnet’s cyclical metaphor is differentiated by a pleasing symmetry, for the earth passes through corresponding eras of destruction (flood and fire) and perfection (Eden and Salvation). But Gould quotes Burnet as saying of the world itself that it comprises “a broken and confused heap of bodies” (i.e., geologic formations) and that it is “a dirty little planet” incapable of renovating itself. In this regard, Burnet’s overarching geologic metaphor mirrors the condition of man’s soul, which can only degenerate over time and is incapable of renewing itself.11 But toward the end of the eighteenth century, James Hutton demonstrated that the earth was indeed capable of “repairing” itself. In his native Scotland Hutton found layers of schist, a sedimentary rock, that had been invaded by intrusions of igneous granite, leading him to the unavoidable conclusion that the granite had been uplifted at a date posterior to the formation of the schist.12 Hutton’s discovery virtually guaranteed that the earth’s appearance had been shaped by ongoing geologic forces, and not by an original, unrepeated catas10. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 32–38. 11. Perhaps because he is intent upon developing his underlying dyad of time’s arrow and time’s cycle, Gould does not interpret Burnet’s depiction of a broken landscape as a metaphor for human sinfulness. Gould may have regarded the connection between the two as being too intuitively obvious to merit a comment. Nevertheless, I think the theological basis for Burnet’s worldview deserves somewhat more emphasis, if only to demonstrate more forcefully religion’s domination of empirical studies during the early development of the physical sciences. 12. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 70–71.

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trophic event such as the Flood. Hutton’s discovery hastened geology’s rupture from religion in three ways. First, the old typological view that the landscape was a reflection of man’s moral nature was implicitly refuted. Second, by pointing out the availability, here and now, of evidence for geologic change, he helped shift the discipline’s emphasis away from a primeval catastrophe, which had stood in people’s minds as a precursor and complement of the apocalypse. Finally, Hutton comprehended that continuously operating physical forces, in order to accomplish their astonishing transformations, required vast periods of time, much more time than was provided for by the traditional Mosaic chronology. Thus Hutton was the first geologist to grasp the significance, if not yet the scope, of what amateur geologist and essayist John McPhee calls “deep time,”13 or the virtually incomprehensible volume of time extending back some five thousand million years (the current best estimate) to the planet’s origin.14 According to Gould, however, Hutton became so fixated upon the idea of geologic repair that he resisted attributing to this huge volume of newly discovered time any sort of progressive pattern. Hutton’s insistence that the natural history of the earth was determined by the interplay of continuously operating geologic processes rendered the concept of history itself virtually meaningless. In his most famous phrase, the line with which he concluded a treatise delivered before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Hutton proclaimed that “The result, therefore, of this physical inquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.” Consequently, Gould identifies Hutton as the foremost “theorist” of “time’s cycle,” or the view of geologic history maintaining that time cannot be productively viewed as history, that is, as a series of distinct events or moments. Gould 13. McPhee uses the phrase “deep time” in his essay “Basin and Range,” which he later incorporated into a collection of his essays addressing geological matters, Annals of the Former World. In that book, he (rather casually) introduces the phrase on p. 29. McPhee is not, of course, a trained geologist; nevertheless, his phrase has been widely adopted by professional scientists, Gould among them. 14. In Gould’s synthesis of geology’s development as a train of overarching and occasionally competing metaphors, Burnet’s and Hutton’s frameworks for time are flawed by their own purity. Because both maintain the existence of a kind of perfection, either throughout time, for Hutton, or intermittently and recursively, for Burnet, neither view admits sufficient space for accident—the single factor that began to dominate, after Darwin, the thinking of most biologists, not to mention social scientists and naturalistic novelists.

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characterizes Huttonian geology as a “world machine” that admits too little room for non-apocalyptic catastrophes (such as those for which Baron Cuvier, Hutton’s contemporary, was uncovering evidence in the fossil record) and their accompanying mass extinctions of biota.15 Although Gould himself does not broach, during his discussion of Hutton, the issue of how cultural factors may constrain the formulation of scientific paradigms, I think we may legitimately regard Hutton’s “world machine” as a conceptual artifact of the Enlightenment. Living in an age that imaged God as a master clockmaker, Hutton may have been predisposed to see natural processes as infallible mechanisms. Thus, despite the waning of religion’s influence upon science during the Enlightenment, Hutton, in conceiving of the earth’s natural history as an endlessly revolving flywheel, may have been swayed insensibly by yet another kind of chronological parochialism. Historically and intellectually, Charles Lyell was James Hutton’s lineal descendant. Author of the famous Principles of Geology (serially published as three volumes in 1830, 1832, and 1833), he is widely regarded as the foundational figure of modern geology. Lyell is also often credited with having raised geology, once dismissed, as we have seen, as a haven for antimonarchists and atheists, to the level of a respectable scientific discipline.16 In his Principles Lyell not only finished the work begun by Hutton and others of rebutting the diluvian theory, but he also hammered home to readers how ordinary geologic forces, operating over enormous expanses of time, could utterly transform the earth’s surface. Lyell dismissed the notion that large-scale changes to the landscape, such as the rise and fall of mountain ranges, could be the result of catastrophes, maintaining instead that more quotidian forces such as erosion, volcanism, and continental uplift were entirely sufficient—given enough time. Lyell also emphasized that agents of geologic change accomplished their massive transformations by working over the course of eons. For this reason he has been recognized ever since as the original promulgator of uniformitarianism, a term coined not by Lyell himself, but rather by his contemporary William Whewell, who, as Secord says, “dubb(ed) Lyell a ‘uniformitarian’ in opposition to his own ‘catastrophism.’” 15. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 304, 80. 16. See, for example, Secord, introduction, xvi.

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Lyell’s impressive marshaling of empirical evidence to support his position, coupled with his characterization of uniformitarian geologic processes as a series of discrete, though small, events, provides the basis for Gould’s portrayal of him as the foremost historian of “time’s cycle.”17 Catastrophists such as Cuvier, on the other hand, once they had disengaged the concept of catastrophe from its archaic association with the Flood, began campaigning for a more linear model of time, one that would incorporate the possibility that great natural anomalies might precipitate broad, comparatively abrupt changes not only in the physical landscape, but also in the speciation of plants and animals.18 Plainly, Western thinking about the shape of time had reached a critical juncture in the early 1830s, three decades before the publication of The Origin of Species. Gould says of early-nineteenthcentury geology: Lyell and the catastrophists were locked in a fascinating debate of substance about the way of our world, not a wrangle about methodological aspects of uniformity. Their struggle pitted a directional view of history as a vector leading toward cooler climates and more complex life, and fueled by occasional catastrophes, against Lyell’s vision of a world in constant motion, but always the same in substance and state, changing bit by bit in a stately dance toward nowhere. This real debate, so lost at our peril in the success of Lyell’s rhetoric, was the grandest battle ever fought between the visions of time’s arrow and time’s cycle.19

Gould’s ever-so-slightly snide reference to Lyell’s “rhetoric” is reflective of his ambivalence both toward the Principles and toward 17. Secord, introduction, xix; Gould, Time’s Arrow, 150. 18. One of Gould’s subtexts in Time’s Arrow is scientists’ dawning awareness of the importance of accident to evolutionary biology. Gould, it should be noted, has a vested interest in the subject. One of his own more notable contributions to the field has been the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which holds that evolution proceeds not so much as a smoothly graduated series of changes, but rather by fits and starts, with occasional dramatic leaps being made—sometimes within the space of a few generations—if variation is stimulated sufficiently by alterations in a species’ habitat. Since Gould’s own theory proposes that evolution is both continuous and subdivided by random geophysical events, it conforms to his suggestion that chronologic models for the earth should incorporate “time’s cycle” as well as “time’s arrow.” See his article, written with Niles Eldridge, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism.” 19. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 132.

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Lyell himself, who was, by profession, a barrister. Despite Gould’s almost rueful admission that for him, as a paleontologist, Lyell “doth bestride my world of work like a colossus,” he deconstructs the Principles as a legal brief “for . . . time’s stately cycle as the incarnation of rationality,” rather than as a sound interpretation of extant empirical data. Specifically, Gould criticizes Lyell for broadening the scope of uniformitarian principles in geology to include organisms, so that, within Lyell’s model of time, at least, life shows no progression over the ages, no adaptability to major changes in the habitat. For Gould, then, Lyell’s overarching metaphor is tainted by another form of parochialism, namely, an ambition among members of the emergent Whig professional class in England—a group that included barristers as well as geologists—to establish the primacy of reason, thereby elevating the status of science and scientists while simultaneously consigning science’s opponents to a “limbo of antiscience.” For Gould, the Principles is to be admired more as a masterpiece of rhetoric than as good science.20 At the time when Emerson and Thoreau were actively writing, however, Lyell’s Principles represented the cutting edge of contemporary scientific thought about the “shape” of time. Yet Emerson’s Nature, the seminal document of American transcendentalism, is itself virtually uninformed by the new geology, probably because Emerson had not yet digested the significance of Lyell’s new worldview. Although the initial publication of the first volume of Principles antedated Nature by some five years, Emerson did not read Lyell’s book until his own was either in its final stages of composition, or, more likely, already appearing in bookshops. Emerson wrote the bulk of Nature 20. Ibid., 179, 143, 178. Secord qualifies Gould’s revisionist critique of Lyell in his introduction to the Principles, objecting that Gould’s (and others’) casting of Lyell as spokesperson for a steady-state, nonprogressive view of time is inappropriate: Recent historians have set up dichotomies between progression and non-progression, or between directionalism and steady-state, which are more nuanced, but serve the same purpose. They make the Principles a cosmological book, which points toward the construction of a connected narrative history of the world. However, in his public statements during the 1830s Lyell no more advocated a steady-state, cyclical or non-progressionist cosmology than he did progression itself. Indeed, the Principles claimed that any kind of global narrative would prove impossible to reconstruct, as too much of the record had been lost. Lyell, despite what Gould has argued, was the ‘historian of time’s cycle.’” (xix)

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during May and June of 1836 and published it himself almost immediately, in late summer.21 Simultaneously he embarked upon an ambitious program of reading in the natural sciences, his curiosity stirred, perhaps, by issues about which he had recently been writing. Thus although Emerson came to read energetically and perceptively such authors as Lyell, Lamarck, Merck, and Davy, their collective influence upon his own theories about nature, time, and change did not become determinative until after 1836. Furthermore, Emerson did not respond as quickly and spontaneously to this influx of new scientific data as he had after reading Herschel, four years earlier. His shift in attitude was gradual, and the transition was not altogether smooth. Emerson’s journal entry for October 27, 1836, shows him attempting to assimilate Lyell’s uniformitarianism into a transcendental idealism which, in Nature, had only just received its fullest elaboration to date: The present age is distinguished by the study of organic remains. The ancients studied not, but formed them. It is a type of our reflective character. Well, solid learning is got from the fossils, and solid wisdom shall be got from the reflexion. Geology teaches in a very impressive manner the value of facts and the laws of our learning from nature. Plain, staring facts that have always been under everybody’s foot, the slab of the pavement, the stone of the wall, the side of a hill, the gravel of a brook,—in these crypts has Nature deposited her secret, and notched every day of her thousand thousand millenniums. A wood sawyer may read it. The facts are capable of but one interpretation, as the rings on the tree or on the cow’s horn record every year of their age. No leaps, no magic,—eternal tranquil procession of old, familiar laws, the wildest convulsions never overstepping the calculable powers of the agents, the earthquake and geyser as perfect results of known laws as the rosebud and the hatching of a robin’s egg. And a perpetual solicitation of man’s faculties to read the riddle is made by the prominence and beauty of the mountains and the streams under the sun and moon, meeting him everywhere in his daily walk. Meantime by these archaic calendars of the sun and the internal fire, of the wash of rivers and oceans for durations inconceivable; by Chimborazo and Mont Blanc and Himmaleh, these monuments of nature and pyramids of the elements, by the side of this silent procession of brute elements, is the poem of man’s life. Most of the process she conceals in her secret shop. Her architecture is commenced and perfected in darkness and under sea. Under the ooze 21. See Richardson, Mind on Fire, 225.

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of the Atlantic she builds her basalts and pours melted granite, like warm wax, into fissures of clay and lime, and when the deposits of a thousand rivers have strewn the bed of the ocean with every year a new floor of spoils, she blows her furnaces with a gas and lifts the bed of the ocean above the water, and man enters from a boat and makes a fire on the new world, worships God thereon, plants a field and builds a school.22

Emerson’s entry begins with an ironic remark and a few deft neoplatonic jokes. The “ancients,” he observes, have been converted into the same fossils about whose existence they had remained ignorant during their own lives; similarly, their petrified remains are now also converted into the “solid” knowledge accumulated by contemporary geologists and paleontologists. Emerson next comments upon the explicitness of the geologic and fossil records, upon their (until only recently) undreamed-of antiquity, and, most notably, upon geologists’ use of facts and logic to compel readers to arrive at the same conclusions. No supernatural agencies of any sort, “No leaps, no magic,” were required to make the tremendous changes to the landscape all could see (as Lyell had repeatedly emphasized) for themselves—only the slow, constant operation of uniformitarian forces such as erosion and volcanism. Emerson also acknowledges the earth’s ability to repair and renew itself, as exemplified by Huttonian unconformities created when tongues of igneous granite were seen to have invaded sedimentary formations of clay and limestone. The quoted passage’s final paragraph also adverts to the process of terraforming, or the wholesale renovation of the earth’s surface through the accretion of strata on the ocean floor. The weight of these strata may generate so much heat and pressure that the earth’s mantle finally fractures, precipitating the rise of submarine volcanoes. Fortified by all this new geological knowledge, Emerson foresees another Noah landing on the shores of a “new world” or newly generated landmass, where he can plant crops, become civilized, and worship God, even though God’s agency in dividing the earth from the waters has evidently been reduced or even removed altogether from this secular, geologic Gene22. The transcription of the journal entry I use here is the one that appears in the Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. The original passage may be found in JMN, 5:231–32. Emerson later reworked much of this material for his lecture “Humanity of Science” (Lectures, 2:31–32).

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sis. Significantly, Emerson’s new race of man, after it has worshiped, builds not a church, but a school, where subjects such as the natural sciences, we may infer, could be inculcated. This comparatively sophisticated synopsis of recent developments in geologic and paleontologic theory indicates that Emerson’s thinking had taken a new turn only one month after he wrote Nature.23 In that book Emerson raises scientific issues only rarely and cursorily, and it is somewhat ironic that his interest in the earth sciences, which he would retain for the rest of his life, did not begin to burgeon until after he had published his most definitive (and most widely regarded) statement about man’s relationship to nature. Those few comments Emerson does make upon the sciences in Nature are either broad generalizations or disparagements of the scientist’s (specifically, the geologist’s and anthropologist’s) approach to nature. Here are a few examples: Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. (CW, 1:7) All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. (8) All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life. Whole floras, all Linnæus’ and Buffon’s volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but the most trivial of these facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or, in any way associated with human nature, affects us in the most lively and agreeable manner. (19) When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly 23. In learning more about contemporary geology, Emerson also had the benefit of knowing Charles Thomas Jackson, a professional chemist and geologist as well as brother to Lidian Jackson Emerson. According to a note in the Centenary edition, written probably by Edward W. Emerson, “Mr. Emerson frequently enjoyed [Dr. Jackson’s] brilliant conversation in his laboratory in Boston and during Dr. Jackson’s visits to his sister . . . in Concord” (CE, 10:575).

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honor minuteness in details, so long as there is no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon the metaphysics of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to the mind, and build science upon ideas. (40)

Nature thus contains relatively few natural facts, and, we must assume, intentionally so, for Emerson’s primary goal in writing his transcendentalist manifesto was to articulate the relationship of nature to the self. Consequently he dwells upon such topics as perception, beauty, language, unity, philosophy, and religion. In Nature his focus remains resolutely fixed upon idealism, especially the utility of idealism. If we return to the journal entry in which Emerson recapitulates Lyell’s new geology, we may reread it, I suggest, as being symptomatic of Emerson’s initially uncomfortable response, as an idealist, to the welter of natural facts he absorbed immediately after writing Nature. That his attempts to integrate all this new information, and particularly his conception of Lyell’s newly old world, with his white-hot idealism were not entirely successful is suggested both by the ambivalent language he uses and by his choice of illustrative instances. For example, his bon mot about the “solidity” of scientific knowledge trivializes natural facts while at the same time ostensibly commending the diligence of the scientists who uncovered them. “Solidity” was a concept with which Emerson, a sometime admirer of the radically antimaterialist Bishop Berkeley, was not altogether satisfied, or even comfortable. As an idealist, Emerson was interested not so much in natural facts, but rather in the laws from which he believed those facts derived. Correspondingly, he readily adopts Lyell’s uniformitarian geologic principles as “laws,” as he had already adopted Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, as well as the laws of botany and zoology, these last being represented metonymically in his journal entry by the natural facts in which they manifest themselves, for example, the “rosebud” and the “robin’s egg.” Emerson was willing to appropriate the “obviousness” of the geologic record as further evidence of the patency of nature’s impulse to reveal messages to man, albeit through riddling correspondences. But at the time he wrote Nature, had Emerson really yet submitted his idealistic view of nature to a thorough test? Domestic and familiar as the rosebush and robin are, one won-

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ders what Emerson’s reaction would be to the undeniable essential foreignness of nature, immanent within such geologic prodigies as the earthquake and the geyser. In Nature, nature is still recognizable chiefly as a manifestation of human nature. Correspondingly, Emerson’s generalizations about nature in his book are expressed in language that oscillates between the poles of anthropomorphism and alienation. In Nature he says, “Nature is so pervaded with human life, that there is something of humanity in all, and in every particular” (38), yet in his journal entry recapitulating geologists’ discoveries, nature alternates between being a “brute” phenomenon that stands in contrast to the “poem of man’s life” and a sort of benevolent witch who carries out the hidden processes of terraforming in her “secret shop.” The ambivalence of Emerson’s figures reflects, I suggest, an underlying uncertainty about man’s centrality to nature. In his journal entry, a feminized nature continues to subordinate herself to man, engendering new lands so that he may cultivate them and prosper. This commodification of geologically generated territories is symptomatic of Emerson’s then-current characteristic approach toward nature, which consisted of putting it into service as epitome and verification of his idealistic philosophy. Moreover, Emerson’s interest in nature’s “laws” arose out of a conviction that, as a writer, he and nature employed similar symbolic methodologies. At this comparatively early stage of his career as a writer and thinker, Emerson’s approach to nature relied largely upon the elucidation of correspondences, and his determination that they existed virtually everywhere (even on a “bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky”) may be ascribed either to the pervasiveness of nature’s underlying sympathy with man or, alternatively, to Emerson’s facility for contriving them. In the “Language” chapter of Nature, Emerson wrote, “The use of the outer creation is to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation” (18). Protean nature abets the detection of correspondences by adopting form after form through a metamorphic process that, I will argue in a later chapter, Emerson recognized as being akin to the change that language, considered as a symbolic construct, undergoes as it strives to come “nearer to the fact.” Such was Emerson’s thinking about science, nature, and man when he issued his first edition of Nature. And yet by the time the next edi-

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tion came out, in 1849, his opinions about humankind’s relationship to nature had undergone a sea change. That difference manifests itself in his exchange of his original epigraph, a quotation from Plotinus, for a poem he himself had written. During the thirteen-year interim between editions Emerson gradually came to adopt the position that man’s appearance upon the earth had inaugurated the presence of consciousness in nature. Thus, while his initial epigraph emphasizes neoplatonic idealism, his second dwells instead upon the idea of developmentalism: A subtle chain of countless rings The next unto the farthest brings; The eye reads omens where it goes, And speaks all languages the rose; And, striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form.

In making this substitution, Emerson readjusts the preliminary tone of his book, and perhaps even its gist. He exchanges a stress upon idealism manifested in nature for a more personal, poetic, and, by that time, au courant reflection upon progressive morphology. His image of a “spire” calls to mind the spiraling mollusk shells illustrated in the third volume of Lyell’s Principles, and the image underlying Emerson’s lines may well be that of the snail imperceptibly accreting, as it grows, layer upon layer of shell. The blossoming rose spirals outward from its bud, too, and the “omen” it provides for the eye perceiving it serves handily as harbinger of the more famous vision suffered by an ecstatically observant “eyeball” only a few pages farther along into the text. Now, Emerson’s preliminary, framing message is that consciousness itself is a form of growth. The intellect stands at the summit of nature’s spiral staircase, giving to nature both a direction and a purpose. In this brief, yet powerful, epigraphic poem, Emerson cleverly subjects his own images to a kind of echoing “development.” He proceeds from “rings” in the first line to “spires” in the final line, which is to say from a two-dimensional circle to a three-dimensional conical helix. Thus, despite the poem’s initial emphasis of rings and cycles, its central metaphor is also suggestive of time’s arrow, a linear progression of events that does not repeat itself, for man does not revert to

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wormhood.24 Man remains, in Emerson’s schema of time, the goal of all time, the culmination of the rest of creation. Yet Emerson certainly was not alone in believing that Homo sapiens represented an incremental improvement—perhaps the last—in the ascending spiral of organic development. Most of his contemporaries would undoubtedly have agreed that man was intrinsically superior to other creatures not just intellectually, but morally and aesthetically, as well. It is important to see that Emerson’s poem is not “about” evolution, at least not in our contemporary sense of that term. He concerns himself with the product of developmentalism more than with the process of organic change itself. The presence of man upon the earth constituted a form of proof in its own right: the worm strove to become man, and man strove to achieve consciousness. Humankind’s great distinction, according to Emerson, was its impulse to free itself from concerns of clay and flesh in order to continue following the upward path to godhead via ideas—that is, through the perception of “laws” alone. Consequently Emerson’s universe remains, despite his embrace of the Copernican cosmology, resolutely man-centered and man-driven, and the great expanse of time Hutton and Lyell had demonstrated to lie behind or beneath geologic history continued to serve chiefly as prologue or preparation for humankind’s arrival upon the scene. Despite Emerson’s knack for perceiving correspondences between man and nature, man remains, for him, not a part of earth, but apart from it. Similarly, man also lives apart from time, so that he may feel the greater affinity with eternity. Close to the end of Nature, Emerson projects his own voice into that of a “certain poet,” saying, The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the universal

24. As Vivian Hopkins pointed out in her book Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson’s Aesthetic Theory, even though the pattern traced by an unwinding spiral simultaneously recurs while it ascends (123), the figure’s momentum is essentially progressive and incremental. Of the Romantic generation’s use of the spiral as a symbol, M. H. Abrams wrote, “The self-moving circle . . . rotates along a third, vertical dimension, to close where it had begun, but on a higher plane of value. It thus fuses the idea of a circular return with the idea of linear progress, to describe a distinctive figure of Romantic thought and imagination—the ascending circle, or spiral” (Natural Supernaturalism, 184).

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man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation. (42)

Thus, despite having rejected judgment and heaven, empty ceremony and cold orthodoxy, Emerson’s post-Christian humanism retains Christianity’s eschatological focus, only with unity, not salvation, as the new goal. In this sense he may again be regarded, to recur to Gould’s terms, as a proponent of time’s arrow, for in Emerson’s linear chronology, all events still tend toward a particular end, to which mankind remained indispensable. Moreover, time’s coils tightened and concentrated their energy as they wound into the future, so that man, rather than being just another link in an endless chain, became the condensed essence of an elapsed and preparatory past. But if mankind stood at the very apex of time’s arrow, all opportunities for further development had to be virtually exhausted once mankind achieved its ascendancy, and the conclusion of time, at least as we know it, could therefore still be anticipated. Because Emerson’s view of time is, as I have said, eschatological rather than cyclical, it retains a salvationist telos, despite having rejected salvation. Such a view would inevitably come into conflict with the nonprogressive, nonteleologic approach to time that informs The Origin of Species. The theory of evolution tells a story, but it has no point and no conclusion, and although its “narrative” is broken up into discrete chapters by random events that stimulate adaptation, those adaptations themselves are not progressive, and may even be repeated, if conditions warrant.25 Acknowledging the instrumentality of accident is key to comprehending natural selection, the mechanism that drives evolution. Catastrophes may be thought of as accidents writ large, so large that in their aftermath some genetic forms cannot adapt, and so become extinct. In Genesis, the story of the Flood describes a catastrophe of such magnitude that most of the earth’s species, represented metonymically as reproductive pairs, only just survive it. God’s 25. Similarly, Lee Rust Brown says, “The plot of Darwinian natural history, like the plots of classic nineteenth-century novels, follows the development of ‘characters’ over time. But unlike the novel—unlike even the serially published novel—the chronicle of Darwinian natural history is unfinishable: given the endlessness of organic development, an infinitely greater number of this chronicle’s pages will always remain to be written than have already been inscribed” (The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole, 126).

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covenant with Noah ensures that equivalent, or even greater, catastrophes will not be inflicted upon the earth; thus a linear orientation to time functioned, in lieu of the rainbow, as a divine guaranty of safety. It was this cultural belief in the unrepeatability of catastrophes that may have impelled Louis Agassiz to propose that ice had swept over the face of Europe and America only once, after which time God recreated all species. But Emerson too, especially in the years succeeding the death of his son Waldo in 1842, became increasingly interested in the problem of understanding the role catastrophe plays in our lives. In his great essay “Fate,” written in 1851, he comes to terms with some of the implications the incidence of accident has for individuals, for the human species, and, somewhat more tentatively, for his own teleology. Yet Emerson’s mature response to the presence of accidents in life, large or small, may be regarded as emerging from a larger cultural and scientific milieu. Two key figures are Agassiz and Darwin; they may be thought of as being, at least for the sake of the present discussion, dialectical opposites. In addition, we must address the importance of distinguishing between the Lamarckian and Hegelian varieties of developmentalism, a subject we already know had attracted Emerson’s attention. By the time Louis Agassiz left Europe to join the faculty at Harvard College in 1847, his reputation as a zoologist and ichthyologist was already well established, yet he continued making solid contributions to many of the other natural sciences, including geology. An inveterate collector, he rapidly began recruiting Thoreau, among others, to gather specimens of New England’s flora and fauna for him. Agassiz brought to early nineteenth-century science a new and unyielding emphasis upon the importance of physical evidence and careful fieldwork, an attitude that contributed to his emergence as, in the words of Robert D. Richardson Jr., “the most important figure in the new professionalizing of American science.” Agassiz was most widely known for his theory that the earth had undergone a catastrophic Eiszeit during which much of the northern hemisphere had been overlain by thick sheets of ice, their presence in the high Alpine valleys in his native Switzerland having been proven by the discovery of deep grooves left in the bedrock. Agassiz supplied no specific date for this geologic event, but physical evidence pointed to an ancient origin. Ironically, it was Lyell’s Principles that provided a sufficient quantity of time

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to make the theory of glaciation tenable, yet the English geologist’s adherence to uniformitarian theory prevented him, at least initially, from agreeing with Agassiz that an anomalous catastrophe such as an ice age could have wreaked such havoc upon the landscape. The two famous naturalists did agree, however, that animal and plant species had originally been created by God, and that all species appear today essentially as they had at the moment he had conceived them. Agassiz, the more religiously conservative of the two (his father was a Lutheran pastor) remained committed to an essentially Noachian version of Creation, maintaining that ice had overspread the earth on one occasion only, destroying all life, after which time all species had been recreated by God.26 Despite their comparatively orthodox religious positions, Lyell and Agassiz have often been represented in scientific historiographies as jointly preparing the way for Darwin’s emergence at midcentury by establishing the existence of both the quantity of time necessary for evolution to become practicable and the types of large-scale changes in habitat that provoke species to adapt. A warm friendship sprang up between the Sage of Concord and the Swiss savant. Agassiz began stopping regularly at Concord during his lecture tours, and when he did, he lodged with the Emersons. Emerson listened with interest to Agassiz’s explanations of his philosophy of “ideal development,” or the theory that a divine principle manifests itself progressively, over time, within the appearance of the physical world. The notion of ideal development received its philosophic validation chiefly via Hegel, whose work, Richardson speculates, Emerson probably encountered through reading J. B. Stallo’s General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature, published in 1848. A young protégé of Emerson’s, the Unitarian minister and self-professed Hegelian Moncure D. Conway, described the essence of Hegel’s thought as “the conception of an absolute idea which has represented itself in Nature, in order that by a progressive development through Nature it may gain consciousness in man, and return as mind to a deeper union with itself.”27 As an idealist, Emerson was naturally sympathetic to a phi26. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 467. The two naturalists did not remain completely antagonistic to each others’ theories, however. As Gould has shown, Agassiz’s praise for Lyell’s vision of geologic history is still to be found in the margin of his own copy of the Principles, housed in Harvard’s natural history museum library (Time’s Arrow, 115). 27. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 472, 473 (Conway quote).

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losophy of science suggesting that, in his words, “the form or type [of the divine will] became transparent in the actual forms of successive ages as presented in geology” (JMN 11:200). Yet during the first half of the nineteenth century, the term developmentalism was being employed somewhat promiscuously. As used by Emerson and Agassiz, “developmentalism” chiefly signified a belief in the progressive revelation of the divine will through a succession of tangible, physical forms. Yet concurrently, the term was also being used to describe a line of scientific thinking given impetus by Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, early proponents of the ideas that species developed over time and that one species could be subsumed within another. Agassiz, a creationist who believed that all species had been generated spontaneously, simultaneously, and immutably, without any mechanism of descent or modification, found this particular strain of “developmental” theories of morphology or organic structure spiritually and scientifically repugnant. So did Lyell, for that matter, and in his Principles he devoted a considerable quantity of ink to ridiculing Lamarck’s protoevolutionary arguments.28 Hegelian “developmentalism” appealed to Emerson because the ascending, expanding model of consciousness it postulated complemented his own progressive, upward-spiraling idealism. Emerson was already highly sympathetic to German romanticism’s (particularly Goethe’s) quest to uncover a synthesis of mind, matter, and spirit. As Richardson says, “Further corroboration of Hegel came from Goethe’s premonition [in “Winckelmann”] that the function of human beings is to give nature self-consciousness.”29 In the Hegelian version of “developmentalism,” Emerson also discovered another useful philosophic vehicle for apprehending a prospect of “kosmos,” or the manifestation of universal unity. Nature could not, Emerson reasoned, have as its primary goal merely its own continued existence; rather, it must promote, over time, the progressive conversion of matter into thought. If only because Emerson would have been predisposed to accept the term “developmentalism” primarily in a Hegelian, not Lamarckian, context, it would be a mistake, I think, to ascribe to him a very high degree of prescience about Charles Darwin’s later discoveries. Because that term was, as we have seen, adopted by two schools of thought 28. See Secord, introduction, xxx–xxxv. 29. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 475.

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intrinsically at odds with each other, an acceptance of Emerson as being somehow Darwin’s intellectual precursor seems over-generous, or perhaps misguided.30 But this is exactly what happened, and for this particular revisionistic myth we have chiefly to thank Moncure D. Conway. As Robert Burkholder and Joel Myerson observe, Nineteenth-century commentators tended to view Emerson’s association with science almost exclusively in relation to Darwin. As early as The Conduct of Life, critics pointed out similarities between Emerson’s concept of fate and the theory of evolution, but it remained for Moncure D. Conway (Emerson and His Views on Nature) to argue without reservation that all Emerson’s work was built upon a theory of development that resembled Darwinian evolution.31

Conway based his attribution of foreknowledge about Darwin’s discoveries to Emerson chiefly upon conversations he overheard between Emerson and Agassiz. In 1860 Conway witnessed such a discussion shortly after the publication of The Origin of Species. Agassiz, despite having warm relations with Darwin the man, dismissed his book and continued to maintain that species had been created by God—as they are, where they are.32 Agassiz’s modified Christian orthodoxy stood in sharp contrast, of course, to Emerson’s only vestigially Christian idealism, but on matters of theology they evidently politely agreed to disagree. They split more sharply, however, over the issue of whether a developmentalist impulse in the universe could manifest itself through organic structural changes, as Conway described: [J]ust after Darwin’s discovery had appeared, I happened to be dining at the Saturday Club in Boston, when something like an encounter between these two friends occurred. Agassiz was seated at the head 30. Lyell, too, has been misperceived as heralding the later arrival of Darwin, according to Gould. After rereading the Principles, Gould says, “I grasped the reason for his [Lyell’s] later allegiance to evolution—as a conservative strategy of minimal retreat from his vision of time’s cycle, not as the testimony of a deputy in Darwin’s radical crusade” (Time’s Arrow, 15). 31. Robert E. Burkholder and Joel Myerson, “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” 152–53. 32. Robert D. Richardson quotes Agassiz’s statement in his study Lake Superior, published in 1850: “The more intimately we trace . . . geographical distribution, the more we are impressed with the conviction that . . . animals must have originated where they live, and have remained almost precisely within the same limits since they were created” (Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, 364).

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Above Time of the table, Emerson being on his right. It was near the end of the dinner, and around the long table those present were paired off in conversation; but being next to Emerson I could enjoy the conversation he held with Agassiz. After a time the professor made some little fling at the new theory. Emerson said smilingly that on reading it he had at once expressed satisfaction at confirmation of what he (Agassiz) had long been telling us. All of those beautiful harmonies of form with form throughout nature which he had so finely divined were now proved to be genuine relationship. “Yes,” said Agassiz eagerly, “ideal relationship, connected thoughts of a Being acting with an intelligent purpose.” Emerson, to whom the visible universe was all a manifestation of things ideal, said that the physical selection appeared to him a counterpart of the ideal development. Whereupon Agassiz exclaimed, “There I cannot agree with you,” and changed the subject.

The abruptness of Agassiz’s response, at least in Conway’s reconstruction of their encounter, would seem to indicate that he opposed the theory of natural selection for reasons that were more ideologic than scientific. Although we may take it for granted that Christian fundamentalism has always found evolution’s basic tenets unacceptable, it is worthwhile, I think, to reflect for a moment upon two important facets of orthodox religion’s historic opposition to Darwin’s message. First, Darwin’s depiction of time as being random and directionless would seem inimical to the long-standing doctrine that human affairs, especially the affairs of any one particular group, are governed solicitously by a divine providence.33 Secondly, Darwin’s treatment of man as an animal effects a shift in identity that threatens to dislodge man from his position of centrality in the earth’s, if not the universe’s, affairs. The point of commonality between both of these Darwinian axioms is that they go to the issue of mankind’s uniqueness among other divine creations. Within Emerson’s circle, man’s uniqueness had an especially zealous defender in the person of the radical neoplatonist A. Bronson Alcott, whose own bizarre conversation with Agassiz was witnessed, again, by Conway: On one . . . occasion I remember listening to a curious conversation between Agassiz and A. Bronson Alcott,—who lived and moved in a 33. Toward the end of The Discovery of Time, Toulmin and Goodfield observe that “[A]fter the establishment of modern historical criticism and Darwinian theory, it would be naive to suppose any longer that history represents either a single process, or one with a demonstrable direction” (235).

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waking dream. After delighting Agassiz by repudiating the theory of the development of man from animals, he filled the professor with dismay by equally decrying the notion that God could ever have created ferocious and poisonous beasts. When Agassiz asked who could have created them, Alcott said they were the various forms of human sin. Man was the first being created. And the horrible creatures were originated by his lusts and animalisms. When Agassiz, bewildered, urged that geology proved that the animals had existed before man, Alcott suggested that man might have originated them before his appearance in his present form. Agassiz having given some signal of distress, Emerson came to the rescue with some reconciling discourse on the development of life and thought, with which the professor had to be content, although there was a soupçon of Evolutionism in every word our host uttered.34

In Conway’s depiction of this almost comical discourse, one of the more striking terms is “animalisms,” a word redolent of all the distaste and horror with which both Agassiz and Alcott regarded the idea that human beings could have evolved from “lower” forms of life. Alcott, the pure idealist, reverts to what is basically a Medieval position when he interprets organic forms as being symbolic representations of man’s moral nature. Agassiz, who must have been astonished not only by the backwardness implicit in such a statement, but also by its rampant anthropocentrism, nevertheless himself maintains that animals were created before human beings, as Genesis describes, so that man remains a “special” creation. Despite their radically different philosophical viewpoints, both men distinguish absolutely between man and beast. In perceiving the extent to which their beliefs were threatened by evolutionary theory, however, Alcott and Agassiz may actually have been a step ahead of Emerson. His conviction that man’s presence upon earth inaugurated the arrival of consciousness within the universe surrendered ground only reluctantly to the diminution of man’s centrality to the universe implicit within Darwin’s line of reasoning. Thus it bears repeating that Conway’s attribution to Emerson of some sort of foreknowledge about evolution should probably be ascribed to hero worship; moreover, Conway’s Memoirs were published in 1883, a year after Emerson had died and after Darwin’s theories 34. Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography, Memories and Experiences, 1:152– 53.

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had become respectable, even fashionable. For Emerson himself, the term evolution continued to be synonymous with developmentalism, in its specifically Hegelian sense of meaning a progressive idealism.35 Nevertheless, it should also be pointed out that Emerson did not, like Agassiz and Alcott, reject out of hand the notion that species could change over time. His unscientific idealism was flexible enough to entertain that possibility, and his more liberal theology, while still at least nominally Christian, did not constrain him to interpret natural phenomena according to a priori assumptions. Emerson did successfully integrate what he had learned both from Lyell and from the catastrophists with his own theory of nature, which underwent considerable modification during the years succeeding the original publication of Nature. One point at which we may see Emerson’s reading in the natural sciences affecting his thinking about the interrelationship of time and accident is the essay “Fate.” Emerson included “Fate” in The Conduct of Life, published in 1860, the year after The Origin of Species appeared on American shores, but he had written the piece considerably earlier, in the fall of 1851.36 One striking change between Emerson’s early and later views of nature is a somewhat grudging acceptance of determinism. In the introduction of Nature, Emerson identifies nature as being the “NOT ME,” but in “Fate,” nature becomes part of fate, that is, man’s condition in time. Rather than being a system of correspondences that invites man to comprehend the universe’s underlying laws, nature is depicted in “Fate” as a massively complex machine whose operations we can only dimly 35. Certainly Emerson was not alone in descrying a tangible benign end in developmentalist theories. Thomas S. Kuhn wrote, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: All of the well-known pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories—those of Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, and the German Naturphilosophen—had taken evolution to be a goal-directed process. The “idea” of man and of contemporary flora and fauna was thought to have been present from the first creation of life, perhaps in the mind of God. That idea or plan had provided the direction and the guiding force to the entire evolutionary process. Each new stage of evolution was a more perfect realization of a plan that had been present from the start. For many men the abolition of that teleological kind of evolution was the most significant and least palatable of Darwin’s suggestions. The Origin of Species recognized no goal set either by God or nature. (170–71) 36. See Richardson, Mind on Fire, 500.

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perceive and which can, without warning or apparent cause, injure or even eradicate us. Man retains his dignity as creation’s masterpiece, yet his hold upon the planet has become much more tenuous. Change, which Emerson had championed so forcefully in earlier essays as a necessary and desirable condition of life, is now admitted to incorporate as well the possibility of catastrophe, on both individual and species-wide levels. In one particular passage, Emerson once again employs geologically based tropes, this time to figure nature as a book in which man’s fate is recorded: The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages,— leaf after leaf,—never re-turning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand ages, and a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of marl and mud: vegetable forms appear; her first misshapen animals, zoöphyte, trilobium, fish; then, saurians,—rude forms, in which she has only blocked her future statue, concealing under these unwieldy monsters the fine type of her coming king. The face of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it comes no more again. (CE, 6:15)

This short passage is densely allusive. First, it acknowledges the existence of deep time as predicated by Hutton and Lyell (although Emerson’s somewhat too-consistent disposition of igneous, sedimentary, and carboniferous rocks leaves little room for Huttonian unconformities). Second, it acknowledges the power of catastrophe to wipe out entire species, as Lamarck, Agassiz, and Cuvier, among others, had been suggesting. Third, it reflects Hegelian “developmentalism” by imaging the entire course of geologic history as a “book,” authoritative as the bible, heralding the arrival of man, whose presence upon earth would usher in the advent of consciousness in nature.37 By race Emerson means “species,” and correspondingly, meliorate’s most salient signification here is “improvement,” specifically the upward progression of species’ structural development beginning with early “misshapen” animals, proceeding through the greater complexity and formal attractiveness of only somewhat less “rude” organisms such as the dinosaurs, and culminating in the Phidian “statue” of man, a 37. Emerson was not the only American writer of this era to conceive of the past as prologue to the present. See, for example, Whitman’s catalogue, in section 44 of the 1881 edition of “Song of Myself,” of the ages spent in preparation for his own birth.

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paragon whom the worm, mounting through all the spires of form, aspired to become. Unlike other creatures, man was beautiful to contemplate, and his formal development had been accompanied by, or had functioned as the outward sign of, an equivalent refinement of the universal moral sentiment. Man, like Christ, is the “coming king,” whose arrival all the rest of earth’s geologic history, like the prophets in the Old Testament, had foretold. As the religiously tinged language in this passage indicates, Emerson’s humanism is still at this point salvationist, even messianic, despite Christ’s absence at its center. Homo sapiens has inherited Christ’s mantle of centrality in a moral universe that continued to remain more Ptolemaic than Copernican in spirit, if not in its mechanics. The pun Emerson makes upon “leaf” operates upon several interpenetrating planes of meaning. Each geologic age is a page or “leaf” in Fate’s book, but it is also the tangible evidence of its own passage, the leaf whose impression generates a fossil, as well as a plant pressed between the pages of time’s book. Thus what is preserved is also the preserving medium: leaf contains leaf. But does that “book” also contain us? Emerson’s progressive developmentalism is radically undermined by the paragraph’s concluding sentence, which suggests that once each species has “lived its term,” it disappears. Without explicitly saying so, Emerson raises the possibility that human beings, too, could be “leaves” whose fossil impressions might one day be all they have left behind of themselves. Species succeeded each other rather than disseminating outward from a common point of origin, but the rule of succession itself dictated that a supplanted species could not return, as the example of the dinosaurs showed. Once the “chapter” of a species’ existence was concluded, it was not “read” again. That extinctions had occurred in the past was clearly indicated by the fossil record, so that logically, Emerson knew, it could not now be assumed that time was somehow “over” and that further catastrophes would not ensue. An acceptance of such a precariously contingent future calls into question not only the sovereignty of man over all other creatures (since he, like they, would eventually vanish into time), but also the entire temporal hierarchy that supported Emerson’s progressive developmentalism. A salvationist view of history inevitably regards the present chapter of time as being the last in nature’s “book,” or at least close to the end, as the “plot” approaches its denouement. But if time itself is as uniform as the recurrent geologic processes that shape

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the earth, the ascending spiral of spiritual meliorism was threatened with being revealed as a kind of temporal myopia occasioned by a failure to grasp the magnitude of nature’s grand, iterative cycles of destruction and creation. In “Fate” Emerson derives some small comfort in the face of radical uncertainty and unforeseeable accident from the law of survivability— which must be differentiated from the law of survival. To clarify the distinction between the two, we might turn our attention first to the issue of temporal subjectivity. As I mentioned, “Fate” was itself fated to be published in 1860, the same year in which The Origin of Species first appeared in America. Emerson, who was eager to read Darwin’s book,38 probably would have found in it more with which to agree than disagree. Darwin declares his debt to Lyell early and often in the book, and in trying to evoke, for the reader, the significance of deep time, Darwin raises two interrelated, and ostensibly antithetical, issues that Lyell and even the transcendentalists themselves had often addressed: the validity of subjectivity and the untrustworthiness of perception. Darwin repeats Lyell’s injunction that observers go see for themselves the results of geologic processes within the landscape, while he simultaneously cautions readers about the limitations of subjectivity: It is hardly possible for me to recall to the reader who is not a practical geologist, the facts leading the mind feebly to comprehend the lapse of time. He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology, which the future historian will recognize as having produced a revolution in natural science, and yet does not admit how vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume. Not that it suffices to study the Principles of Geology, or to read special treatises by different observers on separate formations, and to mark how each author attempts to give an inadequate idea of the duration of each formation, or even of each stratum. We can best gain some idea of past time by knowing the agencies at work, and learning how deeply the surface of the land has been denuded, and how much sediment has been deposited. As Lyell has well remarked, the extent and thickness of our sedimentary formations are the result and the measure of the denudation which the earth’s crust has elsewhere undergone. Therefore a man should examine for himself the great piles of superimposed strata, and watch the rivulets bringing down mud, and the waves wearing away the 38. See Richardson, Mind on Fire, 546.

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Darwin echoes Lyell in suggesting that readers may witness for themselves how geologic forces such as erosion continually wear away at the landscape, and extrapolate from what they see the degree to which the earth has changed over the course of deep time. Yet extrapolate is all that they may do, for the “duration of past time” is so great as to defy comprehension; at best, we may only “feebly” understand how large time truly is.40 The paradox of attempting to observe the unobservable was not lost upon Darwin, who, James Secord says, realized that “[t]he Principles . . . is about seeing.”41 But to “see” accurately, a geologist must learn to disregard what he or she literally is seeing and consult the mind’s eye, instead. Geology was analogous to astronomy, its older scientific sibling, in that human observers have as much difficulty “seeing” landscapes that have vanished as they do in scrutinizing planets lying beyond the ranges of their telescopes. This analogy represents, in some ways, a historical irony, for as Gould points out, Hutton and Lyell were motivated in their efforts to approach geologic time systematically at least in part by a desire to emulate Newton’s success in working out the universal laws of motion.42 Newton had demonstrated that we do not need to observe planets directly to predict how they will move, and perhaps the same principle might be shown to hold true for geologic processes. And yet human observers remained constrained as much by their own preconceived attitudes as by the limits of their instrumentation. Historically, orthodox religion in the West has resisted revisions of the earth’s antiquity (and I include here an acceptance of Darwinian evolution) even more stubbornly than it has astronomy’s revelations about the universe’s true structure and magnitude, perhaps because, one cannot help but 39. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 295–96. 40. In 1859 Lyell also relinquished his belief that the human species had been created separately, and in the not-too-distant past. He became convinced of mankind’s antiquity when he saw, at Boucher de Perthes’s excavations in Picardy, stone tools buried in strata that also included the bones of extinct animals. To Darwin’s great delight, Lyell wrote up his new conclusions in his book Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man, which appeared in 1863. See The Cambridge Illustrated History of Archaeology, ed. by Paul G. Bahn, 84–86. 41. Secord, introduction, ix. 42. Gould, Time’s Arrow, 97.

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think, the former have so many more immediate, palpable, and visible implications for humankind. Then too, the notion that man was intrinsically incapable of comprehending the age and origin of his own home planet, metaphorically incarnated as his mother, represented a corrective to pride many must have found, and find, intolerable. Lyell frankly and eloquently addressed the potential for an understanding of deep geologic time to humble humanity’s sense of its own capacities in the same way that astronomy had: Such views of the immensity of past time, like those unfolded by the Newtonian philosophy in regard to space, were too vast to awaken ideas of sublimity unmixed with a painful sense of our incapacity to conceive a plan of such infinite extent. Worlds are seen beyond worlds immeasurably distant from each other, and beyond them all innumerable other systems are faintly traced on the confines of the visible universe.43

Yet perhaps the most fundamental cultural and historical result of the early nineteenth century’s geologic revolution was that time became a means, rather than an end. Darwin himself did not attach any particular importance to time, nor did he stipulate the presence of any chronological pattern that might be interpreted as being either progressive or cyclical. Rather, time was simply a matrix within which the mechanism of natural selection operated, and developments that seemed to us, observing from our limited temporal perspectives, to be progressive were revealed to be simply adaptations that had succeeded. He says in chapter 4 of The Origin of Species, “Natural Selection, or The Survival of the Fittest”: The mere lapse of time by itself does nothing, either for or against natural selection. I state this because it has been erroneously asserted that the element of time has been assumed by me to play an allimportant part in modifying species, as if all the forms of life were necessarily undergoing change through some innate law. Lapse of time is only so far important, and its importance in this respect is great, that it gives a better chance of beneficial variations arising and of their being selected, accumulated, and fixed. It likewise tends to increase the direct action of the physical conditions of life, in relation to the constitution of each organism.44 43. Quoted in ibid., 16. 44. Darwin, Origin of Species, 108.

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Time is a frame, Darwin says, and not a reason. Even our own lives continue on as long as they do merely to give individual adaptations a fair shake at helping us cope with our environment. Thus, unlike Emerson, Darwin resists imputing to time the underlying presence of “innate law.” His focus upon the mechanism of “developmentalism”—and here the term finally does denote something akin to “evolution”—rather than upon a rationale for explaining development’s existence caused him to be lumped with the French “materialists,” naturalists who earned the enmity of their British colleagues both for suggesting that one species could evolve into another and for the corollary conclusion that the human species possessed no “special character” differentiating it from the animals.45 And Darwin did indeed acknowledge the influence of the most infamous materialist, Lamarck, whose work in the area of false or apparent adaptive structures helped shape his own thinking about morphology.46 Moreover, Darwin recognized that materialism itself could be a double-edged sword. He understood that another, more subtle brand of materialism lurked behind the arguments mounted by naturalists and theologians who saw the complexity of the human brain as clear evidence that deity and mankind were related. Darwin evidently suspected that such a line of thought merely reflected a form of species egotism, and in the following passage, quoted from Darwin’s notebooks by Gould, he apostrophizes an imaginary representative of that faction which championed humankind on the basis of its rational, classificatory power of thought: Love of the deity effect of organization, oh you materialist! . . . Why is thought being a secretion of the brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves.47

Read from the Emersonian vantage point, this brief passage acquires a profound irony. Emerson, who was prone to cite physical principles such as gravity, magnetism, and planetary motion as examples of laws whose reality was as irrefutable as the existence of physical objects, believed thought, too, to be a law. In this context, Darwin’s 45. See Secord, introduction, xxx. 46. Darwin, Origin of Species, 404. 47. Gould, “Darwin’s Delay,” in Ever since Darwin, 25.

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characterization of thought as a “secretion” is particularly pungent. Now thought is no longer the quality that makes man “infinite in faculties . . . in apprehension . . . like a god,” but rather something more like a hormone—an adaptation, not a distinction.48 Even the law of gravity possesses no special status in Darwin’s universe, existing merely as a “property of matter.” Here, at least, we may begin to see the limit at which Emerson’s acquiescence to Darwinian theory would probably have balked.49 How marked a contrast may be inferred to exist between Darwin’s reductionism and Emerson’s well-known advocacy of individualism! And yet, Darwinian theory may also be viewed as a supreme vindication of the individual. This truth became apparent to Lyell, who, despite his denunciation of Lamarck in the Principles for having suggested that one species could be transmuted into another,50 was the 48. In his book Revolution in Science, I. Bernard Cohen says The new Darwinian outlook denied any cosmic teleology and held that evolution is not a process leading to a “better” or “more perfect” type but rather a series of stages in which reproductive success occurs in individuals with characters best suited to the particular conditions of their environment—and so also for societies. No longer were there to be grounds for special creation. An end was heralded to any “absolute anthropocentrism,” since a principle of “common descent” was proposed for all living creatures, including man. To these implications we must add that the Darwinian revolution sounded the death knell of any argument about design in the universe or in nature, since variation is a random and nondirected process. (299) 49. Moncure Conway does indicate that both he and Emerson failed to grasp, when they first read The Origin of Species, the significance of time to Darwin’s theory: Soon after the appearance of Darwin’s volume Emerson visited Cincinnati [where Conway worked as a pastor] to give a lecture in the regular course of the Mercantile Library Association, and I had the delight of talking over with him the great discovery of Darwin. I can now see that neither Emerson nor any of us—the pre-Darwinite Evolutionists—in our joyful welcome of Darwin’s work sufficiently weighed his words concerning the boundlessness of the time in which nature had wrought. We were still in the Twilight of the Gods, reverently spelt nature with a big N, and was our goddess ever at her loom, but weaving with swift shuttles. (Autobiography, 1:282) 50. Secord traces the origins of Lyell’s virulent antipathy to Lamarck to attitudes he held in common with other upper-class Whigs. Lyell, according to Secord, feared that an acceptance of the conclusions suggested by evolution would lead to atheism, miscegenation, and perhaps even revolution (introduction, xxx–xxxv).

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first fellow scientist to encourage Darwin to publish his findings,51 and subsequently, it was to Lyell (and Joseph Hooker) that Darwin showed his preliminary manuscript. Nevertheless, Lyell continued to resist the basic tenets of evolution until finally, without ever quite acceding to Darwin’s central argument about the mechanism of natural selection, he reluctantly acknowledged the validity of Darwin’s theory, shortly before The Origin of Species was published. Gould points out the profound ambivalence of the following excerpt from Lyell’s journal, written after he had capitulated: Species are abstractions, not realities—are like genera. Individuals are the only realities. Nature neither makes nor breaks molds—all is plastic, unfixed, transitional, progressive, or retrograde. There is only one great resource to fall back upon, a reliance that all is for the best, trust in God, a belief that truth is the highest aim, that if it destroys some idols it is better that they should disappear, that the intelligent ruler of the universe has given us this great volume [i.e., Origin] as a privilege, that its interpretation is elevating.52

Lyell retains his faith in a benevolent and intelligent creator who, in the inscrutable workings of his divine providence, even causes such a book as Darwin’s to be written and published. But Lyell also now grudgingly agrees that species as a whole do not possess, in Darwinian terms at least, any particular distinctiveness. Instead, evolution works inexorably and mindlessly through the medium of each individual’s existence, selecting for adaptations that are “progressive,” that is, that contribute to an organism’s ability to occupy its niche in the habitat, or “retrograde,” those that persist, like the panda’s “thumb” or the flamingo’s “smile,” from generation to generation despite serving no functional role.53 Individuation, like “character” in Emerson’s writings, contended against fate while simultaneously and unconsciously promoting fate’s ultimate ends. Each individual is thus an “accident” in his or her own right, possessing an immeasurable potential for affecting the future. 51. See Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, 33–34. 52. Quoted in Gould, Time’s Arrow, 173. 53. See Gould’s essay “The Panda’s Thumb,” which appears in his collection of essays that bears the same name.

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Now, finally, if we return to Emerson’s “Fate,” we may find it echoing some of the themes Lyell raises in his meditation upon the role time allots to the individual. In that essay, as we saw previously, Emerson stipulated to the existence of catastrophes, painting nature as a potential destroyer. He warns, “Nature is no sentimentalist,” and embarks upon a memorable list of the many evils flesh is heir to, including “leapers and bloody jumpers” such as lions or tigers, as well as cholera and smallpox, which “have proved as mortal to some tribes as a frost to the crickets, which, having filled the summer with noise, are silenced by a fall of the temperature of one night.” In “Fate” nature is no longer the “not me,” but rather “that over which I have no control,” a category that expands to include not just catastrophe, but also heredity, or rather, the catastrophe of heredity. “How shall a man escape from his ancestors,” Emerson asks, “or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father’s or his mother’s life?” Heredity could hardly be considered “not me,” and yet it is, inasmuch as it is something over which we can exert no influence. In “Fate” Emerson still acknowledges the dominion of “law” in the affairs of the universe and of man, yet that term now also embraces the law of catastrophe. “Shocks and ruins,” as Emerson calls them, may come along not just once, but again and again, and together they constitute a “law” for Emerson, at least in part because they may not be avoided, nor are they easily withstood: “Will you say, the disasters which threaten mankind are exceptional, and one need not lay his account for cataclysms every day? Aye, but what happens once may happen again, and so long as these strokes are not to be parried by us they must be feared.” Emerson then proceeds to his major theme in the essay, how man should comport himself in the face of certain uncertainties. In his conclusion, Emerson identifies the presence of “Law” as a reason for submitting to what he calls “the Beautiful Necessity,” or a new kind of divine providence that governs our individual fates as part of a larger, preappointed plan: Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all is made of one piece; that plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animal and plant, food and eater are of one kind. In astronomy is vast space but no foreign system; in geology, vast time but the same laws as to-day. Why should we be afraid of Nature, which is no other than “philosophy and theology embodied”? Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements?

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Man should derive reassurance, Emerson now says, not from the idea that nature is the “not me,” but from the very fact that we are part of nature, so that any “foreignness” we may encounter there, however inimical to us it may seem, is finally rendered recognizable and logical, and therefore tolerable—the “law of survivability.” If time was shown by geologists to be vast beyond imagining, at least they also taught us that the earth’s processes operated according to principles that are uniform, predictable, and, eventually, familiar. The existence of this “lawfulness” in nature, to which the “laws” of our own natures proved we too belonged, permitted us to live in a state of confident unknowingness. This was the “Beautiful Necessity” to which, Emerson proposes in the paragraph’s opening sentence, we should build altars, as if to a god. Indeed, the existence of a “lawfulness” in nature was, for Emerson, a last bulwark against which humanity could lean in a post-Christian age, one worthy indeed of promulgating like a new faith. If the face of God had become less human, the intelligence that directs the universe having come to seem less and less like a human intelligence, at least there was an intelligence, as proven by the existence of Laws. Such a faith would not necessarily engender feelings of complacency or peace, however; unlike the “peace that passeth understanding,” the Beautiful Necessity’s imperative to us was to be content within the limits of our understanding. Emerson finally arrived at a perspective upon time not very dissimilar from Lyell’s, although he had traveled there by the route of philosophy rather than of science. Lyell, once he had stipulated to the validity of Darwin’s ideas, professed a willingness to attribute a measure of directionality to time, a momentum generated when individual events ranging from the trivial to the catastrophic set into motion new adaptations and flurries of speciation that ebbed and flowed in very un-uniformitarian fashion. Emerson, however, even before he encountered Darwin’s ideas, had already concluded that time might

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not follow a uniform or predictable path into the future, manifesting itself instead in a restless, pointless torrent of change. He had also begun to understand that man’s destiny did not comprise Destiny; this realization served to confirm him in his growing belief that the moment was all, or rather, that the individual’s response to the moment was all. Moreover, even as the importance and centrality of the human race was beginning to dwindle under the scrutiny of science, the significance of the individual, for whom the moment was temporal analogue, began to grow. For Emerson, then, the question of understanding time’s orientation may finally have receded into comparative unimportance. Instead, he began to explore ways in which man might learn to escape time by living, paradoxically, both in and outside of the moment, manifesting the “dual consciousness” that he would go on to explore in depth in “Experience.” For Thoreau, on the other hand, a comprehension of the shape and volume of time implied by Lyell’s and Darwin’s theories would lead to a very different set of conclusions.

2 ‘‘MY CARNAC’’ AND MEMNON’S HEAD Temporal Reform and Timely Memorials in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Mutability From low to high doth dissolution climb, And sink from high to low, along a scale Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail; A musical but melancholy chime, Which they can hear who meddle not with crime, Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care. Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear The longest date do melt like frosty rime, That in the morning whitened hill and plain And is no more; drop like the tower sublime Of yesterday, which royally did wear His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch of Time. —Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sonnets A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers has not always received the credit it deserves. The book has suffered from being compared to Walden, so much so that the fame of the latter has, as Linck C. Johnson says, “distracted interest from A Week, as a bright star draws our attention away from a lesser luminary nearby.” To press into service yet another figure of speech, the two books may be said to resemble siblings among whom the more recent, “younger” child receives the bulk of attention, to the disadvantage of a deserving “older” brother. My metaphor is grounded, of course, in the relationship between Henry D. Thoreau and his older brother

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John, who died three years after the river trip described in A Week was concluded. The book has long been recognized as being a prose elegy for John Thoreau, as when, for example, Johnson describes it as a “pastoral elegy” written in the spirit, if not the style, of Lycidas.1 Yet A Week is also a memorial to John Thoreau, an artifact crafted expressly to perpetuate his memory. If the emphasis in identifying the book as an “elegy” is chiefly stylistic, calling it a “memorial” gestures toward its identity as an object that interacts, like a granite obelisk or a bronze statue, with time. And yet the memorial dimension of A Week is also congruent with the mild contempt with which Thoreau, writing as transcendental idealist, treated any strictly physical manifestation of an idea; moreover, while a conventional memorial is constructed expressly to resist time as much as possible, in A Week Thoreau explores the possibility of “inscribing” a new sort of memorial that would remain consonant with elapsing time by being performative, rather than commemorative.2 In A Week Thoreau opposes his own methods as memorialist to the practices and supposed philosophies of the ancient Egyptians— more specifically, to their construction of pyramids and stone temples, which he regarded as the consummate cultural emblems of their materialism. Thoreau’s preoccupation with such matters is symptomatic of a vogue for all things Egyptian that arose in America and Europe during the first decades of the nineteenth century, inspired by the early, romantic exploits of French and English archaeologists and by Champollion’s astonishing accomplishment of deciphering the hieroglyphic system. One of the more substantive consequences of the West’s discovery of Egypt was a compulsory reindexing of the scale of years that had been used to define the boundaries of the known past, and in this sense the West’s encounter with Egypt complemented the 1. Linck C. Johnson, Thoreau’s Complex Weave: The Writing of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” ix, 41. 2. My point here has something in common with Robert Milder’s observation, in Reimagining Thoreau, that A Week may be read as a “quest” that is enacted, rather than narrated (29). Milder understands that quest to be Thoreau’s effort to establish an idealized “home” for himself. In this regard Milder’s analysis is reminiscent of Frederick Garber’s suggestion in Thoreau’s Fable of Inscribing that A Week exemplifies Thoreau’s habitual urge to establish, through his writing, a sense of “at-homeness” in the world. My own approach, on the other hand, is more oriented toward investigating ways in which A Week accomplishes its rhetorical objective of constructing a performative memorial.

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simultaneous rise of geology and its theoretic stepchild, evolutionary biology. As John T. Irwin writes in his book American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance, “The decipherment of the hieroglyphics and Darwin’s theory of evolution were probably the two severest blows delivered by nineteenth-century science to the credibility of Genesis and to Bishop Ussher’s widely accepted Biblical chronology. . . .”3 Emerson became swept up in the Egyptian enthusiasm as well, with consequences for his own symbolism and reconceptualization of time, but Thoreau’s interest outstripped Emerson’s, perhaps because his hostility toward the Egyptians often manifested itself as competitiveness, as when he envisioned Concord as a sort of New World Thebes growing up on the banks of the Muskatequid, rather than those of the Nile. Above all, however, Thoreau represents Egyptian civilization in A Week and in Walden as being the production of a strictly historical and therefore unnatural past, to which he consistently opposes a deeper, wider, alternative past more compatible with nature, and it was within the framework of this more “authentic” past that he wished to fashion his brother’s memorial. Such a “natural past” would encompass both the historical and the geologic records, and consequently we shall see Thoreau’s own reading of Lyell’s Principles coming into play in his composition of A Week.4 Thoreau’s opposition of historical time to natural time or, rather, natural timelessness, also develops cumulatively over the course of the book into a call for temporal reform, climaxing in the appearance of his sonnet “My Carnac” in the “Wednesday” chapter of A Week. Thoreau assembled the manuscript for his first book while he was engaged in the experiment in living that provided grist for his second.5 3. John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance, 8. 4. Lawrence Buell writes, “Like the river, like the trip itself, the speaker’s imagination in A Week moves both upstream and down, forward toward self-realization but simultaneously backward into time: the biographical past, the regional past, even the cultural past, as far back as the beginnings of civilization” (Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance, 210). I would only append to Buell’s concluding list the very necessary additional time frame of the geologic past. 5. H. Daniel Peck observes, “Modern scholars have shown us just how contemporaneous the composition of these two works was. . . . To consider the two books

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Despite this overlap, however, the two books exhibit several important dissimilarities. Walden, despite its reputation for being the transcendentalist movement’s most artistically realized literary work, is in many ways less “transcendental,” at least in the stereotypical, and slightly pejorative, sense of that word, than Thoreau’s earlier book. A Week is more discursive and meditative, and less programmatic, than Walden; it is also, admittedly, more derivative and less incisive. Thoreau wrote a good deal of the journal material that would be culled for A Week while still very much under Emerson’s influence, and the anxiety of that influence, coupled with the author’s youthfulness, is in large measure responsible for both the tentativeness and the defensiveness of the voice we sometimes hear while we read. A Week contains too much poetry (much of it not very good) and not enough practicality; too much profundity, and not enough levity—or at least, not as much as we encounter in Walden. Yet the tone in A Week is still unmistakably Thoreauvian, humorous in a minor key, alive to the possibilities of language, alert to the shams and indignities of conventional modern existence. The book’s discursiveness, however, is more problematic. Within the critical canon the subject of A Week’s formal coherence, or perceived lack thereof, has continued to provoke controversy. Some readers have contended that the book is both formless and aimless, while others have discerned in it a unified argument and a focused rhetorical approach.6 I suggest that the book’s overall unity becomes more apparent when we consider some of the many functions the book provided for its own author. Most fundamentally, A Week represents Thoreau’s first attempt to write the “long book,” a purpose that goes far toward explaining both the apparently improvisational quality of its narrative and its too-frequent borrowings from other litin this way is to emphasize just how much they are companion works, dramatizing two sides of the same life, examining in different ways the same set of experiences” (Thoreau’s Morning Work: Memory and Perception in “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” the “Journal,” and “Walden,” 182 n. 10). 6. See, for example, Hugh Seidel Canby’s observation that A Week is “perilously like a library of the shorter works of Henry Thoreau” (Thoreau, 272). Garber recalls Canby’s comment as a foil for his own contention that Thoreau’s first book “is so far from being a muddle that some have called it that we could (should) end by admiring the canniness of its practices, especially its practice of subversion” (Thoreau’s Fable of Inscribing, 116, 121).

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erary sources. The book required at least seven years to gestate, the same amount of time it took Thoreau to work Walden through as many as eight drafts. Moreover, A Week may be considered Thoreau’s own transcendentalist manifesto, very much in the manner of Nature, arguing for the establishment of a new and original relation between humankind and the universe (or the universe as it reveals itself through the medium of nature), chiefly by a process of temporal reform. Clothed, ironically and subversively, within the temporally determined romantic literary genres of the excursion and the travel diary, A Week is actually a multilayered critique of conventional notions of temporality as well as a coherent and sustained disquisition upon the true meaning, materiality, and “naturalness” of time. This “public” dimension of the book closely coincides with Thoreau’s more private, elegiac authorial intent. He set himself the problem of constructing a memorial that would be appropriate to the memory of his brother, or rather, to the reality of both his brother’s existence and to the pleasure John Thoreau himself had once derived from nature.7 Ideally, such a memorial would be, like nature, living rather than dead; present, rather than past. Thoreau attacks the problem from several angles simultaneously, synthesizing models of the ancient past provided by geology and Egyptology, by histories both classical and modern, and by literary sources, especially myths and sacred scriptures. He also employs rhetorical strategies calculated to surprise the reader out of the past and into the present, such as by coining words, by inviting the reader to participate in the illusory “real” time of the narrative’s action, and by condensing time to emphasize nature’s cyclicity. The narrative of A Week elapses within several interrelated, interpenetrating planes of temporal experience. Because the book recapitulates or reenacts the titular week, chapters are named after days. Considered in strictly geographic terms, the Thoreau brothers’ trip takes them up the Merrimack only as far as Hooksett, New Hampshire, yet in imagination they voyage far back into the past, for, as Robert Milder has observed, A Week is a journey through time as well as space.8 Like a waterborne time machine, their boat touches at 7. One of the bases of the brothers’ affection was a shared love of nature. As Linck Johnson points out, the eulogy given at John’s funeral made reference to the elder Thoreau brother’s known fondness for animals and for the countryside surrounding Concord (Thoreau’s Complex Weave, 43). 8. Milder, Reimagining Thoreau, 29.

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sites located not only in New England’s colonial and Indian past, but also in ancient Greece and Egypt. Thoreau begins the book’s opening chapter, “Concord River,” by saying that the “Musketaquid, or Grassground River, though probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony.” The river’s name thus comprises both the Native American and the European American versions of history, yet Thoreau’s association of the Concord River with early civilization’s two most famous rivers extends the reach of his historical comparison back to the very beginnings of recorded time. Nevertheless, Thoreau’s comparisons of life along the banks of the American river to quotidian life in ancient Egypt usually tend to magnify the former while deprecating the latter. This display of cultural favoritism was grounded in Thoreau’s republican sentiments, which verged, at times, upon outright chauvinism. Thoreau criticizes the Egyptians primarily for having invested their time in building pyramids, a theme that will resurface in Walden, as when, in “Economy,” he says that a debased “love of garlic and bread and butter” had persuaded the Egyptians to build a tomb “for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile. . . .” This passage is typical of Thoreau’s customary association of the ancient Egyptians, whether of high caste or of low, with vanity and servility, qualities that inevitably result from a culture’s having permitted itself to become ensnared, or rather enslaved, by materialism. Thoreau represents the idea of making the trip as having been his, and in giving a reason for going, he ostensibly offers nothing more elaborate than simple curiosity. Yet the sinuous tropes with which he frames the brothers’ decision to go appear to have been chosen expressly to help promote an early identification of his narrating voice in the book with the passive, fatalistic world of nature rather than with the overeager, vainly striving culture of nineteenth-century America: I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made; the weeds at the bottom gently bending down the stream, shaken by the watery wind, still planted

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All this would have sounded very romantic indeed to the majority of nineteenth-century American readers, who undoubtedly looked upon rivers chiefly as avenues of commerce rather than as routes to follow during week-long pleasure excursions, much less as manifestations of any so-called eternal law. Yet throughout the book Thoreau uses rivers as loci for convergences of human and natural histories. As he reminds his readers in another nearby passage, rivers, in addition to providing highways for trade, have also conducted travelers, time out of mind, into the interior, or into places “where the animal and vegetable kingdoms attain their greatest perfection.” Moreover, because Thoreau and his brother will beach their boat on these same weeds in the book’s concluding sentence, the concept of “progress” itself is subtly undermined by the book’s overall cyclic structure. Thus Thoreau alerts his readers early in his book that he will treat the river “transcendentally” and symbolically, and if he should discuss destiny (the unspoken topic of the sentences quoted above), it will not be a manifest destiny. “SATURDAY” Thoreau’s narrative begins in earnest when he says, “At length, on Saturday, the last day of August, 1839, we two, brothers and natives of Concord, weighed anchor in this river port” and began piloting their homemade rowboat northeastward, toward Lowell. As they depart Concord they glide by the North Bridge Battle Monument, dedicated only three years earlier in a public ceremony at which Emerson had read his occasional poem “Concord Hymn,” describing how “ . . . Time the ruined bridge has swept / Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.” In a spirit of competition, emulation, or both, the Thoreau brothers append to Emerson’s original two stanzas eight more of their own, carefully preserving his rhyme scheme and, with some exceptions, his iambic tetrameter. The brothers’ stanzas describe, somewhat conventionally, how the “din of war” had eventually been drowned in the “waves of Concord,” but these are succeeded by another brief,

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utterly dissimilar unit of verse that, while functioning as a continuation both of Emerson’s poem and of the brothers’ joint effort, is also an independent lyric in its own right, written by Thoreau in retrospect long after the trip had concluded: But since we sailed Some things have failed And many a dream Gone down the stream.

Now, Thoreau says, in addition to the ruined bridge itself, time has swept away both John Thoreau’s life and some of his own dreams of achieving literary prominence. Thoreau’s four-line meditation upon Emerson’s dedicatory lines acquires a twofold irony by appearing in an elegiac book that is itself a monument, as well as by abandoning, after initially appearing to sustain, the literary idiom in which his mentor had expressed his own elegy for the Revolutionary dead. Thus Thoreau manipulates various temporal points of view by alluding, in short order, to the dedication of the battle monument, to the brothers’ commentary upon the dedicatory hymn, and to his own retrospective interpretation of their commentary. The presence in the book of such multilayered chronologies constitutes yet another reason why A Week should be read as a sort of temporal palimpsest, upon which the story of the trip has been inscribed, and reinscribed, both by time and by Thoreau. That these multiple acts of inscription serve a locational purpose for Thoreau has been pointed out by Frederick Garber, in his book Thoreau’s Fable of Inscribing. Garber connects Thoreau’s persistent interest in autography, or self-inscription, with his distinctive sense of being “at home” in the world.9 To this insight I would only add that Thoreau’s various forms of “inscription” serve to position him in the world temporally, as well as spatially. “SUNDAY” In keeping with the temporal fact that a “drizzling rain” prevented the brothers from getting away until Saturday afternoon, the “Sunday” chapter is more than twice as long as “Saturday,” much of it 9. Garber, Thoreau’s Fable of Inscribing; see especially chapter 4, “Autographical Acts.”

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devoted to expressing Thoreau’s own religious unorthodoxy or heterodoxy, upon which the rest of the book is tacitly predicated. This he does more or less through contrast rather than disputation, an indirect approach that helps him avoid seeming, at this comparatively early point in his book, too blasphemous or didactic. At about the time that Thoreau embarked upon writing A Week, the topic of religion was much on his mind, or more precisely, the fallibility of organized religion, as practiced in the West. Of this period in Thoreau’s life, Robert Richardson says, in his biography A Life of the Mind, “All his reading for this summer and fall of 1840 has a common thread, that the Bible-centered Judeo-Christian worldview was neither the only nor even necessarily the best account of things.”10 A major attitudinal component of normative Christianity was, as I have tried to show, a salvationist approach to time, and, as had been true for Emerson, Thoreau discovered his theology to have been irrevocably modified by his readings in the sciences, especially geology. Thoreau read Lyell’s Principles in 1840, a year after making the boat trip, so that even though he would not have had Lyell’s book in hand while the brothers were actually upon the river, he would have it in mind while writing A Week at Walden Pond. Thoreau’s imbrication in his text of material from Lyell is exemplified by his treatment of a journal entry for October 11, 1840, made while he was reading the Principles, which would find its way as well into A Week. Thoreau indirectly compares the amount of time required to formulate the theory of “deep time” with the period required to persuade someone to reexamine his religious convictions: In a lifetime you can hardly expect to convince a man of an error— You must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced his grand children may be. It took 100 years to prove that fossils are organic, and 150 more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge. (J, 1:188)

In the journal, this passage falls within a more general meditation upon the sincerity and truthfulness of scientific observers, as well as upon the deep “foundations,” in time and in moral character, of science or “natural philosophy”: 10. Richardson, Life of the Mind, 82.

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Deep are the foundations of all sincerity—even stone walls have their foundation below the frost. Aristotle says in his “Meteorics” “as time never fails, and the universe is eternal, neither the Tanais, nor the Nile, can have flowed forever.” [Here Thoreau quotes from The Principles] Strabo, upon the same subject, says, “It is proper to derive our explanations from things which are obvious, and in some measure of daily occurrence, such as deluges, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, and sudden swellings of the land beneath the sea.” (J, 187)

Here, within or beneath the journal’s customarily elliptical and discursive style, Thoreau may be seen purposefully conflating images drawn from several contexts. The “sincerity” of which Thoreau is speaking refers most directly, considering the preceding paragraph’s praise for the “true man of science,” to the scientist’s steadfastness in propounding a theory. Scientific inquiry produces knowledge, which, like a stone wall whose foundation extends below the frost line, remains unshakable and, like time itself, constant. The source of the scientific observer’s confidence is the patency of his proof: Anyone who wishes to perceive geological forces in operation may do so, daily. Yet when Thoreau recycles this journal entry in A Week, his emphasis shifts away from the tenacity of scientists to limitations imposed upon the understanding by Christian orthodoxy: You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grand-children may be. The geologists tell us that it took one hundred years to prove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge. I am not sure but that I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece rather than to my country’s God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks. (Wk, 64–65)

Thoreau recurs here to his theme about the slowness and constancy of both time and of scientific progress, yet this topic is immediately, and somewhat disconcertingly, succeeded by a teasingly blasphemous suggestion that Greek polytheism might be preferable to monotheistic

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Christianity. The transition seems abrupt, yet Thoreau’s line of thinking becomes clearer upon reflection. According to Western religious tradition, the Noachian deluge was visited upon humankind by God as punishment for sin in a display of divine spleen that Thoreau contrasts with the deportment of the classical age’s more liberal, and less vindictive, deities. Jove, despite his bawdy adventures among mortals, is more of a “gentleman” in his transactions with humankind, more “catholic”—and here Thoreau’s use of the term is probably ironical— and permissive than Jehovah, the jealous god. In addition, the Greek and Roman gods were more closely attuned to nature than was the more abstract Christian deity, more “intimate” with matters of the world than was the “unapproachable” Jehovah. In questioning Christianity’s harmoniousness with nature Thoreau strikes a pose more calculated to shock even than the one struck by Wordsworth when he wrote, in “The world is too much with us” that his era’s selfish materialism had grown so pervasive that he might prefer adopting a “creed outworn.” Thoreau’s juxtaposition of geology with Greek mythology in this quotation becomes still more meaningful if we consider the full context of its appearance in A Week’s travel narrative. It falls in the midst of a consideration of the strictness with which many New England towns observed the Sabbath, both in recorded history and in Thoreau’s own time. Even after the colonial era, it remained illegal in many New England municipalities to travel upon the Sabbath. The brothers, rowing through the town of Middlesex on a Sunday, are exposed to the disapproving looks of churchgoers who make “heathenish comparisons” about them as they pass by. But Thoreau turns the tables on these pious citizens, asserting that “we were the truest observers of this sunny day,” a statement that, with its submerged pun upon “sun day,” implies that the townspeople who have sequestered themselves inside their church on such a lovely morning are the true “heathens.” Thoreau also criticizes Middlesex’s small-minded citizenry for being old-fashioned and anachronistic, as well as hypocritical. He recalls finding in Concord some old town records detailing the village elders’ interrogation of two men found traveling “on the Sabbath, December 18, 1803,” in a rig “used to carry barrels” (of liquor, presumably). “We were the men,” Thoreau admits with tongue in cheek, “that were gliding northward, this September 1, 1839, with still team, and rigging not the most convenient to carry barrels, unquestioned by any squire

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or church deacon, and ready to bear ourselves out if need were.” Thus Thoreau exposes the citizens’ strict adherence to the Sabbath as an attitude long gone out of date; his playful, yet nevertheless sarcastic and angry, substitution of his brother and himself for the long-departed whiskey-smuggling teamsters referred to in the record implicitly attacks such backward thinking by representing time as not having progressed at all, despite an interim of three decades. Thoreau then goes on to mention a Puritan settlement’s punishment of Sabbath violators by confinement in a cage erected near the meetinghouse, and he drily observes that since the time of the Puritans “Society has relaxed a little from its strictness, one would say, but I presume that there is not less religion than formerly. If the ligature is found to be loosened in one part, it is only drawn the tighter in another” (64). The connection between Thoreau’s comments in A Week upon the Sabbath and those upon science in his journal now becomes clearer: Christianity has effectively slowed time down by impeding man’s intellectual progress, and even, occasionally, his moral development. Thoreau thereby establishes an implicit contrast between “natural” time on the river and “unnatural” intolerance on the shore. As I mentioned earlier, the river of time in Thoreau’s book, rather than being a symbol of material progress, is emblematic primarily of spiritual development, nourished and encouraged by nature. It has been speculated that Thoreau’s heterodox religious beliefs, expressed carefully yet unapologetically in the “Sunday” chapter, may have cost him some readers, thereby contributing, eventually, to the book’s commercial failure.11 Thoreau was well aware of what others labeled his “pantheism,” which he literalizes in “Sunday” as “worship of Pan,” saying of himself, with understated wit, “Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine” (65). Thoreau’s consciously contrarian strategy for achieving spiritual progress was to turn back toward the past (and the farther back, the better) to find new ways of interpolating it with the present and the future, rather than, like his Middlesex neighbors, becoming enmeshed in a past preserved passively and uncritically. He was freed to do this by his own transcendentalist temporal telos, which did not, like Emerson’s humanistic developmentalism, see all present moments 11. See Denham Sutcliffe’s foreword to the Signet Classic paperback edition of A Week, xii.

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as tending toward a future perfection, but rather opportunistically brought all other times to bear upon the present moment, to intensify its reality. As he would later write in Walden, at the conclusion of “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” “Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe . . . till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamppost safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time” (97–98). For future reference in our discussion, it is worth noting that the “Nilometer” Thoreau refers to here was a real object that once stood upon an island in the Nile near Memphis.12 It was one of the few Egyptian artifacts Thoreau found admirable. “MONDAY” The falsity of the Sabbath observances described in the “Sunday” section of A Week stems from their foundation in a conceptualization of time that nature does not validate or recognize. Nature’s “Sabbath” is either perpetual or nonexistent; therefore, the act of setting aside only one day per week for piety is itself impious. Although attitudes such as those displayed by the citizens of Middlesex are, as Thoreau commented, slow to change, still they may be changed, and in the “Monday” chapter, Thoreau reflects more generally upon the topic of temporal reform, drawing into his discussion not just religion, but secular issues too, especially social reform. Thoreau signals his determination at the chapter’s outset, for his first epigraph is a quotation drawn from John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Gower employs archaic transitive and intransitive verbs that Thoreau must have found intriguing: I thynke for to touche also The world whiche neweth everie daie, So as I can, so as I maie. (Prologue, ll. 58–60) 12. See Walter Harding, ed., Walden: An Annotated Edition, 94.

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A world that can “new” itself can renew itself, and Thoreau wished not only to “thynke” on such a world, but to “touche” it as well, that is, to bring it within the scope of his empirical experience. The first temporal topic Thoreau raises in “Monday” is, however, time’s magnitude, which is so great as to make individual acts of reform seem initially either insignificant or futile. As we consider time in larger and larger units, the significance of a single incident or instant rapidly diminishes: individual actions appear to lose their meaning when seen against the larger backdrop of time’s totality. In this regard Thoreau finds common ground between geology and Hindu philosophy, for both predicate such a titanic volume of time that the entire scope of human endeavors may seem to vanish. Thoreau’s figure for time’s all-inclusiveness is that of a river’s current being drawn irresistibly to the sea, and as the latter absorbs the former, so too can time seem to “drink up” the actions of men, rendering them futile: We occasionally rested in the shade of a maple or a willow, and drew forth a melon for our refreshment, while we contemplated at our leisure the lapse of the river and of human life; and as that current, with its floating twigs and leaves, so did all things pass in review before us, while far away in cities and marts on this very stream the old routine was proceeding still. There is, indeed, a tide in the affairs of men, as the poet says, and yet as things flow, they circulate, and the ebb always balances the flow. All streams are but tributary to the ocean, which itself does not stream, and the shores are unchanged but in longer periods than man can measure. Go where we will, we discover infinite change in particulars only, not in generals. When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today. “Time drinketh up the essence of every great and noble action which ought to be performed, and is delayed in the execution.” So says Veeshnoo Sarma; and we perceive that the schemers return again and again to common sense and labor. Such is the evidence of history. (124)

Thoreau’s citation of the Vishnu Sarma, a collection of Hindu proverbs, exemplifies his growing interest in Hinduism as an alternative source of temporal authority. In fact, throughout A Week, Thoreau privileges Hindu mythology while simultaneously denigrating another

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“oriental” philosophy, that of ancient Egypt. For Thoreau, the cardinal “error” of the Egyptians’ religion was their belief that the body should be preserved for reanimation in the afterlife. Such an obsession with corporeal materialism demonstrates, Thoreau says, that humankind has always needed to reform itself, but from within, as Emerson recommended in “Self-Reliance,” rather than from without by “artificial” means. What most stands in need of reform is the notion that any individual life retains a high precedence in nature, whereas in reality, the law is that particulars are absorbed into the general, as rivers are by the sea. This primal sea does have its tides and its movements, but they operate on such a massive temporal scale that man is incapable, ordinarily, of detecting them. Thoreau sees the Egyptian “error” of selfish materialism perpetuated among contemporary reformers, who are themselves in need of reform when they project their schemes preliminarily to changing themselves; they understand “reform” to mean a change in external circumstances only, rather than a shift in attitude or perspective. Thus, as a precondition to instigating societal reform, Thoreau argues for philosophical reform, which, according to his own brand of latter-day stoicism, required man to derive his moral principles from nature. To find out what does and does not matter in life, human beings first had to adapt themselves, he maintained, to seeing from nature’s broader perspective, which includes a more catholic view of time. As I have said, taking a longer view of time is compatible either with Hinduism, which Thoreau began reading intensively in 1846,13 or with the new geology. Thoreau agreed with Lyell’s assertion that time elapses on a scale that exceeds human powers of comprehension. Yet an awareness of time’s true magnitude could be used, somewhat cynically, to rationalize a refusal to essay near-term reforms in society, which was, like the earth underfoot, essentially “invariable”: As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past change in the present invariable order of society. The greatest appreciable physical revolutions are the work of the light-footed air, the stealthy-paced water, and the subterranean fire. Aristotle said, “As time never fails, and the universe is eternal, neither the Tanais nor the Nile can have flowed forever.” We are independent of the change we detect. 13. In regard to Thoreau’s early reading in Hindu sacred texts, see Richardson, Life of the Mind, 175.

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The longer the lever the less perceptible its motion. It is the slowest pulsation which is the most vital. (128)

Thoreau indulges here in a bit of “social Lyellism,” analogizing from uniformitarian geologic principles to societal processes. The root causes of injustices and inequities, he says, rest ultimately in the human character, which undergoes virtually no change from generation to generation. The more profound reforms in the character of our species go on unnoticed, because their rate of change is so gradual. And yet, because such changes do require vast quantities of time, they are so much the more likely to become pervasive and effectual. What humankind really lacks is an accurate index to time, that is, an index that has some basis in reality, as determined by nature. Employing such a “realometer,” to borrow his neologism from Walden, would give us the perspective necessary to determine which issues we should concern ourselves about, and which are too trivial to merit our attention. “Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us,” Thoreau says, with studied insouciance, “but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend” (129). Thoreau does profess a willingness to participate in reforms out of an interest in the welfare of his fellow man, yet like Emerson in “Self-Reliance,” he asserts he will do so only when such actions are consistent with his own philosophy, and not because any organization, religious or otherwise, has pronounced them virtuous: “I do not wish, it happens, to be associated with Massachusetts, either in holding slaves or in conquering Mexico. I am a little better than herself in these respects” (130). As a temporal reformer, Thoreau declares his freedom from the past as he declares his independence from those civil institutions which he finds immoral. “I love man—kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors” (131). Thoreau’s wordplay in these two sentences is exuberantly polysemous. For example, the corny joke “man—kind” reverberates, after a moment’s consideration, upon several different levels. Thoreau wants to take the long view of humankind, which, as a species, displays potential for evincing greater compassion and kindness, but its moral progress is obstructed by the dead hand of the past. As parts of speech, the words “dead” and “unkind” shuttle back

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and forth between being adjectives and nouns, their meanings shifting accordingly. Those people whose memories do not deserve to be preserved by posterity, that is, the “unkind,” are still with us, through the agency of archaic and corrupt institutions such as slavery; yet the dead, spoken of generically, are themselves “unkind” for exerting an undue influence upon the living. Their “wills”—a word Thoreau uses in full consciousness of its many meanings—control our own wills, so that we, as “executors” of their estates, are reduced to acting as time’s executioners. And by killing time, as Thoreau would go on to remind us in Walden, we also necessarily become assassins of eternity. Thoreau suggests that an investigation of the philosophies of the East, especially Hinduism, could provide a viable starting point for temporal reform in the West, since the oriental “index” of time operates on a much longer basis than does our own, which is born of a culture that is itself still relatively young. Oriental conservatism, which Western observers were prone to criticize as justifying inactivity in worldly affairs and indifference to civil injustices, might actually originate, Thoreau suggests, from a keener appreciation of the slow speed at which nature’s currents flow. He quotes the Laws of Menu (or Manu), an ancient Hindu compendium of laws, or code of conduct: “Immemorial custom is transcendent law,” says Menu. That is, it was the custom of the gods before men used it. The fault of our New England custom is that it is memorial. What is morality but immemorial custom? (135)

Thoreau’s characterization of New England custom as “memorial” is significant. He takes advantage of the word “immemorial’s” denotation, that is, being literally “out of memory,” while “memorial” betokens an enslavement to the dead past, literally a monument to the dead, like the “votive stone” Emerson helped dedicate at Concord’s battle site. But in rationalizing the necessity of acting in a comparatively static world, Thoreau turned primarily not to the Laws of Menu, but to the Bhagavad Gita, and most particularly to its central event, the battlefield dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna. Arjuna asks Krishna why he should engage in warfare, since killing enemy troops who are his kinsmen seems senseless and wasteful, as well as sinful. Thoreau cites Krishna’s advice to Arjuna to fight, that is, to take action in the world, despite knowing that his endeavors, viewed from the long perspective, are ultimately ineffectual. “‘Perform the settled

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functions,’ says Kreeshna in the Bhagvat-Geeta, ‘action is preferable to inaction. The journey of thy mortal frame may not succeed from inaction’” (135). Moreover, an intellectual appreciation of the universe’s aloofness did not relieve man of the obligation to act. Thoreau quotes Krishna in the Gita again: “‘The man who is acquainted with the whole, should not drive those from their works who are slow of comprehension, and less experienced than himself.’—Wherefore, O Arjoon, resolve to fight . . .’” (135). Thoreau does briefly admit that adherence to Eastern religions can promote a kind of cultural stagnation, and he praises Christianity—which, he reminds his readers, was originally an “Eastern” religion in its own right—for its moral energy. “Christ is the prince of Reformers and Radicals,” says Thoreau. “There is no harmless dreaming, no wise speculation in [Christianity], but everywhere a substratum of good sense. It never reflects, but it repents. . . . The New Testament is remarkable for its pure morality; the best of the Hindoo Scripture, for its pure intellectuality” (137). Aside from this somewhat obligatory encomium to Christianity, however, Thoreau’s focus in the “Monday” chapter remains fixed squarely upon Hinduism, specifically the Gita. Thoreau goes on to discuss Hinduism’s discrimination of the various degrees of awareness of time that different castes, such as the Brahmin or the soldier class, possess, yet he appropriates this difference to construct a more generic model of the temporal discrepancy between oriental and occidental societies. He figures them as being as different, literally, as night and day: Behold the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental. The former has nothing to do in this world; the latter is full of activity. The one looks in the sun till his eyes are put out; the other follows him prone in his westward course. There is such a thing as cast [sic], even in the West, but it is comparatively faint; it is conservatism here. It says forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no violence, rend no bonds, the State is thy parent. Its virtue or manhood is wholly filial. There is a struggle between the oriental and occidental in every nation; some who would be forever contemplating the sun, and some who are hastening toward the sunset. The former class says to the latter, When you have reached the sunset, you will be no nearer to the sun. To which the latter replies, But we so prolong the day. The former “walketh but in that night, when all things go to rest in the night of time. The contemplative Moonee sleepeth but in the day of time, when all things wake.” (141)

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Thoreau approves of the Orient’s “wise conservatism” because it is founded upon a more authentic, because longer, view of time, while he disapproves of a Western “conservatism” that binds the living to the dead, and the individual to the state, because its cultural memory extends back no further than a few generations. Yet these differences appertain within societies as well, says Thoreau, so that any one culture, rather than having “the party of the Past” and “the party of the Future,” as Emerson proposed in “The Conservative,” would instead have an “eastern” portion that sees time as being cyclical, and a “western” moiety directed toward mercantilism, utilitarianism, and material progress. This latter group is not necessarily completely in the wrong; after all, as Krishna told Arjuna, the fate of humankind is to be active, even if the universe itself does not impute a very high importance to action. Toward the end of this paragraph Thoreau generates, from these inter- and intracultural differences, a temporal inversion in which day is substituted for night, and vice versa. Those who subscribe to an “oriental” outlook may live, during part of their days, in a “night” of nontime, that is, during a period in which time has “set,” and so is no longer operative. The rest of the world remains insensible to this period of no-time, and thus is “asleep.” The “contemplative Moonee,”14 on the other hand, sleeps during the “day” of time, while all the rest of the world is awake and about its business. This paradigm of an atemporal order coexisting with or paralleling the normative temporal order accords well with the transcendentalist theory that during revelatory moments we may live, if only transiently, “above time,” still having one foot, so to speak, planted in either domain. The Laws of Menu, the Bhagavad-Gita, the sayings of Zoroaster, the analects of Confucius—sacred writings such as these, says Thoreau, are so ancient as to be almost geologically old. For example, Thoreau says of the Laws of Menu that they are “believed by the Hindoos ‘to have been promulged in the beginning of time, by Menu, son or grandson of Brahma,’ and ‘first of his created beings’; and Brahma is said to have ‘taught his laws to Menu in a hundred thousand verses, which 14. The “Munis,” to advert to a spelling Thoreau adopts a few pages farther along in A Week, were Hindu wise men. Here he may be using the more phonetic spelling if only to get a wonderfully apt pun upon moon.

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Menu explained to the primitive world in the very words of the book now translated” (148). Holy scriptures join with myth as fundamental statements of meaning that transcend temporal contexts, and therefore they constitute the form of human “inscription” that is nearest in spirit to eternity. Their antiquity, says Thoreau, “alone make[s] us doubt if the poetic form and dress [of words] are not transitory, and not essential to the most effective and enduring expression of thought. Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light which it is destined to receive thence” (143). Poetry and other forms of literary expression are relative newcomers in comparison to these books of wisdom, Thoreau says, whose language has been preserved over the centuries by the forcefulness of their truth, as opposed to their style. Anticipating the establishment of formal studies in comparative religion by about a decade,15 Thoreau subsequently calls for the collection of the world’s various scriptures into one vast “Scripture of mankind,” with each gospel indexed to every other one. “Such a juxtaposition and comparison,” he suggests, “might help to liberalize the faith of men. This is a work which Time will surely edit, reserved to crown the labors of the printing press” (144). Such a compilation would be pantheistic indeed, in the largest sense. Furthermore, as scriptures would supplant literature in Thoreau’s multicultural, multitemporal utopia, myths would take the place of history. “If we will admit time into our thoughts at all,” he says, “the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world’s inheritance, still reflecting some of their original splendor, like the fragments of clouds tinted by the rays of the departed sun . . . these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race . . .” (157–58). These wisdom texts and myths were of such an ancient date that they were not just “geologic,” but virtually elemental themselves, in an Aristotelian sense: Nor will we disturb the antiquity of this Scripture, “From fire, from air, and from the sun,” it was “milked out.” One might as well investigate the chronology of light and heat. Let the sun shine. Menu understood this matter best, when he said, “Those best know the divisions 15. Max Müller is often credited with having pioneered the study of comparative religion shortly after 1855. See Joachim Wach, The Comparative Study of Religions, 3.

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By immersing himself, as the final sentence in this quotation demonstrates, in the ancient scriptures of other civilizations, Thoreau derived not just the benefit of their knowledge, but also the vicarious pleasure of participating in their present. A recovery of the past may thereby result in a recontextualized and expanded present whose depth approaches or equals nature’s richness of experience. Thoreau’s final sentence also confronts the reader with a paradox: If these civilizations are so ancient, how could a contemporary man like Thoreau live “under” them? Temporal paradoxes such as this one subtly challenge a reader’s received notions about what constitutes the present moment, a preliminary tactic in Thoreau’s overall campaign of pressing for temporal reform on a one-to-one basis with the reader. He also uses rhetorical and narrative devices to disrupt the rigid temporal fabric of the conventional travelogue genre. By exploiting time as a “stream” he “goes a-fishing in,” as he says in Walden, that is, by dipping in and out of the past at will and then resuming the fictive, narrative time of the present, Thoreau conveys to the reader his own professed sense that at any one time, many times are simultaneously available. In the “Monday” chapter of A Week, for example, he asks, “And do we live but in the present? How broad a line is that? I sit now on a stump whose rings number centuries of growth” (153; emphasis mine). In this statement alone, Thoreau’s “broad” philosophical or transcendental present includes a multilayered time whose presence is suggested or signaled via several techniques. Physically, Thoreau is “supported” by the stump of the past; figurally, his “present” is supported by the presence of the past, materially encoded within the tree stump’s growth rings; rhetorically, he is supported by his temporally fictitious use of the word “now,” which implies that he is sitting on the stump while he writes these very words. Although Thoreau may indeed have been sitting on a real stump by Walden Pond while he wrote this sentence, plainly he is more interested, as an artist, in using rhetorical devices to achieve a chronologic

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verisimilitude. This technique is sustained in the sentence immediately following, in which he uses relative pronouns and the present tense to generate a complex virtual present: “If I look around I see that the soil is composed of the remains of just such stumps, ancestors to this. The earth is covered with mold. I thrust this stick many aeons deep into its surface, and with my heel make a deeper furrow than the elements have ploughed here for a thousand years. If I listen, I hear the peep of frogs which is older than the slime of Egypt. . . . I raise my fairest and freshest flowers in the old mold” [emphasis mine]. This virtuoso display of temporal manipulation culminates shortly afterward as Thoreau uses his stick figuratively to dig all the way to China.16 As he “digs,” he encounters progressively ancient cultures, figured as geologic “strata”: Why, what we would fain call new is not skin deep; the earth is not yet stained by it. It is not the fertile ground which we walk on, but the leaves which flutter over our heads. The newest is but the oldest made visible to our senses. When we dig up the soil from a thousand feet below the surface, we call it new, and the plants which spring from it; and when our vision pierces deeper into space, and detects a remoter star, we call that new also. The place where we sit is called Hudson,— once it was Nottingham,—once—“ (153–54)

In spirit this rhetorical trip backward through time is very geologic indeed, replicating the ease with which professional geologists may enumerate strata and recreate, in their imaginations, vanished or buried landscapes. But Thoreau incorporates space as well as time, superimposing upon the brothers’ immediate fictive campsite in New Hampshire not only the Hudson Valley, almost one hundred miles distant to the west, but also England’s Sherwood Forest, in which other sylvan ne’er-do-wells had roamed in an equally distant mythic and historical past.17 Cultures are interchangeable, says Thoreau; space and time, fungible. Ordinarily we are blinded to this truth by our immersion in 16. In the “Economy” chapter of Walden Thoreau mentions a “crazy fellow once in this town” who dug a hole so deep that he said he could hear “the Chinese pots and kettles rattle.” As Harding points out, north of Concord was a modest hole in the ground that townspeople called “the hole to China” (Annotated Walden, 55). 17. A preliminary link between the Thoreau brothers and Robin Hood’s merry men is established early in the “Monday” chapter by the inclusion of epigraphs drawn from the Robin Hood ballad cycle.

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the “new,” which is often determined and circumscribed by the limits of our sense impressions. Actually, Thoreau observes, the present moment extends backward or “downward” infinitely far into the past, a regression evoked stylistically by Thoreau’s concluding dash. All of these redefinitions and new indexings of time bear directly upon the nature of the monument or memorial Thoreau proposes to construct in his book. Traditionally, monuments such as the one the brothers had rowed past at the Concord Battle site were constructed to preserve a moment in time for posterity. To Thoreau, however, this is symptomatic of “Egyptian” thinking, dominated by a materialistic habit of mind that vainly seeks to preserve the material reality of an instant in a manner analogous to the way the ancient Egyptians had tried to preserve the physical body. He asks in the “Monday” chapter, Why should the monument be so much more enduring than the fame which it is designed to perpetuate,—a stone to a bone? “Here lies,”— “Here lies”;—why do they not sometimes write, There rises? Is it a monument to the body only that is intended? “Having reached the term of his natural life”;—would it not be truer to say, Having reached the term of his unnatural life? The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth. (170)

Because John Thoreau died at an age that was certainly “unnaturally” young, this passage acquires a distinctly personal significance. In his bitter rhetorical questions, Thoreau struggles with the conceptual problem of devising, as a temporal reformer, a memorial that is both appropriate to the memory of his brother and consistent with his own beliefs. A few pages earlier, he had asked: Of what moment are facts that can be lost—which need to be commemorated? The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided to them; the living fact commemorates itself. Why look in the dark for the light? (154)

Thoreau goes on to project the conflict he encountered between his identities as artist and as grieving brother onto the figure of the historian, who, with each successive discovery about the past that he makes, necessarily learns more about himself and about his own present (which is only the culmination of events that have gone before). In a meditation upon the office of the historian that is perhaps unintentionally self-referential, Thoreau coins another tempo-

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rally based pun to characterize what historians do with the past they uncover: Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veil hangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. (155)

For Thoreau as natural or local historian, the past’s “knowability” became a critical issue. Despite Champollion’s heroic exertions, the “Egyptian” past remained, in Thoreau’s own literary iconography, untranslatable, “dark,” and antithetical to the sun. The “Greek” past, on the other hand, was sunlit, accessible, and “contemporary,” perhaps because his own culture descended from it. This dichotomizing of the ancient past into “Egyptian” and “Greek” eras produces two memorial emblems that Thoreau mentions toward the end of the “Monday” chapter—Memnon’s head and the Aeolian harp. Both have their origins in antique civilizations and so “contain” the past, and both respond musically to natural stimuli: the harp to the wind, and Memnon’s head to the rays of dawn. The memorial message of the Aeolian harp, or rather its memorial inscription, as set forth in Thoreau’s poem in A Week, “Rumors from an Aeolian Harp,” is that in “a vale which none hath seen,” where “every virtue has its birth,” time stands still at its moment of greatest potential: There love is warm, and youth is young, And poetry is yet unsung, For virtue still adventures there, And freely breathes her native air.

In this secluded paradise for rural saunterers, time does not elapse, perhaps because the known has been successfully integrated with the unknown, for, in a place where, as Thoreau writes, “foot of man has never been,” inhabitants may paradoxically breathe their “native air.” The eponymous harp rumors the existence of this “vale,” which, while it is somewhat akin to the materialized and stereotypic Christian heaven, more closely resembles classical Elysium. Almost immediately after concluding the poem, Thoreau recurs to an image drawn from his journal, that of hearing telegraph wires “singing” in the wind one

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morning like modern Aeolian harps. This “telegraph harp,” Thoreau writes, “like the statue of Memnon . . . resounds only in the morning, when the first rays of the sun fall on it” (177). Telegraph wires are drawn into the memorializing language of Thoreau’s tropes because they satisfy his need to “present” the past: Although a recent invention, the wires behave in ways consistent with mythical objects carried forward from antiquity through time. Yet despite the felicitousness of Thoreau’s simile, a successful integration of Memnon’s head—which, as a temporal artifact, is more “foreign,” and therefore more culturally and intellectually indigestible, than the Aeolian harp—into a fully performative present will not be accomplished until the “Wednesday” chapter of A Week. “TUESDAY” In a book that has often been criticized for being excessively discursive, Thoreau wanders farthest afield in “Tuesday.” The brothers’ trip itself bogs down when their boat becomes enveloped by morning fog, reminding Thoreau of another fog he had seen from the vantage point of Saddleback Mountain’s summit.18 His narration of that ascent consumes several pages, and his “foggy” digression inaugurates a more general discussion of prospects and perspectives, both visual and spiritual. This rhetorical excursion gives way to yet another digression away from the river and toward the hills, as Thoreau recounts his overnight stay at the house of an uncivil old farmer who lives in the “romantic and retired” Nashua River valley, upon which, we may speculate, Thoreau modeled the sequestered “vale” described in “Rumors of an Aeolian Harp.” Back again, at length, upon 18. Thoreau’s inclusion of his ascent up Saddleback Mountain represents yet another of A Week’s temporal displacements. Garber points out that Thoreau did not make that climb until 1844, fully five years after the brothers had completed their boat trip (Thoreau’s Fable of Inscribing, 118). In the narrative, however, the digression is framed in such a way that a reader accepts it as being told retrospectively rather than prospectively. Thoreau says simply, by way of introduction, “More extensive fogs, however, have their own limits. I once saw the day break from the top of Saddleback Mountain in Massachusetts, above the clouds. As we cannot distinguish objects through this dense fog, let me tell this story at more length” (180; emphasis added). By creating the temporal illusion that the reader is present, in real time, with the brothers during their immobilization by the river fog, Thoreau distracts the reader from noticing his chronological evasiveness.

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the river, Thoreau describes the brothers’ intermittent encounters with other boaters, summoning up memories of the canalboatmen of their youth, a breed Thoreau remembers with a nostalgia reminiscent of Samuel Clemens’s for the vanished keelboatmen, in Life on the Mississippi. Other boaters retrieved from memory and the past include the voyageurs, whom Thoreau, whose patronymic was French, admired for their hardiness and woodlore. He singles out for praise an account written by Alexander Henry of his company’s Adventures, not only for its wealth of narrative excitement and historical detail, but also for Henry’s accurate descriptions of nature. “What is most interesting and valuable . . . is . . . not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves” (219). Thus history is shown to have a component of timelessness particularly when it treats of natural facts, which are as demonstrably true today as they were in the past. Such “truths” are “perennial” because they never go out of date. The chapter concludes with one other “timeless” feature of history, the poetry of Anacreon. For Thoreau, as I have said, Greek culture apparently possessed a purity that stood in stark contrast to the ostentatious arrogance of all things Egyptian, and in this preference he betrays a cultural bias. What Thoreau says he most enjoys about the poetry of Anacreon is its contemporaneousness: “There is something strangely modern about him” (226), which is another way of saying that Thoreau felt a cultural affinity for him. Anacreon is therefore not anachronistic; indeed, Thoreau’s putative kinship with the Teian poet runs so deep that he figures Anacreon’s poetry in A Week’s text as a “pleasant harbor” in which he and his brother may briefly anchor in their imaginations, or as a “journal” written by “some other sailor, whose bark had ploughed, perchance, more famous and classic seas” (225). This comparison is strained, to say the least, yet Thoreau’s continual self-identification with the Greeks, whether in theology or in literature, does help to promote his overall design in the book of investigating the possibilities offered by historical synchronicity. If, as Emerson proposed in “Self-Reliance,” no one historical epoch was any better or worse than another, the present may be thought of as yet another manifestation of the past, and vice versa. New England could be found in Arcadia, Athens in Concord.

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“WEDNESDAY” In this chapter Thoreau shifts from the historical and literary past to the natural and geologic, especially in his contemplation of the rocks above Amoskeag Falls, near Manchester. Thoreau’s recursion in the “Sunday” chapter to the Principles, via his journal, showed that reading Lyell helped confirm his already long-standing belief that orthodox Christianity had become an impediment to mankind’s direct engagement with nature, as in a comprehension of geologic mechanisms. But from Lyell he also absorbed a concept with which, as we have seen, Emerson was compelled to come to grips, too: that the dimensions of deep time are so great as to defy, potentially, not just our conventional powers of comprehension, but also the entire scope of our imaginations. This idea is in evidence during Thoreau’s sustained meditation upon the rounded stones he and his brother witness resting in potholes in the upper part of the falls: The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time. . . . Not only have some of these basins been forming for countless ages, but others exist which must have been completed in a former geological period. In deepening the Pawtucket Canal, in 1822, the workmen came to ledges with pot-holes in them, where probably was once the bed of the river, and there are some, we are told, in the town of Canaan in this State, with the stones still in them, on the height of land between the Merrimack and Connecticut, and nearly a thousand feet above these rivers, proving that the mountains and the rivers have changed places. There lie the stones which completed their revolutions perhaps before thoughts began to revolve in the brain of man. The periods of Hindoo and Chinese history, though they reach back to the time when the race of mortals is confounded with the race of gods, are as nothing compared with the periods which these stones have inscribed. That which commenced a rock when time was young shall conclude a pebble in the unequal contest. With such expense of time and natural forces are our very paving stones produced. They teach us lessons, these dumb workers; verily there are “sermons in stones, and books in the running brooks.” In these very holes the Indians hid their provisions; but now there is no bread, but only its neighbor stones at the bottom. Who knows how many races they have served thus? By as simple a law, some accidental by-law, perchance, our system itself was made ready for its inhabitants. (248–49)

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In this important passage Thoreau’s images and rhetorical devices bend back upon themselves like folded and compressed strata. He subdivides time into categories differentiated by successive cultures’ utilization of the falls and their associated rocks. These temporal-cultural divisions include the present day’s construction of canals and cobblestone streets; the older European adoption of any stone, emblematized by Thoreau’s quotation from As You Like It, as typological signifier; and the Indians’ use of the potholes to cache their food. That the townspeople and the Indians employed river rocks as paving stones or potholes as cupboards are facts that are not in themselves especially revelatory, for, as Emerson had written in Nature, “commodity” was one of the several means by which nature makes itself available or accessible to man. But the term inscribes gestures simultaneously toward a consideration of Emersonian-style correspondences, that is, symbolic manifestations of nature’s impulse to communicate with us. Through “hieroglyphic” traces left upon the landscape by geologic processes, nature writes in the “book” of the “brook.” Frederick Garber defines “inscriptions” as “acts that share significant features with what we traditionally call writing.” He suggests that in both A Week and Walden, Thoreau’s frequent figuration of the natural world as a sheet of paper or “field of inscribing” stems from a wish to write himself into that world, as a means of making a home for himself. Thus the concept of “inscription,” as concretized in Thoreau’s writing, would embrace not only writing, but also “natural writing,”19 or marks left upon the landscape in the forms of fossil traces, animal tracks, cellar holes excavated from the earth, or plough furrows. Vast periods of time are required to learn how to “read” this book as well as to “write” it, yet such a world awaits, Thoreau’s concluding sentence suggests, having been made expressly “for” us. Moreover, by conflating the act of authorial “inscription” with the passage of time, Thoreau’s figures render the empirical world a kind of “wisdom book” in its own right, comparable to the Bhagavad Gita or the Laws of Menu. The word period signifies not just a historical epoch, but also the rounded full stop that the stones have “inscribed” into the geologic record. Similarly, while revolution denotes time’s cyclical passage, indicated by each stone’s orbit within the circumscribed space of its pothole, the term also looks ahead to Thoreau’s reference in the next 19. Garber, Thoreau’s Fable of Inscribing, 14, 172.

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sentence to Hinduism’s sacred-secular history, which is recorded not just in years, but in karmic cycles. As the antiquity of Hinduism’s recorded history merges, at some distant point in the past, with mythic or divine time, human history melts into the nearly endless sea of geologic time. Thoreau’s effort to call our attention to inscribe’s denotation of gravure, or the scratching of grooves or pits into plates, is integral to his larger strategy of blurring the distinction between human and natural histories, impressed into a resistant medium by the point of a pen or of a burin, or by the rocks themselves. Nevertheless, one other distinction that may become lost against the larger perspective of geologic time is that of Old World versus New World. If the antiquity of an object could be determined by discerning upon it the presence of engraved messages in cryptic idioms such as the Egyptian hieroglyphics, America had its own prerogative to the past, Thoreau maintained, in the form of inscribed, and inscriptive, rocks such as those found above Amoskeag Falls. In a densely allusive passage Thoreau appropriates the archeologist’s task, in “reading” legends left upon stones, for the transcendentalist’s, in determining natural correspondences: Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with lichens, and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mold, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome, or Greece, Etruria, or Carthage, or Egypt, or Babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare? The lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which beginning and imperfect Nature suspended there. Still hangs her wrinkled trophy. And here too the poet’s eye may still detect the brazen nails which fastened Time’s inscriptions, and if he has the gift, decipher them by this clue. The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins. Here may be heard the din of rivers, and ancient winds which have long since lost their names sough through our woods;—the first faint sounds of spring, older than the summer of Athenian glory, the titmouse lisping in the wood, the jay’s scream, and bluebird’s warble, and the hum of “bees that fly About the laughing blossoms of sallowy.” Here is the gray dawn for antiquity, and our to-morrow’s future should be at least paulo-post to theirs which we have put behind us. There are the red-maple and-birchen leaves, old runes which are not yet deciphered; catkins, pine-cones, vines, oak-leaves, and acorns; the very

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things themselves, and not their forms in stone,—so much the more ancient and venerable. And even to the current summer there has come down tradition of a hoary-headed master of all art, who once filled every field and grove with statues and god-like architecture, of every design which Greece has lately copied; whose ruins are now mingled with the dust, and not one block remains upon another. The century sun and unwearied rain have wasted them, till not one fragment from that quarry now exists; and poets perchance will feign that gods sent down the material from heaven. (250–51)

In this paragraph staking America’s own claim to antiquity, Thoreau’s figures employ terms that participate simultaneously in the domains of history, archaeology and geology, and biology. “Dust,” for example, is a poetic euphemism for ruins, but Thoreau’s language also reifies and literalizes it. “Mold” means “humus,” yet it also signifies fungal growths, a denotation that is reinforced by his subsequent reference to lichens. Then Thoreau introduces an admixture of historical content by comparing the lichen’s “wrinkled trophy” to the Persian shields that the Athenians hung as trophies in the Temple of Minerva. All such lexical composites serve to promote Thoreau’s overarching rhetorical objective of conflating history with natural history. Follow history back into the past far enough, he tells us, and you will find on American shores the same rocks the ancients used to build their temples. Thoreau’s catalogue of ancient place names, beginning with Rome, recedes ever further back into the past, and yet the rocks of his native New England are themselves the remnants of former geologic periods. In order to recover this natural and historic past, however, we first had to learn how to “read” it. The alphabets of some of the cultures Thoreau enumerates, such as Egypt and Etruria, were famed for being cryptic, and his emphasis in the early portion of this quotation upon “reading” such enigmatic inscriptions is at least as marked as his emphasis upon the validity of the New World’s claim upon the past.20 Thoreau’s introduction of the word ruin, coming, as it does, in the context of his musings upon the availability in nature of “clues” 20. Thoreau’s use of geology, as opposed to archaeology and history, to validate America’s claim upon antiquity in A Week is typical of a wider practice not only among the transcendentalists, but also among other antebellum artists, scientists, and theologians. As Barbara Novak observes, in her valuable book Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875:

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for interpreting “ruins” once thought indecipherable, suggests that he intends for us to hear that word, in our mind’s ear, as “runes.” This subliminal pun is reinforced by the appearance of the word itself only a few lines farther along in the paragraph. Such a pun would lexically embody Thoreau’s contention that ruins themselves, and not just the inscriptions that appear upon them, may be interpreted not solely by archaeolinguists, but by geologists and poets as well; furthermore, the reader, in “deciphering” such a pun, replicates the labors of these various researches. But Thoreau’s language also privileges his own activity as an observer who can bring to bear upon the landscape a perceiving consciousness that is at once scientific, historic, and aesthetic. In the text he implicitly aligns himself with the “poet” who, by deciphering transcendental correspondences, is spiritually and intellectually allied both with Champollion, who used the Rosetta Stone to crack the “code” of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the geologist, who can “read” in rocks the presence of the past. In America, as in Europe or the Far East, a poet might discern the depth and significance of the past by learning how to interpret clues left upon his native rocks by the “brazen nails which fastened Time’s inscriptions.” Put another way, a poet “gifted” in the fields of geology and mycology might be able to date rocks by discerning upon them discolorations comparable to those left upon marble pediments by the bronze nails used to fasten decorative friezes. In concert with this expertise in the sciences, the poet brings to the task an aesthetic sensibility that permits him to make just such a philosophical-poetical argument as we see here. One additional justification Thoreau offers for intermixing Old World and New World histories is that the ancients based their architectural idioms upon organic forms resembling those found in American New England. Although the Greeks could not have known the paper birch or the sugar maple, their art attests that they were completely familiar with pines, grapevines, and oaks. On America’s shores, says Thoreau, we have “the very things themselves, and not their forms in stone—so With every geological discovery America grew older. Geological time, transcending exact chronology, was infinite and thus potentially mythical. Through geology, chronological time was easily dissolved in a poetic antiquity that fortified the “new” man’s passion for age. . . . From this point of view, the “nature” of the New World was superior to the “culture” of the Old. (58)

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much the more ancient and venerable.” Moreover, as transcendentalist and idealist, Thoreau valorizes the idea behind the artifact over the artifact itself, for ideas are immune to time, unlike all the “blocks” that have tumbled to dust, and unlike even the ruined rocks shaped by nature, the “hoary-headed master of all art.” For Thoreau, “hammered” or dressed stone such as was used to construct the pyramids is emblematic of a doubly mistaken approach toward temporality, since neither the mummies they immured nor the blocks of sandstone of which they were built could withstand what Wordsworth called time’s “unimaginable touch.” In Walden Thoreau castigates Egypt for “burying itself alive” with hammered stone and asserts that “a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest man’s field is preferable to “hundred-gated Thebes.” Thoreau’s criticism of Egypt’s supposed materialism focuses often upon an abuse of a skill at which he himself excelled—mensuration. The Egyptians’ misuse of measurement is exemplified by their devotion of their sophisticated surveying and architectural techniques primarily to the service of the dead (or the soon-to-be dead) rather than to the living, as opposed to the New England farmers who hired Thoreau to lay out the rods of stone wall that enclosed their life-sustaining fields of hay and corn. Thoreau appends to his preceding claim to a classical antiquity for America a contrastive rejection of a materialistic “Egyptian” past symbolized by the temple at Karnak. He introduces his sonnet “Carnac,” in which he appropriates for himself the memorializing quality of Egyptian architecture, with a harangue of what he perceives as Egypt’s diseased, mortality-obsessed vanity: What though the traveler tell us of the ruins of Egypt, are we so sick or idle that we must sacrifice our America and today to some man’s illremembered and indolent story? Carnac and Luxor are but names, or if their skeletons remain, still more desert sand and at length a wave of the Mediterranean Sea are needed to wash away the filth that attaches to their grandeur. Carnac! Carnac! here is Carnac for me. I behold the columns of a larger and purer temple: This is my Carnac, whose unmeasured dome Shelters the measuring art and measurer’s home. Behold these flowers, let us be up with time, Not dreaming of three thousand years ago, Erect ourselves and let those columns lie, Not stoop to raise a foil against the sky.

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Above Time Where is the spirit of that time but in This present day, perchance the present line? Three thousand years ago are not agone, They are still lingering in this summer morn, And Memnon’s Mother sprightly greets us now, Wearing her youthful radiance on her brow. If Carnac’s columns still stand on the plain, To enjoy our opportunities they remain.

In this rather well-crafted sonnet Thoreau substitutes an unstructured American memorial scene for the highly elaborate and foreign structure of an Egyptian temple, yet he nevertheless also imports from Egypt into his native, natural “temple” the image of Memnon’s statue, inevitably brought to mind by mention of Memnon’s mother Eos, goddess of the dawn.21 The pronominal referent for “This” in the poem’s first line we might think at first to be America as a whole, and so it could be; however, an alternate, much more specific antecedent may suggest itself if we return to the scene he and his brother had been examining only a few pages earlier in the text: Amoskeag Falls. And yet determining the most appropriate referent for “this” becomes even more problematic if we look back at Thoreau’s initial version of the poem, recorded in his journal entry for August 6, 1845. There Thoreau’s thoughts first turn to the temple at Karnak because he has been reading Warburton’s The Crescent and the Cross, a romanticizing account of the Crusades. Thoreau decides he has wasted his time reading the book, and in his disgust over that lost time, he compares his immediate surroundings at Walden Pond with the exotic foreign locales described in Warburton’s book: Here grow around me nameless trees and shrubs, each morning freshly sculptured—rising new stories day by day—instead of hideous ruins— Their myriad-handed worker—uncompelled as uncompelling 21. The famous singing statue of Memnon was the northernmost of two statues erected near the great temple of Karnak at Thebes. According to Greek legend, Memnon was an Egyptian king and Trojan ally killed by Achilles during the fall of Troy (subsequently, however, Egyptologists have identified the figure represented by the statue as Amenhotep III, a king whose reign preceded the Trojan War by at least a century). Perhaps Memnon’s association with the Greeks, whom Thoreau admired, was the reason why he praised the singing head while condemning virtually all other Egyptian antiquities.

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This is my carnac—that its unmeasured dome—the measuring art man has invented flourishes and dies upon this temple’s floor nor ever dreams to reach that ceilings height. Carnac & Luxor crumble underneath—their shadowy roofs let in the light once more reflected from the ceiling of the sky. (J, 2:168; emphasis added)

Here, at least, the relative pronoun “this” clearly refers to the natural habitat encircling his house at Walden, and “that” refers to the sky overhead. Significantly, it is not the house itself that is being compared to a temple, but rather the natural forms surrounding it. As artist, nature constructs its own temples of foliage that rise seemingly to the skies. Thoreau’s language contrasts this organic art with “the measuring art man has invented,” which crumbles inevitably into “hideous ruins.” Thoreau’s inclusion of “measuring” also suggests that this passage is at least partially self-referential. Although Thoreau scorns premeditated, methodical artistry such as the Egyptian stonemasons practiced, he realized that in constructing his house and writing his book, he too was a builder. But he distinguishes his “measuring art” from that of the Egyptians by forswearing any ambition to create something lasting; only nature and the sky are permanent. Thoreau humbly submits that his art will not emulate Egypt’s or nature’s, but instead remain transitory, vulnerable to time, and mortal rather than immortal, so that it “dies” upon the forest floor. His art will remain open to the sky, unlike the Egyptian roofed temples that shut out the sun, but which have now, Thoreau recognizes with some satisfaction, become ruins whose “ceilings” are once again the firmament. The basis for Thoreau’s original comparison of the woods surrounding him at Walden to the temple at Karnak is revealed by this journal passage to be organic form, present in America in its original state rather than translated into architectural forms and motifs such as the lotus-shaped capitals of Karnak’s pillars. In the version of “My Carnac” that finally appears in A Week, Thoreau substitutes the remembered scenery around Amoskeag Falls for the natural setting at Walden Pond that had originally inspired him to compose the poem in his journal. Within the textual limits of A Week, the title “My Carnac” refers most visibly to the falls themselves, or, rather, to the rocks standing above them, but the falls and his homesite at Walden Pond are both types of ideal natural settings in which Thoreau’s art could flourish.

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By constructing the memorial enshrined in the sonnet, Thoreau also interposes himself in the stream of time. Earlier in the text he had said, before embarking upon his apparent digression into the affiliations between human and natural history, that the potholes worn into the river’s bedrock “must be our antiquities, for lack of human vestiges. The monuments of heroes and the temples of the gods which may once have stood on the banks of this river, are now, at any rate, returned to dust and primitive soil. The murmur of unchronicled nations has died away along these shores, and once more Lowell and Manchester are on the trail of the Indian” (249). The pebbles that had worn the potholes are like the Egyptian laborers who patiently “hammer” stone, yet the pebbles are superior, for they do not memorialize time but serve rather as indexes or measurements of time’s power and passage. Similarly, in writing “My Carnac,” Thoreau “rebuilds” the temple of antiquity, yet without stooping to the level of crass materialism for which, as we have seen, he repeatedly criticized the historic Egyptians. His “hypaethral” temple preserves its idealism in three ways: by being “constructed” in the open air, in harmony with nature; by being expressed literarily rather than materially; and by indexing time, rather than attempting to immobilize it in a memorial.22 The “unmeasured dome” in Thoreau’s poem is, of course, the sky that shelters both the “measurer” and “measurer’s art.” As a surveyor, Thoreau was a practitioner of a craft that was sheltered, literally and paradoxically, by the outdoors. Yet the title of “measurer” pertains equally to someone who writes in “measures” such as the sonnet, one of the more highly wrought verse forms. Thoreau exempts himself from the Egyptians’ supposed materialistic employment of the measuring skill by incorporating it here as literary practice, si22. In his journal, Thoreau wrote, shortly after finishing A Week: I thought the one peculiarity of my “Week” was its hypaethral character—to use an epithet applied to those Egyptian temples which are open to the heavens above—under the ether—I thought it had little of the atmosphere of the house about—but might wholly have been written, as in fact it was to a considerable extent—out of doors. It was only at a late period in writing it, as it happened, that I used any phrases implying that I lived in a house, or lead [sic] a domestic life. I trust it does not smell of the study & library—even of the Poets attic, as of the fields & woods.—that it is a hypaethral or unroofed book—lying open under the ether—& permeated by it. Open to all weathers—not easy to be kept on a shelf. (J, 3:279)

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multaneously distancing himself from their “corrupt” memorializing techniques and validating his efforts to fashion a memorial out of words rather than stones. In the sonnet’s third line, it is difficult to say whether Thoreau, whom I shall accept as the poem’s explicit narrator, is apostrophizing his brother John, calling his attention to the flowers he has noticed growing by the falls, or addressing the reader, or speaking to both.23 Similarly, it is difficult to tell whether we are to imagine the narrator standing by the side of the falls, or before the actual ruins of Karnak in the Egyptian desert. Yet these deliberate confusions of intended auditor and narrative perspective are themselves consistent with the poem’s disordering of temporal frames of reference. Within the sonnet’s succinct architecture, the imagined fallen columns at Karnak exist in contrast to the erect flowers growing by the falls, so that to be “up” with time signifies both verticality, since the columns had once stood on end, as flowers sit atop their stalks, and contemporaneousness, since the flowers (unlike the columns) continue to live and grow in the moment. When Thoreau urges his brother, and the reader, to “erect” themselves, he allies them, imagistically, with the flowers, rather than with the columns. Once they are “standing” again, he says, they should disdain to “stoop to raise a foil against the sky” by enclosing nature’s meditative sanctuary within the confines of a constructed temple. In the poem’s seventh line, the words “that time” may refer simultaneously to ancient Egypt and to the late summer in 1839, when the brothers had visited the falls. Thoreau subsequently suggests that “that time” may be implanted within the present day, “perchance the present line.” Thus in one bold artistic stroke Thoreau relocates the dual chronologies and dual locations of the poem within the substance of the poem itself, which, rather than memorializing time either in antiquity or in the recent past, performs it. If Thoreau is indeed apostrophizing 23. In Thoreau’s Complex Weave, Linck Johnson delineates another connection between Memnon and John Thoreau. When Memnon died at Troy, he was reputed to have been still in his youth. Thus Memnon symbolizes all young men who have been prematurely cut off by death: “A Week prolongs the memory of another such youth to yet later mornings” (59). I would only add to Johnson’s insight that John Thoreau would also have been comparable to Memnon in that both dead youths were the sons of “morning/mourning.”

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his dead brother, the poem exhorts John Thoreau to be alive by living in the moment, standing by the thundering falls, while simultaneously seeking to “raise” him from the dead, or retrieve him from memory.24 Thoreau’s performative statement “the present line” falls at the end of the sonnet’s octet, structurally the most powerful position in the poem, and the sestet enters upon a more specific restatement of the generalization limned out in the first section. A personified morning is greeting the speaker and his unidentified auditor at that moment just as it had Memnon’s statue in Egypt, three thousand years before; now, however, the poem, and not the statue, “sings,” enacting and performing the truth of Thoreau’s message.25 Nevertheless, the poem’s last line is admittedly deficient, both musically and syntactically, and Thoreau’s concluding point is vague, in disappointing contrast to the rest of the poem’s robustness of tone. Yet he appears to be saying in his conclusion that the actual columns at Karnak exist, today, not to memorialize the past so much as to present advantages to presentday observers: they are to be used, like the stone walls surrounding a farmer’s field, or the potholes left by revolving rocks above Amoskeag Falls. Thoreau is, of course, himself making such a use of the temple’s columns and statues in this very poem when he exploits the ruins at Karnak as a trope in the construction of a multitemporal memorial to his brother. But unlike the materialistic Egyptians, who used their skills as surveyors to produce dead memorials for dead people, Thoreau uses his own “measuring” art to fix a place in time, that is, to establish a temporal high-water mark. In this sense Thoreau’s 24. In Thoreau’s Morning Work, Peck emphasizes how Thoreau’s manipulation of time in A Week is instrumental to achieving the memorializing effect of the book: Unlike the natural cycle of the seasons that structures Walden, A Week is a purely human and therefore arbitrary measure of time. This is appropriate to the elegiac intentions of A Week; Thoreau made the voyage on which the narrative is based with his brother John in 1839. Completed almost ten years after the voyage, A Week honors an experience that through a mixture of planning and coincidence happened to occur in the final days of the summer of 1839, but can now be memorialized—given to memory—by fixing it in the human record as “a week.” (10) 25. It seems to me to be almost inconceivable that so knowledgeable a classicist as Thoreau would not have noticed the phonetic similarity of the name “Memnon” both to the Latin root memor, or “mindful,” and the Greek mn¯emosun´e, “memory.”

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“Nilometer” was a “realometer,” for it preserved the temporal reality, and therefore the significance, of his brother’s life and death. “THURSDAY” In this short chapter the brothers reach “the limit of [their] voyage,” and, appropriately, one topic raised in it is the cessation of time, or at least, the limits of measuring it. In the previous chapter, men measured time, whether historically, geologically, or literarily; time itself, however, remains inherently continuous, uniform, undifferentiated. Thoreau declares in “Thursday” that “Time measures nothing but itself,” an observation he makes in the context of discussing the writings of the Roman satirist Aulus Persius Flaccus. His comments about Persius are taken almost verbatim from a piece he had already written for the Dial in July 1840.26 Although it is initially unclear why this piece should reappear in A Week, an examination of Thoreau’s themes and images in this self-contained essay may help clarify matters. Thoreau cites Persius’s writings as part of a larger reflection upon the need for truthfulness and a clear conscience. In order to cultivate these qualities, Thoreau maintains that we must first learn to live authentically in the moment and resist the temptation to qualify or justify our present actions. In other words, we must learn to live “extemporaneously,” literally, “out of the time.” He quotes and then translates a passage from Persius’s third satire, in which the satirist recommends living according to plan, rather than serendipitously: Est aliquid quo tendis, et in quod dirigis arcum? An passim sequeris corvos, testâve, lutove, Securus quo pes ferat, atque ex tempore vivis? Is there anything to which thou tendest, and against which thou directest thy bow? Or dost thou pursue crows, at random, with pottery or clay, Careless whither thy feet bear thee, and live ex tempore?

But Thoreau converts Persius’s vice into a virtue, emending the last line to read, “Securus quo pes ferat, atque ex tempore vivit” (311), in 26. For a history of the piece’s editing by both Thoreau and Emerson, as well as a list of Thoreau’s emendations, see the Princeton edition of Thoreau’s Early Essays and Miscellanies, 378–80.

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effect claiming that he who lives extemporaneously is indeed mindful of where his feet are going. “The life of a wise man,” says Thoreau, is most of all extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity which includes all time. The cunning mind travels further back than Zoroaster each instant, and comes quite down to the present with its revelation. The utmost thrift and industry of thinking give no man any stock in life; his credit with the inner world is no better, his capital no larger. He must try his fortune again to-day as yesterday. All questions rely on the present for their solution. Time measures nothing but itself. The word that is written may be postponed, but not that on the lip. If this is what the occasion says, let the occasion say it. All the world is forward to prompt him who gets up to live without his creed in his pocket. (311–12)

Further, Thoreau says of character and of art, in words that apply as validly to himself as they do to Persius: The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact. There is but one stage for the peasant and the actor. The buffoon cannot bribe you to laugh always at his grimaces; they shall sculpture themselves in Egyptian granite, to stand heavy as the pyramids on the ground of his character. (312–13)

Here, even though he is writing about Persius, Thoreau reflexively gives himself permission to write or inscribe his memorial in A Week. If his character and his art were flawed, he tells himself, he must nonetheless persevere; the moment demanded that he construct a prose memorial. Yet rather than receiving his inspiration from an examination of literature’s great elegies, he models his literary production upon Persius’s satires, whose oft-criticized flaws constituted, he decided, a kind of warped virtue. Persius, despite his own warning that life must be lived deliberately and planned accordingly, satisfies Thoreau’s artistic criterion that it is best to speak extemporaneously, or out of the moment, for only by doing so could one hope to live out of all time, ex tempore. This juncture at which Thoreau concedes that his project might not succeed is crucial to the book’s overall structure. Although he could not be sure whether his prose memorial for his brother might be judged by posterity to be, like the pyramids, merely a vulgar display of vanity, such as a pyramid sitting “heavy . . . on

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the ground of his character,” or as simply one more fruitless attempt to resist mutability, he might yet aspire to sound, like Memnon’s head or the Aeolian harp, a note in accord with nature and therefore synchronous with the sempiternal “morning time” of the present instant. The “Thursday” section also contains a lyrical section in which Thoreau reaffirms that all times are immanent within any particular hour, so that “Night forwardly plants her foot even at noonday, and as Day retreats she steps into his trenches, skulking from tree to tree, from fence to fence, until at last she sits in his citadel and draws out her forces into the plain” (320). Although time, as a human construct, measures nothing but itself, nature measures time with infallible accuracy, except that every moment is the current one. “The landscape contains a thousand dials which indicate the natural divisions of time, the shadows of a thousand styles point to the hour,” says Thoreau, and he says that if he were to fall sleep and then awaken in the woods, he would be notified what hour it was by differences in the landscape “that no painter can paint” (319). Thus Thoreau identifies one of the transcendentalists’ essential paradoxes about time: All instants are interchangeable, and yet each instant is unique. From this reflection upon nature’s contemporaneity, Thoreau embarks upon a temporal excursion into the past, specifically to the Indian captivity narrative of Hannah Dustan, an early settler who had lived in Haverhill, New Hampshire.27 Although Dustan ultimately escapes her Indian captors, she does so only after having witnessed them brain one of her infant children against an apple tree. That same tree, Thoreau says, produced apples other settlers remembered having eaten in the years since her abduction. The image is a disconcerting one, for it carries with it the implication of cannibalism, applied, ironically, to the “civilized” pioneer population rather than to the “savage” Indians. Thus the tangible “proof” of the story’s authenticity and antiquity, the apple tree, is simultaneously figured as the site of a communal “consumption” of the past. Yet the image becomes even more complexly disturbing, for Thoreau’s next reference is to Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Adam and Eve eat the apple of legend: “This [the Dustan abduction] seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost” (324). Thoreau’s tropes, enfolded both tempo27. As Peck points out in Thoreau’s Morning Work, the name Thoreau spelled “Dustan” was originally spelled “Duston” (169 n. 16).

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rally and culturally, thus work yet again to suggest a blurring of the historical into the mythical, and on this occasion that transformation takes place not only across multiple temporal frames of reference, but also across cultures. A comprehension of the radical “sameness” of all time comes as a shock, Thoreau says, because we cannot imagine the present as past, past as present: “On beholding an old picture of Concord, as it appeared but seventy-five years ago, with a fair open prospect and a light on trees and river, as if it were broad noon, I find that I had not thought the sun shone in those days, or that men lived in broad daylight then. Still less do we imagine the sun shining on hill and valley during Philip’s war, on the warpath of Church or Philip, or later of Lovewell or Paugus, with serene summer weather, but they must have lived and fought in a dim twilight or night” (324). In “Thursday” Thoreau finally brings the past up into the present forcefully, yet also dismissively, if the past is defined as consisting solely of the available historical record. Almost fifteen years before he read The Origin of Species, Thoreau could still question whether geologists’ computations of chronology finally possessed any significance for the average person, who could conceive of time only as an extension of human history, itself merely the elongated shadow of any individual’s own history: The age of the world is great enough for our imaginations, even according to the Mosaic account, without borrowing any years from the geologist. From Adam and Eve at one leap sheer down to the deluge, and then through the ancient monarchies, through Babylon and Thebes, Brahma and Abraham, to Greece and the Argonauts; when we might start again with Orpheus and the Trojan war, the Pyramids and the Olympic games, and Homer and Athens, for our stages; and after a breathing space at the building of Rome, continue our journey down through Odin and Christ to—America. It is a wearisome while.— And yet the lives of but sixty old women, such as live under the hill, say of a century each, strung together, are sufficient to reach over the whole ground. Taking hold of hands they would span the interval from Eve to my own mother. A respectable tea-party merely,—whose gossip would be Universal History. The fourth old woman from myself suckled Columbus;—the ninth was nurse to the Norman Conqueror;—the nineteenth was the Virgin Mary;—the twenty-fourth the Cumæan sibyl;—the thirtieth was at the Trojan war and Helen her name;—the thirty-eighth was Queen Semiramis;—the sixtieth was Eve the mother of mankind. So much for the

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—“old woman that lives under the hill, And if she’s not gone she lives there still.” It will not take a very great-granddaughter of hers to be in at the death of Time. (324–25)

Here Thoreau’s attitude toward time stands in stark contrast to that which is implicit in the passage about Amoskeag Falls quoted earlier. In this depiction of time as an exclusively human construct, time lacks both the scope and majesty represented by the river stones’ untiring “effort” to modify the landscape, as well as any suggestion of being open to human interpretation such as had been present in Thoreau’s reference to the stones’ “inscription” of a lesson for us to learn or the flowers’ injunction to us to be “up” with time. Time’s “tea party,” in contrast, possesses no direction, no meaning, and the whole record of universal history is reduced to idle gossip. The beginning and end of mankind are thus the alpha and omega of time, as we, at least, experience it; we can extend our imaginations no farther than the limits of our own existences, projected matrilineally and genetically both forward and backward. Although Thoreau does not explicitly portray humankind’s existence as being “nasty, brutish, and short,” it is coincidental with the life and “death” of time. Nature is not mentioned, and indeed, does not seem even to have an existence of its own beyond that of Homo sapiens. Time becomes indistinguishable from history, itself a closed cycle that displays no change, and no progression. Thus, at least in sections of the “Thursday” chapter, we do not yet see the more optimistic, because progressive, view of time that became more characteristic of Thoreau especially in the years after he became acquainted with Louis Agassiz and, later, the writings of Darwin. In “Thursday,” Thoreau’s view of time is dominated temporarily by history, and the vision history generates is a dark, bloody, and self-consuming one. “FRIDAY” If the “death” of time is presaged in A Week’s “Thursday” section, in “Friday” it recovers, brought back to health by a rejection of death’s ascendancy over life. Death and decay are natural in the natural world, Thoreau reminds himself: “The constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth” (352). Yet man, through his excessive materialism, may upset nature’s delicate

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balance between life and death. Thoreau, whose thoughts turn in this chapter to agriculture and husbandry, provides an example: the substitution of cultivated crops for wild plants, coupled with overgrazing by cows and swine, has increased the incidence of disease, through an acceleration of the process of decay. “[T]he earth . . . having been long subjected to extremely artificial and luxurious modes of cultivation, to gratify the appetite, [was] converted into a stye and hot-bed, where men for profit increase the ordinary decay of nature” (355). In effect, agriculture’s destruction of native flora has spoiled America’s original purity, symbolized metonymically in Thoreau’s text by the fragrance that early European explorers of the New World had reported detecting while still many miles out at sea. To purify the earth and air of America required the admission of salubrious sunlight and a ventilating wind. In addition to this implicit criticism of his countrymen for depending upon livestock and manured fields, Thoreau renews his attack upon the ancient Egyptians, most especially upon the symbol of what was, to Thoreau’s way of thinking, their primary fetish of materiality, the pyramid. The shadow cast by the pyramids is typical of all shadows by being widest at the base and narrowest at the apex; this twodimensional blockage of the sun is, however, subsequently dispelled by the sun’s three-dimensional radiance: . . . [O]ur darkest grief has that bronze color of the moon eclipsed. There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it. Shadows, referred to the source of light, are pyramids whose bases are never greater than those of the substances which cast them, but light is a spherical congeries of pyramids, whose very apexes are the sun itself, and hence the system shines with uninterrupted light. But if the light we use is but a paltry and narrow taper, most objects will cast a shadow wider than themselves. (352–53)

Unlike the pyramids, Thoreau’s proposed open-air memorial would be receptive to sunlight, because, having no materiality, it is illuminated equally on all sides. Such a memorial may be “built” or written by the side of the Merrimack, for “The revolutions of nature tell as fine tales, and make as interesting revelations, on this river’s banks, as on the Euphrates or the Nile” (356). Thoreau’s more “native” memorial might also be likened to yet another apple tree that appears in A Week, this one named after “Elisha,” an Indian in the employ of

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a Tyngsborough resident, who had been killed in an Indian battle and was supposedly buried nearby. Simultaneously, however, this tree also had driven into it a nail indicating how high the river had risen during the great flood of 1785 (304). As a high-water mark, a “Merrimackometer,” “Elisha’s apple tree” could be thought of as being another “archaeological” artifact suitable for memorializing John Thoreau, since not only had it persisted through time, but it also contained within itself the accumulated infusions of historical and natural meanings. Thoreau observes of archaeologic memory, versus archaeologic artifacts: Sometimes we see objects as through a thin haze, in their eternal relations, and they stand like Palenque or the pyramids, and we wonder who set them up, and for what purpose. If we see the reality in things, of what moment is the superficial and apparent longer? What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them? While I sit here listening to the waves which ripple and break on this shore, I am absolved from all obligation to the past, and the council of nations may reconsider its votes. The grating of a pebble annuls them. Still occasionally in my dreams I remember that rippling water. Oft, as I turn me on my pillow o’er, I hear the lapse of waves upon the shore, Distinct as if it were at broad noonday, And I were drifting down from Nashua. (359)

Here, the proper actions of rock and water, pebbles “inscribing” the river bottom or sands piling up on the shore, disperse the veiling mists of temporal illusion, represented by the only seemingly opaque and enduring ruins of Palenque’s or Egypt’s pyramids. By making memory, rather than hammered and dressed stone, the basis of his memorial, Thoreau remains congruent both with transcendentalism’s underlying idealism and with his own determination to integrate his brother’s death with an overall pattern of existence determined by nature. Moreover, by fulfilling his obligation to erect a memorial for his brother, Thoreau also derives a personal benefit by gaining a new understanding of time that will permit him to live in the moment while yet retaining the ability to revisit, and even reenact, the past. Key to this effort was developing the faculty of existing with nature “above”

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time, free of fallacious and arbitrary chronological measurements devised by man. In this final chapter of A Week, Thoreau discovers both a remedy for mutability and a validation for his own continued existence, despite his brother’s passage out of life. He writes: When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet. There is a pleasant tract on the bank of the Concord, called Conantum, which I have in my mind;—the old deserted farm-house, the desolate pasture with its bleak cliff, the open wood, the river-reach, the green meadow in the midst, and the mossgrown wild-apple orchard,—places where one may have many thoughts and not decide any thing. It is a scene which I can not only remember, as I might a vision, but when I will can bodily revisit, and find it even so, unaccountable, yet unpretending in its pleasant dreariness. When my thoughts are sensible of change, I love to see and sit on rocks which I have known, and pry into their moss, and see unchangeableness so established. I not yet gray on rocks forever gray, I no longer green under the evergreens. There is something even in the lapse of time by which time recovers itself. (350–51)

Like time, Thoreau recovers himself in A Week, by becoming neither older, by “graying,” nor younger, by “greening.” The “presentness” of the book, in enacting his trip with his brother, replicated the “presentness” of nature, thereby reintegrating Thoreau into both nature and time, out of which the trauma and injustice of his brother’s premature death had cast him. Then, too, during the time he “lost” while writing the book, Thoreau paradoxically “recovered,” from the clutches of the past, time he had spent with his brother. As he had observed, “Time measures nothing but itself”; time is not so linear as we have come to believe, he says in this passage, nor is it always unrecoverable. Time’s essential uniformity or fungibility also rendered it susceptible to being condensed within the artistic and conceptual framework of a book. In reality the brothers were gone from Concord for two weeks, and the book’s temporal compression anticipates Thoreau’s longer, more intensive distortion of time in Walden, which essentially distills the experiences of a little over two years spent at the pond into a single narrative year. The episodic structure of A Week, in which nearly every chapter is rounded with a sleep as the brothers camp upon the riverbank, helps promote the impression that the book is a sequentially written travel diary. Overall, however, a cyclic and

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recursive pattern informs the book, which, as I mentioned previously, depicts the brothers returning to the very site from which they had embarked, one “week” earlier.28 The reader, too, is delivered back to where he or she had begun, producing a sense of “no-time” while the book’s action elapses, or while the book is being read, and in this regard the entire book may be viewed as being performative. Although summer has turned to autumn by the time the book concludes, the passage of time, compressed within the brothers’ rapid trip homeward before a favoring wind, has been reduced virtually to a single temporal point, that of the boat’s entry onto, or exit from, the river of time. While an actual river’s current proceeds in only one direction, the brothers’ boat travels full circle, into the past and then beating back into current time, and in A Week Thoreau finally brings the past, which includes both the life and death of his brother, into harmony with the present. In Walden, however, Thoreau’s temporal motif of the circle will undergo a profound developmental shift. There, he concentrates upon amplifying the significance of the present moment, so that it expands outward like a ripple upon the still surface of Walden Pond, or like the successive growth rings of a maturing tree.

28. Thoreau apparently wished to concentrate upon the brothers’ life upon the water, rather than upon the shore. As Richardson says, “Thoreau compressed two weeks into one, essentially cutting out the middle week he and John had spent traveling on land and merging the first Thursday with the second” (Life of the Mind, 155–56).

3 CIRCLES AND LINES Emerson’s Parade of Days After the exertion of entering into such a place, through a passage of . . . perhaps six hundred yards, nearly overcome, I sought a restingplace, found one and contrived to sit; but when my weight bore down on the body of an Egyptian, it crushed it like a band-box. I naturally had recourse to my hands to support my weight, but they found no better support; so that I sank altogether among the broken mummies, with a crash of bones, rags, and wooden cases, which raised such a dust as kept me motionless for a quarter of an hour, waiting till it subsided again. I could not remove from the place, however, without increasing it, and every step I took crushed a mummy in some part or other. —Giovanni Belzoni, The Tombs of the Kings of Thebes, discovered by G. Belzoni (1820) On time; Three Sentences I am glad of a day when I know what I am to do in it. There is no time to brutes. The only economy of time is in every moment to stick by yourself. —Emerson, Journal, October 21, 1836 Encoded within Emerson’s image of the rose in “Self-Reliance” is a paradox: One may rise above or surmount time only by possessing it and inhabiting it absolutely. For Emerson and Thoreau, living

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“above” time implied an ability to live in the moment—not for the moment, but rather to live fully in the present tense. If our senses are completely attuned to what we are seeing and doing, they insisted, the present may indeed be rendered timeless, becoming a revelatory state of eternal transience, which Emerson, echoing his friend Carlyle, designated oxymoronically as the “everlasting Now.” Yet Thoreau and Emerson tended to define the present moment somewhat differently. While Thoreau concentrated upon the fullness of the minute, Emerson’s fundamental chronologic unit was the day. Emerson envisioned his own life as consisting of a series or “procession” of days, each one unique, each one a god. The image of a long line of particularized individuals evidently possessed special significance for Emerson, because processions, parades, and pageants recur regularly throughout his formal and informal writings. As a means of representing chronologic time, the image of a procession offered Emerson several advantages, as time considered as a river, an allied image, did for Thoreau. Each figure in Emerson’s processions marches independently of his or her fellows, and this quality of separateness lends itself to the suggestion that the days remain discrete from each other, even when concatenated into weeks, months, or years. Moreover, the linear format of a procession also implies an essential equality among all participants, so that past, present, and future are all alike, except that each instant of the present comes briefly into focus as an observer watches the parade file past. That an observer does stand on the sidelines, watching time go by, itself represents yet another distinctive feature of Emerson’s treatment of “processing” time. Unlike the Thoreau brothers’ boat, which glided over or became immersed in time in A Week, thereby participating in time’s forward motion, the point of view that prevails in Emerson’s depictions of a train of days is objective, almost reportorial. Finally, Emerson’s various personifications of time also connote, like the figures coursing after each other on Keats’s Grecian urn, an unfathomable antiquity. In observance of some incomprehensible ritual or unknown solemn occasion, these various godlike avatars of time step majestically past the limited perspective of Emerson’s observing consciousness, and as they do, he feels for them an oblique and puzzling kinship. The linear orientation of Emerson’s procession of days strongly suggests that he conceived of time, ordinarily, as being unidirectional and nonrecursive, that is, as falling under the controlling temporal

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metaphor of “time’s arrow.” Yet Emerson usually resisted linearity, in any form whatsoever; like his angelic surrogate Uriel, he was more apt to affirm that “Line in nature is not found / Unit and universe are round.” Similarly, his essay “Circles” begins with the statement “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.” Line and circle exist in a state of creative tension throughout Emerson’s writings, and in this chapter I will take up the question of whether at least some measure of that tension may have been generated by biographical and cultural factors. I wish particularly to examine the allegorical figures who march in his poems and essays, yet preliminarily to doing so, I will look at two other, affiliated temporal symbols that evidently possessed personal and cultural significance for Emerson: the rose of the present and the corpse of the past. To the first of these we have already been introduced, in the quotation from “Self-Reliance” discussed in this book’s introduction. The image of the corpse, as it appears in some of his essays, is, I will suggest, partially grounded yet again in nineteenth-century writers’ responses to the discovery of Egyptian antiquity and antiquities, particularly as recorded in the writings of early Egyptologists such as Giovanni Belzoni. I will also examine the “circularity” of Emerson’s image of the rose, as well as the concept of circularity itself, in the poem “Uriel” and the essay “Circles.” Finally, I will integrate Emerson’s three temporally related symbols—rose, corpse, and procession—into a discussion of Emerson’s great later essay “Experience,” which I wish to read as a qualification or emendation of what he had written earlier in “Self-Reliance” about the self’s relationship to time. We might begin by considering where Emerson could have acquired some of the images he used to denote man’s proper relation to time. Emerson’s observation in “Self-Reliance” that the roses outside his window “make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day” was anticipated by similar language in his lecture “The Naturalist,” read before a meeting of the Boston Natural History Society in 1834. Yet perhaps because he was speaking on that occasion to an audience composed of naturalists and scholars, as opposed to the more general lay audience he would address in his lecture-essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson places

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more stress in this earlier statement of the same thought upon the natural sciences and upon archaeology. His theme in “The Naturalist” is the relative depth of the past; as I tried to demonstrate in Chapter 1, Emerson and his contemporaries were prompted by new discoveries in geology and archaeology to reassess the entire concept of antiquity. Emerson’s response to new discoveries “unearthed” by geology I have already adumbrated, but we have yet to see how he reacted to historical revisions of the past being made by early Egyptologists. Emerson’s metaphorical treatment of “Egyptian stones” in the following passage is predicated upon his learned audience’s familiarity with two specific cultural points of reference: If our restless curiosity lead[s] us to unearth the buried cities and dig up the mummy pits and spell out the abraded characters on Egyptian stones, shall we see a less venerable antiquity in the clouds and in the grass? An everlasting Now reigns in nature that procures on our bushes the self same Rose which charmed the Roman and the Chaldaean. The grain and the vine, the ant and the moth are as long descended. The slender violet hath preserved in the face of the sun and moon the humility of his line, and the oldest work of man is an upstart by the side of the shells of the sea.1

Emerson’s auditors would have had little trouble recognizing his phrases about digging up mummies and spelling out “abraded characters” as allusions to, respectively, the Italo-English strongman and explorer Giovanni Belzoni, and to Jean François Champollion. In 1824, a decade before Emerson delivered his lecture, Champollion published his famous Prècis du systéme hièroglyphique, written after he had deciphered the Rosetta Stone. One year before that, in 1823, Belzoni had returned to London from Egypt laden with a remarkable number of artifacts—including a “head of Memnon” weighing almost eight tons2—and a dramatic account of his finds and adventures that eventually appeared as a Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia, which became something of a best-seller. Belzoni 1. Emerson, Early Lectures, 1:71. 2. Actually the head of Ramses II. Belzoni’s discovery of the colossal figure, half buried in the sand, is supposed to have provided the basis for Shelley’s “Ozymandias”; see Karl E. Meyer, The Pleasures of Archaeology, 66.

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said that within the Valley of the Kings he had discovered literally dozens of mummies, coming upon them inadvertently, or even disastrously at times, as the epigraph to this chapter testifies. One mummy he brought back with him to London, to be unwrapped and examined by doctors.3 Thus for Emerson’s learned listeners, Belzoni’s name would have sprung to mind at the mention of mummy pits being dug up, and Champollion’s name had already become a byword for scholarly diligence and ingenuity. Yet in the passage quoted above, Emerson employs these two scholar-celebrities allusively and parenthetically as part of an overall contrast of archaeology, whose focus is man’s ancient history, to the biological sciences, including botany, entomology, and conchology. At issue in his discussion of the “everlasting Now” is, really, our notion of precisely what constitutes “antiquity”: ancient civilizations, or the developmental history of all forms of life? Emerson’s point is that the cryptic inscriptions we discover upon ruins render them seemingly alien to our own experience, and this impression of “foreignness” engenders a specious impression of oldness that seems to exceed even the antiquity of some plant and animal species that scientists know were already old when mankind was yet young. Emerson takes advantage of this common temporal misperception to introduce a deliberate temporal confusion of his own by juxtaposing the past with the present. The “self same Rose” that appears in Egyptian and Chaldean (i.e., Babylonian) iconographies is also the rose that blooms today, he says, beneath our windows. Then, having undermined his audience’s conventional chronologic hierarchies, Emerson proceeds to shift his emphasis even further away from the human toward the nonhuman by means of a subtle transition in his figural imagery. First, he integrates archaeology with biology by conflating images drawn from both disciplines, progressing from botanical species associated with cultivation, the grain and the vine, to the destroyers of those crops—the ant and the moth, whose depredations prefigure the ultimate collapse of entire civilizations and their subsequent “consumption” by nature. Then, rather then reverting to the domesticated rose, he nudges his audience even farther away from the human by introducing the wild violet, associated by poetic convention with a frailty, which, his argument implicitly affirms, is revealed to be strictly illusory when we consider that particular flower 3. See Daniel, Short History of Archaeology, 68–70.

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in archaeobotanical terms, for the longevity of its species bespeaks its hardiness. Nevertheless, even the violet’s lineage is not so ancient as that of some mollusks, whose ancestors’ shells once lay by the side of primeval oceans. Emerson, by impugning both commonplace attitudes toward time as well as conventional scales of temporal measurement, compels his listeners to seek refuge in the perspective of the present moment, the “everlasting Now.” Moreover, Emerson’s subordination of historic time to biologically and geologically determined time serves the ancillary rhetorical function of complimenting his audience of naturalists by validating their chronologically based classification systems. Within Emerson’s progression of images, however, only the rose connotes three coexistent temporal planes: the present moment, with which it has always been associated by artists and poets; history, for the rose has appeared in artifacts left behind by several vanished civilizations; and natural history, for the genus Rosa is an ancient one in its own right. The image of the rose therefore exists at the heart of Emerson’s central paradox about time, which is that the more of it we discover to have existed, the less important the totality of time becomes, so that the significance of the present moment grows only greater every day. Reading this passage in conjunction with Emerson’s later, more famous statement about roses living “above time” in “Self-Reliance” can help amplify the symbolic significance roses possessed for him. In “Self-Reliance,” in which Emerson’s primary theme is the cultivation of the self, the rose exemplifies self-culture, transcending time not by participating in all the available schemas of time, as roses in the lines quoted from “The Naturalist” do, but rather by internalizing time’s passage, in effect appropriating it as a means of measuring consciousness, not duration. “There is no time” to the rose, Emerson says in “Self-Reliance,” because “it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the fullblown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike.” Because the self may, with the rose, learn to transcend time, this particular rose is also to be distinguished from the rosa mutabilis with which we are familiar from reading poems such as Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to make much of Time.” As we saw in Chapter 1, Emerson’s rose, which represents the self’s cognitive growth spiraling

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upward or outward, has more to do with Bildung than it does with carpe diem. The passage of each rose through the various stages of bud, bloom, and dying root takes precedence not only over its immediate surroundings, but also over the history of its entire race. Thus rather than exhorting us to live for the day, Emerson would have us live for all days, content both with the rate of our own cognitive or spiritual maturation and with the circumstances under which we exist at any given time. That our internal development also coincides with an external agenda for growth is neatly expressed by Emerson’s minor pun upon “nature” in his description of the rose at each stage of its development: “Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike.” Contemporary man, on the other hand, lives all too often in a state of temporal dissociation, so that when he “postpones or remembers” he becomes fixated upon the future or the past, alienating himself not only from nature, but from himself. In “Self-Reliance” Emerson traces the etiology of the age’s malaise to a failure to recognize and digest the present. Again and again in Emerson’s writings (as well as in Thoreau’s, via Emerson), we hear the injunction: “Accept the place the divine providence has found for you; the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events” (CW, 2:28). Even as Emerson became less interested in time considered in the aggregate, that is, as duration, he became more convinced of the importance to both our physical and mental well-being of living in the moment. Furthermore, because, as he wrote in his journal, “a moment is a concentrated eternity,”4 by intuiting the presence of the moment we could appreciate the fact of eternity more profoundly than we could even if we were to succeed in grasping the whole of “deep time” with our cold Understanding. The potential rewards of learning to live within the present were so great as to be breathtaking. The possibility of achieving insight into infinity raised the status of any moment, potentially, to that of revelation. Absent these insights into eternity, however, Emerson thought time did not “move,” or advance toward the condition of unity and perfection posited by his progressive and developmental teleology. To be truly “revelatory,” a moment had to incorporate change, not in the comparatively unchanging world itself, but within the individuated consciousness—a transformation that, to Emerson’s way of 4. In 1836. Quoted in Richardson, Mind on Fire, 254.

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thinking, also ultimately effected change in the world as well, for time’s ends could be accomplished only on a piecemeal basis rather than in the mass, either through social reform or even through history’s transfer of power and influence from one society to the next. Emerson considered all resistance to change pernicious, whether in individuals or in nations, and his indictment of the twin evils of consistency and conformity in “Self-Reliance” derives, to a large extent, from a recognition that both retard the pace of change, within the self, first, and then within society at large. An insistence upon being consistent in our opinions and our actions Emerson equated with a denial of the fact that we are living, changing organisms, and this willful blindness impedes not only our own subsequent growth, but also the progress of our times. Likewise, conformity, which is at base merely a form of imitation, also frustrates time’s forward movement by repeating the patterns of the past. When we adopt society’s usages rather than our own, we not only suppress our own individuality, but we also fail to innovate, so that society as a whole suffers, too. For Emerson, consistency and conformity were symptomatic of contemporary man’s tendency to rely upon the past, whether in memory or in history, for models of behavior, rather than fashioning a more authentic, more appropriate response to present-day circumstances. Individuals who insist perversely upon remaining absolutely consistent in their actions or who do not dare to live unconventionally are therefore acting anachronistically, or out of synchrony with their era. This failure to live in the present is tantamount to removing oneself, as well, from nature and from God, for, as we have seen, Emerson believed nature exists only for today, while divinity will suffer itself to be understood only in the present tense. As he declared with memorable economy in the Divinity School Address, “God is, not was.” Moreover, Emerson equated a retardation of the self’s growth with a kind of self-murder. Cultivation of the self required a conscious effort and investment of resources, and Emerson thought that all people possessed finite reserves of energy and time that conforming needlessly consumed: “The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you, is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character” (CW, 2:31– 32). Nevertheless, that other fatal evil consequent upon a failure to be self-reliant, consistency, involved an even deeper betrayal of the

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self. By demanding uniformity in our own actions or in others’, we artificially prolong the existence of something that is “dead” by being already out of time. Correspondingly, the language Emerson uses in “Self-Reliance” emphasizes the pollution and uncleanliness of dead things: The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. (CW, 2:33)

Emerson’s diction here is a strange amalgam of astronomical, biblical, and perhaps even archaeological terms and references. His comparison of our lives to “orbits” resonates with his admiration for Kepler, whose discovery that planetary orbits were elliptical rather than circular offended the Aristotelian dictum that all heavenly bodies traveled along perfectly circular paths. Christian metaphysics had adopted this classical error of cosmology as an indication of the perfectness of God’s creation, so that early observers of parabolic planetary orbits were compelled to disavow what they had seen with their own eyes. Emerson then continues smoothly into the next image, in which past behavior becomes a weight that those who are obsessively consistent in their behavior must drag about after them. Preserving an excessive regard for memory is thus figured as a second and supernumerary “head” that hangs, monstrous as that of a dead Siamese twin or of an Egyptian colossus, “behind” overly consistent people’s present-day acts. And yet Emerson’s grotesque figure also perpetuates his emphasis upon astronomical concepts, in that the memory is imaged simultaneously as an unseen or phantom “moon” whose gravity “drags” upon an observed planet, making a calculation of the latter’s authentic “or-

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bit” more difficult. To achieve salvation and live “in a new day,” the self must detach itself from the false moon of memory, rid itself of the corpse it has been carrying about, and confess its crime of selfdesecration before the tribunal of the “thousand-eyed present,” a deity resembling either the “hundred-eyed” Argus of Greek mythology, or Indra, the hundred-eyed Hindu god. Second, the soul in search of temporal self-reform must stipulate to the authentic nature of revelation, or the “devout motions of the soul,” when it infrequently arrives, even if it should manifest itself in ways that are shockingly empirical, so that God appears dressed in “shape and color.” In contrast to this holy raiment is the expendable, already polluted shell of constraining theory, the “coat” Joseph leaves in the hands of the harlot. Emerson’s juxtaposition in this paragraph of an Old Testament story with the laws of planetary motion produces an odd and powerful synthesis in which the materials of the same religious orthodoxy that he suggests we should be ready to cast off is recycled as support for his contention that changes such as those introduced by the Copernican revolution must be accepted on their own terms. Change, whether internal or external, cannot be well predicted or anticipated; therefore we should accept ourselves, as we accept what we see, as new phenomena, unprecedented and incalculable. As a motif for the integrated self, the shape of the circle and its three-dimensional equivalent, the sphere, presented Emerson with several implicit advantages. First and foremost, the circle connotes symmetry and completeness in ways that a unitary line, lacking context, never can. Thus it is well suited for representing a life constituted of actions that are seen to be consistent when viewed from the larger perspective of an entire life span rather than from the isolated, falsely decontextualized perspective of linear time. False or “foolish” consistency—the consistency that is a “hobgoblin of little minds”—is associated ineluctably with linearity, because the mental and social climate that fosters consistency will, if for no other reasons than expediency and convenience, reduce man’s experience in time to a series of actions performed single-mindedly by agents who are themselves unchanged and unchanging. Emerson distrusted people who devoted all their energies to a single interest or cause, professing to dislike zealots, fanatics, and other such one-dimensional thinkers. In his journal he wrote, “I don’t like linear, but spheral people.” For Emerson, “spheral man” was the archetypal, Platonic man who predated special-

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ization and atomization. Sherman Paul explicates the image’s utility for Emerson: The whole man was an ideal like the spheral man in Plato’s Symposium who had two faces, four hands and legs, and whom God divided, as Plutarch later rationalized the fable, to make man more helpful. This fable of the divided man helped Emerson reconcile himself to his limitations and to find compensation in the best use of his faculties by following his bent.5

Plato’s unified, bilaterally symmetrical figure provides the basis for Emerson’s oft-used parable of the original “One Man” who had become fragmented, over time, into all the various trades and professions we now recognize. Unlike Plutarch, however, Emerson regarded the “One Man’s” division into his constituent body parts as being more unhelpful than helpful. In “The American Scholar,” for example, Emerson decries what a trend toward specialization had wrought in America: “The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man” (CW, 1:53). Emerson’s troping of memory, or the weight of a personal past, in “Self-Reliance” as a superfluous “second head” appears to me a negative manifestation of Plato’s original multifaceted prototype. Furthermore, although “spheral man” in Emerson’s writings extends himself, as Paul says, to “touch the universe on all sides, merge with it and transform it into himself”—that is, he expands his own awareness to fill whatever space is provided by the present— the obsessively consistent man only contracts himself within his own past, despite its “deadness” to him.6 As I have said, circles and spirals in Emerson’s writing are usually indicative of the successfully integrated self. Nevertheless, the image of the circle may also be employed, as we have seen in Thoreau’s writing, to signify the boundary of the present moment, a use that overlaps and informs its figural content in Emerson’s writing as a symbol of the self. If the present moment may be imagined not as a point located along a continuous line, but rather as a sphere, it too may be regarded as being, like the self, nonreferential, self-sufficient, 5. Sherman Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision, 169. 6. Ibid., 135.

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perfect rather than incomplete. Accordingly, Emerson seized upon images of symmetry and circularity found in the material world. For example, as he says in “Self-Reliance” of his domestic existence in Concord, after having taken up residence there with his second wife, Lidian: In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. (CW, 2:34)

In this passage, which precedes Emerson’s account of seeing the rose growing outside his window, his gaze is still moving outward from the vantage point of the desk in his study. He concentrates upon sounds and odors rather than sight, but the import of his message is the same: To be happy, we must learn to live within the moment. Unimpeded by “prospect or retrospect,” future or past, Emerson here expresses a hope that he may be able to live with nature, in the moment, and that he might also be able to record this life of spontaneity spontaneously, in his journal. The images Emerson employs to designate the perimeter of the present moment are highly reminiscent of those he also used to signify the integrated self, for the hoop of the swallow’s nest is affiliated with the deferred, similarly circular image of the rose. Moreover, Emerson’s intention to make a “home” for himself within the orbit of the present is signaled by his supplanting of the swallow’s nest with his own “web” of words, an emblem for his journal. Emerson may well have interpreted his immediate domestic situation in his peaceful Concord retreat as being crucial to his success in all three interrelated fields of endeavor: living within the moment, attaining a unified self, and pursuing a career as a writer. The house in which he and Lidian lived their “pleasing contrite wood-life,” known previously as “Coolidge Castle,” they rechristened “Bush,” probably because one of their first priorities upon moving in was to landscape the lot with rosebushes, which Lidian, who raised several cultivars, had ordered shipped up to them from her home at Plymouth. Read in this context, the rose to which Emerson refers in “Self-Reliance,” which was written in 1837, also betokens their entire conjugal and

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domestic life in “Bush,” which they purchased only two months before their wedding in 1835.7 If the image of the rose was inextricably linked in Emerson’s mind to life with Lidian, a highly specific and personal current of meaning may attach to at least some components of Emerson’s message in “Self-Reliance.” When Emerson wrote that a man who lives either in the past or for the future cannot be happy, he may have had himself in mind. The loss in 1831 of his first wife, Ellen, to tuberculosis had plunged him into despair, and his exhortation to leave the past behind may have been influenced by a desire not to let persistent grief color his present happiness with his second wife. Then, too, when Emerson wrote these lines describing his writerly life at “Bush,” he was in his early thirties, newly embarked upon his selfchosen career as essayist and peripatetic lecturer. Reinvigorated and encouraged about his own prospects, he may have counseled himself nonetheless to be patient and receptive rather than too ambitious. Any impulse to stand “on tiptoe” to see his own future could potentially become a distraction, serving to dilute the quality of life he was enjoying with Lidian at Concord, where they dwelled in the rose(bush) of the present, represented metonymically as the spirally blooming rose growing outside Emerson’s study window. In “Self-Reliance,” therefore, both passages in which Emerson refers to what he sees outside his study window may have served an extrarhetorical function for their own author by objectifying, in nature, his personal, private motivations for striving to live within the moment, sealed within a sphere that isolated and protected him from past and future. Having begun his life over again, so to speak, Emerson was powerfully motivated when he wrote “Self-Reliance” to see his life as unfolding in the present tense, rather than conceiving of his path into adulthood as a linear progression whose early steps had been blasted by loss and grief. Thus the figure of a line may have repelled Emerson unconsciously and emotionally as much as it did intellectually. Nevertheless, he was also aware that this antipathy toward linearity would tend to alienate him from a society that valorized conceptual tidiness and classification. For Emerson, lines implied limits, and he declared in “Circles” that “The only sin is limitation.” With their catechisms, categories, and 7. See Richardson, Mind on Fire, 206–8.

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nomenclatures, moralists, materialists, and empiricists inscribed falsifying lines, he thought, upon experience. In Emerson’s idiosyncratic iconography the horizontal line accordingly denotes, as Sherman Paul writes, “the one dimensional world of fact, of space, time, and history, a world limited to the experience of sense impression. It gives us—to use the transcendental label distinguishing the superficially outward and the meaningful inner—only the world’s surface.”8 Yet as we saw in Chapter 1, Emerson was capable of converting science’s or empiricism’s methods and terms to his own advantage without necessarily subscribing to a scientific rationale, in the same way that he was able to recycle biblical stories and scriptural language to defend his own unorthodox and transcendental beliefs. In “Uriel” Emerson does both, borrowing from Milton and from modern physics as he debates, through the vehicle of his angelic protagonist, the very existence of a line. That poem has usually been interpreted—validly, I think—as Emerson’s angry response to the treatment he received at the hands of the conservative wing of the Unitarian Church following the delivery of his Divinity School address at Harvard Divinity School in 1838.9 Yet I suggest that we treat the poem simultaneously as an expression of Emerson’s aversion to linear time, and that we consider his implicit criticism of institutionalized liberal Christianity as also being, to some extent, a criticism of historical Christianity’s one-dimensional view of time. “Uriel” begins by locating its narrative in the distant, imaginary past before time, as we think of it, even existed: It fell in the ancient periods Which the brooding soul surveys, Or ever the wild time coined itself Into calendar months and days. This was the lapse of Uriel, Which in Paradise befell. Once, among the Pleiads walking, Seyd overheard the young gods talking; And the treason, too long pent, To his ears was evident. 8. Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision, 22. 9. See, for example, Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson, 480.

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In the introductory stanza time is “wild” because it is still all of a piece, having not yet been lineally schematized into months or days, and this temporal homogeneity helps validate Uriel’s heretical observation later in the poem that differentiation and division are alien to the natural order. Like young theology students, Uriel and his fellow angels become embroiled in a discussion of philosophic idealism, or “What subsisteth and what seems.” Correspondingly, in the course of the poem’s narrative, Uriel comes to embody his own theory, or conversely, he theorizes his own body. Throughout the poem he is described in terms that emphasize his “sphericity,” as opposed to heaven’s “linearity.” For example, during the angels’ colloquy his face displays a look “that solved the sphere,” an image that will be echoed, a few lines farther down, both by the remark that he speaks with a “piercing eye” and that he may potentially have become “too bright / To hit the feebler nerve of sight.” Thus Uriel is associated, as Emerson had associated himself in Nature, with an ecstatic eyeball: He becomes what he beholds, or rather, he becomes what he believes. After his heresy has offended the paternalistic “old war-gods” (a play upon “war-horses”?) by questioning the imposition of divisions between good and evil, unity and universality, Uriel withdraws into his cloud, and his own substance undergoes a transformation into pure ideality or force. Having achieved a complete identification with protean nature, Uriel either gyrates timelessly in the “sea of generation” or, bright as Lucifer, becomes radiant light itself. Emerson’s imagery subsequently veers away from Milton and toward contemporary scientific theory, signaled by the presence of technical terms drawn from astronomy, chemistry, and physics. Emerson’s introduction of scientific content inevitably calls to mind, I would suggest, science’s historic challenge to religious dogma, so that within the poem, the old gods’ unsubstantiated beliefs are implicitly contrasted with the emergent “truth” of empirically verifiable scientific theory. This conflict is magnified by the incongruous application of scientific phrases such as “solar course” and “chemic force” to a heavenly landscape that is made to seem almost ludicrously stereotypic, combining elements of Mount Olympus and of

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an idealized Christian paradise. Heaven’s materiality contrasts with the nonspecificity of Uriel’s new manifestations, once the other gods have refused to recognize, or have forgotten the fact of, his existence. Emerson adroitly compels his readers to adopt “Seyd’s” medial position of limited omniscience, so that although we know of Uriel’s apostasy, we, like the oblivious “celestial kind,” are not privy to what happened to Uriel after his fall—we can only speculate, like theoreticians. Uriel is transformed, or transforms himself, into pure law, and accordingly, many of the terms Emerson uses to characterize him after his fall are derived from scientific illustrations of the interchangeability of matter and energy, or what Emerson calls, in “Experience,” “form” and “power.” Even after Uriel’s voice has been stilled, his message continues to be disseminated by way of the spherical “fruit” of “chemic force,” rippling outward in concussive shock waves; alternatively, it speeds through water like wave energy. This myth of transformation or transubstantiation is also reminiscent, given the partially classical context of the poem’s locus, of stories told in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses (about which I shall have more to say in Chapter 5), and, as is often the case when mythological tales are brought to a conclusion, the myth’s primary metamorphosis receives empirical confirmation in a terminating image, when the old gods’ “blush of shame” is converted into the redness of sunrise or sunset. Emerson’s choice of a conventionally classical, and Christian, setting for his myth participates in his searing indictment of conservative Unitarians’ complaisance by reducing their liberal religious convictions to the status of the same orthodoxies that they imagined themselves as having transcended. In censuring Uriel, they repeat the mistakes both of the old Church, which had threatened Galileo with excommunication after he established that the solar system was heliocentric, and of fifteenth-century geographers who refused to believe Columbus’s assertion that the world was a sphere. Uriel’s fall or “lapse” is only ostensibly his fall from heavenly favor. More properly, he should be seen as falling out of materiality and linearity into ideality and sphericity. The archangel’s transformation from form into power is a necessary consequence of his insight that nature does not suffer the existence of lines. At the symbolic level, this transformation is suggested by a shift in emphasis from the eye to the sun, as Uriel’s consciousness or self radiates outward

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to encompass his uncomprehending fellow angels. The physical literalness of the gods’ heaven, which Uriel subsequently “contains,” is the materialized product of a habit of thought that favors false distinctions, such as that which differentiates good from evil, or heaven from “strong Hades,” rather than perceiving underlying unities. Thus it is not Uriel who has lapsed, but rather his fellow demiurges, whose dualistic thinking has generated lines of division where, rightly, none should exist. Significantly, this lapse among the conventionally religious angels transpires before time has undergone a similar process of differentiation into weeks and days. Thus time’s “coinage” will take place while the universe remains at least putatively under the aegis of a cognitively stagnant old guard, an indication that segmental, linear time derives from excessive materialism, unreflective empiricism, and false moral dichotomies. What the old gods in “Uriel” finally fear most is change, and Emerson’s most forceful prose statement of the inevitability of change is his essay “Circles,” which he begins with his famous observation that the eye is the first circle, and the horizon, the second. The shift in perspective implicit in this trope, rippling outward from the immediate foreground to the distant background, or from the near circle of the eye to the far circle of the horizon, is indicative of one of Emerson’s major themes in the essay, that is, the instability of any one point of view. Introduce one new element into a system, one new fact, new person, or new book, says Emerson, and everything may be instantly changed. This he calls the “Law of eternal procession,” and he cites it as a reason not to be too prudential in our affairs. To prepare yourself to face a potential evil, says Emerson, is to put yourself “into the power of the evil,” for you are already altering your course, perhaps unnecessarily. Better to put your trust in a faith that things will balance out, in the long run; in any case, seen from a higher perspective, all events and actions are roughly equivalent. The “law of procession” renders stubborn adherence to any unilateral position or a fixed perspective fallacious, if not foolish. Therefore (to cite an example Emerson provides) while a creditor may put a premium on seeing loans repaid, a debtor, who may be an artist or a writer, may have other, equally legitimate priorities, such as following the bent of his genius. Although to the broker, “there is no other principle but arithmetic,” says Emerson, “For me, commerce is of trivial import” (CW, 2:187).

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But commerce is driven by the engine of labor, and work, in the sense of merchandisable thought, ultimately becomes problematic in Emerson’s universe of unceasing change. As transcendentalist and idealist, Emerson accomplished most of his work in moments of transition, or, in effect, by never staying still intellectually. Advancing outward from one “circle” to the next depended upon suffering what Emerson called, with a consciously religious emphasis, “revelation.” As secular prophet, Emerson tasked himself with undergoing revelation as frequently as possible, so that when he was uninspired, he thought of himself as not performing useful labor. Thus in “Circles,” he characterizes his own work as a philosopher in the same commercial language of gain and loss that he had used to describe the broker who thought only in terms of money: It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness, day by day; but when these waves of God flow into me, I no longer reckon lost time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a sort of omnipresence and omnipotence, which asks nothing of duration, but sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to be done, without time. (CW, 2:187–88)

When revelation’s “waves” flow through him, Emerson says, he loses his usual linear sense of duration, which was usually accompanied by a conviction that he was wasting his time, or that his time was being wasted. When he can temporarily achieve a higher prospect, however, he feels that his goals can be accomplished “without” time, and his syntax shows he is employing that word both as an adverb and as a preposition: He succeeds without requiring time, and the arena in which that success is achieved lies “without” time, that is, outside of or above it. Although Emerson could achieve moments of living “above” time by identifying passionately with nature, as when he sees roses growing outside his study window, nature’s presence was not indispensable to attaining a revelatory state. The god could visit at any time, and his arrivals came unheralded. Emerson cherished, even hoarded, such moments, so that he often characterizes them, as here, in terms emphasizing profit and loss. When he fails to generate sufficient intellectual or spiritual capital, he accuses himself of spending his time “unprofitably”; on the other hand, when

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he is inspired, he feels he is performing work and building up assets that, although initially intangible, become palpable once he has committed them to paper. In Emerson’s precarious economics of revelation, ownership of such “assets” made possible his “computation” of his “possible achievement.” Thus, although the merchant’s singleminded devotion to his business might prevent him from achieving a relativistic perspective, Emerson’s devotion to achieving moments of revelation permits him, ironically, to do more of the “work” that will bring him worldly success. To keep ourselves open to the possibilities of the present, Emerson emphasizes in “Circles,” we must willingly relinquish the past, experienced negatively as regret or “contrition.” But does living without contritions mean living without consciences? Emerson anticipates this potential objection by bringing to bear upon himself the imagined accusation of his reader: “And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an equivalence of indifferency of all actions, and would fain teach us, that, if we are true, forsooth, our crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall construct the temple of the true God” (CW, 2:188). But Emerson’s precaution seems overhasty and excessive; after all, the theme he had been developing in this section of the essay is “indifferency” to time, not morality. Nevertheless, the “circularity” of all actions that Emerson proposes could be legitimately construed in some quarters as an endorsement of libertinism. In another attempt to deflect potential criticism, Emerson qualifies his position with the somewhat weak disclaimer that he is speaking strictly for himself, rather than recommending a course of action for others: But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head, and obey my own whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back. (CW, 2:188)

The defensiveness of Emerson’s tone here stands in stark contrast to Uriel’s proudly fearless promulgation of “truth-telling things.” Still, Emerson resembles his angelic surrogate not least because his revelations have the effect of unsettling “all things,” material or temporal. What liberates Emerson to occupy his extreme position, he says, is the

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absence of a personal past “at my back.” He has no vested interests to protect, no dogma to defend, no party line to follow, no supernumerary corpse of a past self to tow in his wake, like an enormous Memnon’s head or anchoring moon. Emerson then recommends to the reader that he, too, should free himself from the corpse of the past: Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one. We call it by many names,—fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime: they are all forms of old age: they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young. (CW, 2:188–89)

Emerson’s yoking of the verb import with “rags and relics” signals that his trope is grounded in archaeology. He is in effect saying that we should not “import” into America remnants of the past, as Britain did when its doctors examined Belzoni’s abstracted mummy or when the British Museum accepted his pirated sculptures.10 “Importing” the past onto American shores exposed the nation to European “diseases,” figured here as old age, although the trope must surely be anchored as well in a fear of venereal disease. Rather than permitting the past to “infect” us, Emerson says, we can digest it harmlessly if we inure ourselves to the fact of inevitable change. In nature, every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. . . . People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them. (189)

And in any case, we may as well accustom ourselves to being unsettled and living with change, Emerson says, because life will inevitably be a series of surprises: “We do not guess to-day the mood, the pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being.” The virtue of such surprises is that they shock us out of customary modes of knowing and behaving, compelling us to evaluate our experiences in a new light. Toward the end of “Circles” appears the much-quoted statement “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” yet 10. Emerson may also have had in mind Lord Elgin’s importation into Britain of friezes taken from the pediment of the Parthenon.

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the meaning of Emerson’s injunction is all too easily missed if we do not see that he is offering enthusiasm as an alternative to preserving our memories of the past: The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire, is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment. (190)

By “enthusiasm,” Emerson plainly does not mean Victorian earnestness, but rather a primitive, older energy, a kind of Dionysian ecstasy. We need, he says, to be surprised or elevated out of linearity, to learn that the past is incommensurate to accounting for the present or predicting the future. Suitably, Emerson winds up “Circles” with the observation that a deep-seated need for abandonment explains why men are tempted to resort to alternative means to achieve a semblance of this passionate and “oracular” state, through the avenues of drugs, alcohol, gambling, and war. In “Circles” Emerson expresses a wish to make the best use of his time by, paradoxically, losing it. As an author, he gained most in those moments when he was not thinking about tangible gain. When he became distracted, when he lost track of time and lived “above” it for a while, then was he employing his time most efficiently and productively. Yet his unworldliness was as calculating, in its own way, as the merchant’s “arithmetic.” Emerson’s economics of revelation may even be viewed, somewhat uncharitably, as merely a transcendentalist variation of the Protestant ethic, that is, as an attempt to justify the self to heaven by performing worldly (or unworldly) work. Indeed, Ellery Channing said of Emerson that he was never in the least contented. This made walking or company to him a penance. The Future—that was the terrible Gorgon face that turned the Present into “a thousand bellyaches.” “When shall I be perfect; when shall I be moral? When shall I be this and that? When will the really good rhyme get written?” Here is the Emerson colic. Thoreau had a like disease. Men are said never to be satisfied.11 11. William Ellery Channing, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist. With Memorial Verses, 132n.

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It was Emerson’s discontentedness with the present and his ambitions for the future that occasionally left him prone to accuse himself of “sloth and unprofitableness,” despite self-adjurations to the contrary. Certainly Emerson does display a peculiar brand of anxiety about the use he was making of his time, and nowhere, perhaps, is this anxiety more evident than in his poetic image of the processing days. Robert D. Richardson, among others, points out that the image of days passing before Emerson like “figures in a pageant” is characteristic of his sense that he was not using his time efficiently or effectively.12 The appearance of such figures before Emerson could be either auspicious or ominous, depending upon his receptivity to their presence. In his journal Emerson wrote, “The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away” (JMN, 10:61). These solemn processions or parades in Emerson’s writings all have to do with his response to the literalized passage of time, or else linear time personified. Figured as an endless progression of highly individualized moments, a “law of procession[s],” time presents a formidable challenge to the unifying and inclusive self. As if in a recurrent dream, these godlike figures file impassively past the spectator, who discovers he is half-paralyzed by awe or fear. The “Days” in these several permutations of the same vision display significant similarities: They bear gifts, or will accept gifts from the spectator; they are dumb, and often veiled; despite their muteness they bear the watcher a tenuous goodwill that he must reciprocate, to retain it; finally, although the figures bear a resemblance to each other, they also exhibit crucial differences, and much of the appropriateness of the witness’s response to their appearance depends upon his ability to recognize and respond to these individualizing differences. In the poem “Days” itself, the spectator’s tardy recognition of the present day’s character exposes him to her scorn: Days Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will, 12. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 78.

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For Emerson, recognition equals revelation: if he cannot enter into the spirit of the moment, he risks being reduced to merely witnessing it. In being so diminished he fails to experience the impression of “timelessness” to which he alludes in “Circles,” the sensation he associated with accomplishing substantive intellectual and spiritual work. Put differently, by failing to notice individuating differences among the processing Days, he remains static in time, no longer an agent of change or one who “unsettles,” but rather a helpless bystander. In “Days” the narrator makes an offering, as if to the Olympian gods, of “herbs and apples” from his garden, symbolic equivalents of the fruits culled from Emerson’s intellectual labors. The Days evidently do expect the poem’s speaker to respond in some sort, although they themselves remain “muffled” and “hypocritic.” Yet the speaker is tardy with his offering, having become entranced, temporarily, by the spectacle or “pomp” of time seen in the aggregate, that is, the entire “procession” of Days. His dilatoriness is symbolic of a failure to grasp the significance of the moment, and the Day’s snubbing of the speaker is equivalent to his exclusion from immediate, oracular time. In attempting to determine a possible underlying reason for Emerson’s recurring diurnal anxiety, we might turn to another poem that bears a close resemblance to “Days,” the epigraph to Emerson’s essay “Experience.” While “Days” seems to be a confession of temporal guilt, the autobiographical component of the poem “Experience” may be even more revelatory of Emerson’s attitudes toward time, divided into present and past: Experience The lords of life, the lords of life,— I saw them pass, In their own guise, Like and unlike, Portly and grim, Use and Surprise, Surface and Dream,

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Here we see a succession of qualities rather than of days, but the difference may be moot, since Emerson saw each day as having its own distinct quality, and, as I have said, he believed it was incumbent upon an individual to recognize that quality in order to participate fully in the moment. Emerson’s procession of qualities is as cryptic as his parade of days: “Temperament” has no tongue, and the “inventor of the game” goes unnamed. The procession is witnessed by Emerson, who I shall assume is referring to himself in the first person in the second line, but subsequently his witnessing presence is subsumed by, or projected into, that of “little man,” who gets caught up within the parade like an overexcited child. Although “little man” may be a marcher himself, and thus a “lord of life” in his own right, the fact that he is wandering about among the other marchers’ legs would seem to indicate that “little man” is an observer who has become a participant by accident. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the scene depicted in this poem—that of a child witnessing a parade—was inspired by the facts of Emerson’s own experience. In the Boston of Emerson’s boyhood, parades were held in observance of Election Day, May 25, which was also, coincidentally, Emerson’s birthday. It is therefore not unreasonable to suggest, I think, that Emerson conceived a strong personal association with that particular holiday, and he may have been motivated to do so even more powerfully by other intense emotional ties. Emerson’s father, the Reverend William Emerson, was, among his other pastoral duties, chaplain to the Boston Artillery Company, which marched as a unit on important civic occasions such as Elec-

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tion Day and the Fourth of July. After William Emerson died on May 12, 1811, the artillery marched in his funeral procession—as did the late minister’s two oldest sons, William and Ralph, then eight. Gay Wilson Allen writes that the spectacle of this funeral cortege constituted Emerson’s “most vivid recollection” from boyhood.13 Coinciding so closely with a date that the Emersons would usually have associated with both public and family celebrations, that parade must have seemed like a grim mockery, especially to the young Ralph Waldo Emerson. Subsequently, the figure of a parade may have acquired a profound ambivalence for him. In the poem “Experience,” the child is portrayed as a bewildered “little man” looking up from among a forest of legs at the alien countenances of grim adults marching alongside. Yet the child/man is perturbed more by their foreignness than by the prospect of being trampled underfoot, and a maternal “nature” rescues the child not by snatching him out of harm’s way, but by reassuring him, first, that the marchers towering above him will wear different expressions tomorrow, and, second, that they are somehow related to him—“The founder thou! these are thy race!” Could Emerson have been remembering, while he wrote this line, the doleful and condoling faces of the members of the Boston Artillery Company, looking down upon his own? The connection seems plausible. Then too, assuming that the poem’s core image is derived from a remembered scene from Emerson’s family life helps clarify the mediating role “nature” plays between “little man” and “the lords of life”: She, of course, is kin to him, like his mother, yet she also explains to him that he is “father” to them, as Emerson’s own father had served as the Boston Artillery’s spiritual leader. Kinship is an important issue at the content level of the poem as well, for man’s puzzlement over the inscrutable workings of these various abstract forces is meliorated first, by a realization that their aspects will never cease to change, and, second, that they are both external and internal, operating in the world at large and in his own character. The amorphousness of the “lords of life,” which renders them both identifiable and unidentifiable, to be “see[n]” or “guessed,” is their most disturbing quality, yet it is entirely consonant with one of the major themes Emerson will go on to address 13. Allen, Emerson, 15; this biography also provides a brief description of ways in which Bostonians celebrated Election Day during Emerson’s boyhood (5–14 passim).

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in the essay itself—life’s unpredictability and uncertainty, of which he says, “The results of life are uncalculated and incalculable. The years teach much which the days never know” (CW, 3:40). Indeterminacy as a theme in the poem also receives reinforcement from Emerson’s technique. The narrating persona initially adopts a point of view that remains first-person singular as it describes having witnessed the passage of the “lords of life” “[i]n their own guise,” yet when the cardinal problem of distinguishing faces and degrees of relatedness presents itself to the bewildered “child,” the perspective shifts to that of personified nature, who addresses him familiarly as “thou.” But even that pronoun will not remain stationary long enough for us to identify its antecedent with a high degree of certainty—does it refer to the adult narrator’s displaced self? all mankind? the reader? Blurring these boundaries helps Emerson drive his point home. Even if we do contrive to become truly self-reliant, we are still ultimately subject to external and internal forces over which we can exert little control— “Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,” as he summarizes them toward the close of “Experience.” These seven, he says, are “threads on the loom of time,” or the “lords of life” who hold sway over what phenomenal reality constitutes for each of us. Significantly, Emerson’s avatars of time in “Days” are female, while those in “Experience’s” epigraphic poem are male, the lords of life. Emerson’s gendering of time in these two poems appears to serve a specific purpose, one that is rooted in his filial relationship, or lack thereof, to the marchers. In “Experience” the central figure is a male among males, “little man,” a term that bears dual complementary significations. “Little man” denotes “mankind,” of course, but we would know it more familiarly as a half-humorous term of affection for a little boy. Calling a boy “little man” reminds him that he will be a man someday, and that he will have to shoulder adult responsibilities. For Emerson, the occasion of his father’s funeral procession would have marked his forced entry into adulthood. During the funeral parade his father is absent, yet present, like “—the inventor of the game / Omnipresent without name—,” and only the presence of his mother, inhabiting the “guise” of nature, can mediate between the “little man” and his “guardians tall” by asserting that he is related to them, in the same way that Ralph Emerson was related to his

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step-grandfather, the Reverend Ezra Ripley, who became his and his brothers’ informal guardian after William Emerson’s death.14 Thus the poem establishes systems of kinship on two levels. First, Emerson as a boy is inducted into manhood by being invited to take the place of his absent father (“The founder thou! these are thy race!”), even as he is reassured that henceforth he will be under the care of a new guardian. Secondly, nature, speaking as mother or as wife, informs “little man” that the various personified qualities of life (even change, or “Succession swift” himself) are not really his “lords,” or his paternalistic overseers, but rather his subjects and his children, perhaps through union with her. Within this Oedipal relationship, the man-child receives nature’s reassurance that he will dominate what he thought had dominated him, yet he remains nevertheless unable to identify “the inventor of the game / Omnipresent without name,” whose corpse is present, yet absent, during the parade. In “Days,” on the other hand, it is the female intermediary who is absent, or rather transmuted into the particular present moment who disdains the narrator’s belated offering. The female processant’s own family relationship is made explicit in the poem’s first line: Like the other Days, she is a daughter of Time. Rather than acting upon the narrator’s behalf, as she had in “Experience,” the female Day must be placated in some obscure fashion. Potentially, she may offer the observer either “diadems” or “fagots,” according to his “will.” A gift of fagots would have a negligible value compared to a diadem, emblematic of royalty; moreover, bundled sticks resemble all too closely the corrective rod wielded by authorities such as displeased parents and schoolmasters. Thus we may assume that the Day’s reaction to the supplicating observer may be either remunerative or punitive, depending upon his deserving, yet in this poem an even worse result ensues: No reaction or recognition whatsoever is evoked from the ascendant Day. In “Experience,” the child, who is father to the man, senses that he has behaved improperly during the procession by failing to understand its relationship to him, while the adult in “Days” has an acute sense of time having been wasted. Moreover, in “Days” the narrator is plainly an observer of the parade rather than a participant in it, so that at 14. For an explanation of these family relationships, see Allen, Waldo Emerson, 29–32.

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least some fraction of his sense of guilt or shame may be attributed to his failure to understand that his proper role is that of fellow marcher, not supplicant. Admittedly, this suggestion that Emerson’s diurnal anxiety could have been rooted in unresolved familial relationships is highly speculative. And yet the content of the essay “Experience” is itself also congruent with interpreting its epigraphic poem as depicting a rite of passage, an initiation into adulthood. The essay, which is perhaps Emerson’s masterpiece, was written in the years following the death of his son Waldo, in 1842. Consequently, “Experience” is at times both profound and tragic, yet in it Emerson strives to define a means by which the self can withstand the vicissitudes of fate and time. As in “Circles,” his theme is succession itself, or rather life’s transience. Whereas before he had taken some satisfaction in the kinetic quality of life, the ceaseless movement out of the past and into the present like “the shooting of the gulf,” or “the darting to an aim” as he writes in “Self-Reliance,” now, half a decade farther along in Emerson’s life, change has become sometimes ominous, implacable, and stern like a displeased and distant god. “Experience” is really an antiphonal response to “Self-Reliance,” or a series of qualifications to ideas that continued to form the nucleus of Emersonian belief. In “Experience” Emerson revisits such concepts as the necessity of accepting one’s time and place, the merits of intuition and instinct, and the inutility of attempting reforms or of acting charitably without first reforming the self. Yet although he repeats his injunction to the individual to be self-reliant and indifferent to the world’s opinion, Emerson does not concern himself overmuch in “Experience” with the self’s interactions with society, nor does he reiterate his warnings about the dangers of consistency and conformity. While in the earlier essay he instructed the self how to comport itself in public, in “Experience” he offers suggestions for how the self may survive time and the world, despite obstacles generated both internally and externally. First and most importantly, Emerson refines his concept of self, spinning out more answers to his rhetorical question in “SelfReliance,” “What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded?” Whereas in “Self-Reliance” the self was to be relied upon, and self-trust was the “iron string” to which we could tune ourselves, in “Experience” self can be a trap. “It is very unhappy,” writes Emerson, “but too late to be helped, the discovery we have

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made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man” (CW, 3:43). Consciousness necessarily leads to self-consciousness, but the realization of self also introduces us to the tyranny of subjectivity. We hope to find objective realities upon which we can all agree, says Emerson, but we are disappointed to discover instead that subjectivity is the rule, and that everything is viewed through the filter of self: Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast. (43–44)

On one level, the imperial self is simply a negative consequence of Emerson’s neoplatonism, or the elevation of ideas over empiricism. The distance between self and other, I and Thou, was equivalent to the difference between concept and material reality: “There will be the same gulf between every me and thee, as between the original and the picture” (44). Alternatively, Emerson’s view that subjectivity constituted man’s fall may be viewed as a byproduct of his essential romanticism, grounded in post-Kantian phenomenology. Whatever the case, Emerson had come to believe by the time he wrote “Experience” that human beings’ interactions with the world and with each other consisted primarily of surfaces encountering other surfaces. Even good and evil, which Uriel understood could overstep each others’ boundaries and intermingle, now seem to Emerson to have almost no objective reality whatsoever. The circle of self, nurtured, in part, by self-cultivation, expands to accommodate virtually every facet of life, even the death of a beloved child. The witnessing, helpless self drew the fact of a child’s death within the totality of its experience not least by writing an essay about experience, beginning with a poem in which the perspectives of grieving parent and dead child are reversed or inverted. The necessity of subjectivity removes from our experience the dependable presence not just of objective realities, Emerson goes on to observe, but also of moral absolutes. Each action an individual takes may ultimately appear to be consistent when viewed from within the context of his own personality, even if that action violates society’s laws or merely our own sensibilities. Consequently, in evaluating the

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objective reality of sin, Emerson makes an important distinction between conscience and intellect: Saints are sad, because they behold sin, (even when they speculate) from the point of view of the conscience, and not of the intellect; a confusion of thought. Sin, seen from the thought, is a diminution, or less; seen from the conscience or will, it is pravity or bad. The intellect names it shade, absence of light, and no essence. The conscience must feel it as essence, essential evil. This it is not: it has an objective existence, but no subjective. (45)

This last phrase may cause us to stumble, at first. Wouldn’t Emerson, as radical subjectivist, wish to maintain that sin has a subjective existence, but not an objective one? Yet Emerson means what he says: Sin has no subjective existence within the conscience, only an objective one within the intellect. As interpreted by the intellect, sin is authentically a condition of diminution or incompleteness, but it is not what it seems to the conscience, that is, an excrescence from some larger body of evil inimical to man’s welfare. Emerson’s affirmation of the intellect’s accuracy in making moral distinctions is consistent with an overall emphasis in “Experience” upon the intellect’s reliability as guide and arbiter among the confusing planes or “surfaces” that constitute, he says, the bulk of our phenomenologic apprehension of reality. Emerson understood that his location of ultimate moral authority within the self necessarily brought him into conflict with traditional repositories of values already sanctioned by society, such as art, love, and religion. But this could not be helped, Emerson says in his introductory trope, which is reminiscent of his figural use in “Uriel” of the physical sciences to indicate truths that are empirically testable and verifiable: It is true that all the muses and love and religion hate these developments, and will find a way to punish the chemist, who publishes in the parlor the secrets of the laboratory. And we cannot say too little of our constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or saturated with our humors. And yet is the God the native of these bleak rocks. That need makes in morals the capital virtue of self-trust. We must hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axis

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more firmly. The life of truth is cold, and so far mournful; but it is not the slave of tears, contritions, and perturbations. It does not attempt another’s work, nor adopt another’s facts. It is a main lesson of wisdom to know your own from another’s. (46)

Moral relativism, protoexistentialism, stoicism—any and all of these labels may be (and have been) applied to Emerson’s apotheosis of radical subjectivity, whether in praise or in condemnation. And yet the shift in belief we see Emerson making in “Experience” is consonant with patterns of thought that had been evolving since Nature, in which he proposes that subjectivity may also precipitate ecstatic revelation, even upon “a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky.” The overall trend visible in Emerson’s continuing reevaluation of the self’s relation to the world is a growing awareness that judgments made subjectively were provisional, and not determinative. A tenuous balance had to be maintained, he decided, between the self’s internal directives and normative experience, which includes not only nature, but also society’s just claims upon the individual, whether as citizen, friend, or family man. This point of equilibrium he calls the “mid-world,” which he maintains can only be realized by living fully in the present moment—provisionally, yet with confidence: “We must set up the strong present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come. So many things are unsettled which it is of the first importance to settle,—and, pending their settlement, we will do as we do” (37). Emerson’s “strong present tense” was also predicated upon a provisional acceptance of conventional chronologic time. Even in those moments when we were not inspired, Emerson suggests that we should make the most of whatever particular “present” we inhabit: Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of to-day are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are. (35)

Emerson is only half joking in his concluding statement. Although a neoplatonist might conceive of the world as an imperfect and illusory representation of an eternal and perfect reality, the reality of

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day-to-day life, Emerson admits, is that we live among men and women with whom we must cobble together some kind of life. Yet elsewhere in “Experience,” he nevertheless continues to assert the primacy of the other kind of time in which we live, subjective time. Located at the opposite end of the temporal spectrum from simple routine, subjective time encompasses our momentary insights, inspirations, and revelations. Like the unconscious mind, subjective time is generally inaccessible to the reasoning, tyrannical self, and this immunity constitutes perhaps its greatest virtue. Emerson suggests that we are prevented from perceiving the existence of this alternate chronology by a sort of temporal uncertainty principle, so that we can never quite grasp the significance of any one moment while we are still in it. Thus we live in a kind of necessary oblivion, or obliviousness: All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that ’tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born. (CW, 28)15

Because we cannot solicit the arrival of these moments “between” or “outside of” time, we must resign ourselves, Emerson proposes, to living among the shifting planes of material and temporal appearances. The trick to living authentically in the present is to avoid becoming ensnared either by the past or the future, in the guises of regrets or of unfounded expectations. But how might we hope to maintain a dayto-day existence, and yet remain accessible to momentary intervals of subjective time? One solution Emerson offers is simple busy-ness: “To fill the hour,—that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. . . . To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom” (35). Emerson’s trope of 15. Emerson’s reference here is to a Hellenic-Egyptian myth of how Osiris, the god of vegetation, came to be born. The lunar calendar of twelve thirty-day months provided a total of only 360 days, leaving another five days to be accounted for.

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“skating” is felicitously chosen. When we skate we can often plainly see the dark water lurking beneath the supporting ice, so that skating becomes an act of faith; moreover, by continuing to move, by simply continuing to act, we reduce our chances of falling through the ice and drowning. By the same token, we should go about the business of living despite knowing that our most significant moments may lie completely outside the realm of everyday existence. Learning to “skate upon surfaces” is another way of saying that it is good to learn how to improvise, that is, to live extemporaneously. This is not only realistic, but pragmatic: Emerson revisits a theme he had raised earlier in “Circles” when he says, “for practical success, there must not be too much design.” Because we cannot truly know what time we are in at any given moment, it is futile or even counterproductive to try to predict the future. We plan and calculate as if experience could be relied upon as a predictor of the future, but when, Emerson pertinaciously asks, have our past predictions ever turned out to have been accurate? “The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarreled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new and very unlike what he promised himself” (40). Moreover: Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. “You will not remember,” he seems to say, “and you will not expect.” (39)

All we can know of time, Emerson proposes, is the law of procession or succession. One minute follows another, and, as I have said, his images of parades and processionals reify and literalize the “passage” of time. We stare into the face of the present for a brief and crucial moment, while the figures that went before and those that will come after remain shrouded and impenetrable. Because we cannot organize phenomenologic chronology into any coherent pattern, “time” really becomes just another word for change, which, embrace it though we may, a part of our being always resists:

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The secret of the illusoriness [of the phenomenal world] is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si muove. When, at night, I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects. Dedication to one thought is quickly odious. (32)

Emerson’s allusion here is probably to the comment Galileo made after reluctantly recanting his statement that the earth moved: “But it does move,” he is reported to have muttered, while stamping the ground with his foot. Thus Emerson, in the essay, is putting himself in the position of the Church, which could not bring itself to confront solid evidence. The earth turns, Emerson says, and change is constant, whether we like it or not. We become caught between the onward rush of nature and our own inextirpable desire to stop or freeze time in order that we may determine the reality and significance of what we see and experience. We are thus constitutionally unsuited to the conditions under which we exist, and it is this incongruity that lies at the heart of Emerson’s version of the Fall of Man. Yet another paradigm served by Emerson’s figure of succession, however, is memory, or our reconstruction of the chain of events that eventuate in present circumstances. But memory, like expectation, is a human invention foreign to the natural order, and liable to error. While we are in any given moment, we cannot perceive its relation to anything that has gone before; the present is literally unprecedented. Thus we are condemned to exist in one of two types of the present, both of which lack coherent form or explanatory context: quotidian “diurnal” time, which is linear, yet disjunct, or revelatory subjective time, which is infrequent and disconnected from our day-to-day lives.16 But Emerson professes an optimism that at some future date 16. Barbara L. Packer makes a similar point: Emerson had always refused to abandon his insistence that the visionary moments constituted our real life, the one in which we felt most truly ourselves. This insistence is not quite as suicidal as it sounds, for the visionary moments, however brief they may be when measured by the clock, have a way of expanding while they are occurring into an eternal present that makes a mockery of duration. (Emerson’s Fall, 156)

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we will be able to “re-member” ourselves by successfully integrating the two temporal modes of our experience: Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency. So is it with us, now skeptical, or without unity, because immersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the reception of spiritual law. Bear with these distractions, with this coetaneous growth of the parts: they will one day be members, and obey one will. (40–41)

Emerson’s italicizing of “members” draws our attention forcefully to his pun. He prophesizes that one day we will be able to reassimilate all of our experiences, mundane or sublime, as one unified “body” of knowledge. In the present state of affairs all our experiences seem like disjecta membra, either parts subtracted from the original “spheral man” of Plato’s legend or like the disjointed bones of crushed mummies. Here we may see the thread of commonality that binds Emerson’s spectral processions to his characterization of the past as a corpse. Successive time, associated in his mind with a past from which he had been sundered by death, may be reassembled to live again within the circle of the present moment. Emerson signals the concluding portion of “Experience” with a recapitulation, in order, of the subjects he has raised: “Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,—these are threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life” (47). This list is virtually identical to the one he provides in his introductory, eponymous poem. Thus in Emerson’s own text, he lets the “lords of life” parade past his observing authorial consciousness, one after the other; the essay itself therefore emulates life’s progression. By fulfilling his role as writer, Emerson successfully makes the transition from child to man, still “witnessing” the parade of change passing before him, while simultaneously, on this occasion, distinguishing the individual qualities and demeanors of the various “participants.” Even so, however, and despite his discussion of the “lords” in the order in which he first named them, he cautions: “I dare not assume to give their order, but I name them as I find them in my way.” Emerson admits to having qualms about looking too closely at the sequence of figures in the cortege, as if he were afraid that among the ranks

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of marchers he might suddenly see something disconcerting, perhaps even horrifying.17 In the final two or three pages of “Experience,” this list of life’s determinants is succeeded, appropriately, by Emerson’s inventory of himself. He accepts the fact that he has entered middle age. He reckons his accomplishment as a thinker and an “experimenter,” while cautioning that his method is not easily formalized or quantified, and he protests that he is “too young yet by some ages to compile a code” (47). He knows his accomplishments have been chiefly intellectual, and he defends intellectual labor against imagined accusations of idleness: [H]ankering after an overt or practical effect seems to me an apostasy. In good earnest, I am willing to spare this most unnecessary deal of doing. Life wears to me a visionary face. Hardest, roughest action is visionary also. It is but a choice between soft and turbulent dreams. People disparage knowing and intellectual life, and urge doing. I am very content with knowing, if only I could know. That is an august entertainment, and would suffice me a great while. (48)

This passionate defense of transcendental living asserts the value, as work, of intellectual exploration. Emerson says that knowing is doing, if people will only recognize it as such; it is not a species of “entertainment,” and his use of that word is ruefully ironic. Emerson recognizes that he is condemned, as an intellectual, to live a kind of double life: I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe that difference, and shall observe it. One day, I shall know the value and law of this discrepance. (48)

That a discrepancy must exist between inner and outer reality appears to have been ordained, as “law,” but Emerson pledges to use his 17. Packer cites the appearance among Emerson’s early notebooks of yet another reference to a “train” of days or of qualities. At the age of nineteen, Emerson was already loath to distinguish one participant in the processional from another: In the pageant of life, Time & Necessity are the stern masters of ceremonies who admit no distinctions among the vast train of aspirants. . . . And though the appetite of youth for marvels & beauty is fain to draw deep & strong lines of contrast between one & another character we early learn to distrust them & to acquiesce in the unflattering & hopeless picture which Experience exhibits. (Emerson’s Fall, 153)

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intellect to “re-member” the disparate portions of his experience, and he invites others to do likewise. Rather than wasting one’s power of thought upon polemics or upon elaborate philosophic schemes, Emerson asks rhetorically, “[W]hy not realize your world?” His verb is double-edged, its duality pointing straight at a theme that his essays raise repeatedly and insistently: To be happy, try to reduce the difference between reality and ideality, or the world that is and the world that you think. The key to accomplishing such a transformation is to accept thinking as a valid form of work, and in his conclusion Emerson urges us, his readers, to be circumspect in how we allocate our time, so that we allow ourselves sufficient time in which to reflect: We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life. We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. (49)

Emerson differentiates between the hours an individual spends in society earning a living and attending to household affairs, all of which can be measured by the clock, and subjective time, an atemporal state in which an individual may perform the most significant accomplishments of his life, through the agency of thought alone. The deceptiveness of time lies in our tendency to accord more value to activities that consume more time. In revelation’s alternate economy, however, time is not money, but simply time. Emerson wrote in his journal that “the only economy of time is in every moment to stick by yourself.” Yet he could not avoid feeling ambivalent about his chosen vocation as itinerant intellectual, subsidized, in part, by the legacy he had received from his first wife’s estate. He recognized that he had more discretionary time than the majority of people did, and although he tried to make the most of it, as a self-employed man he could never work hard enough to satisfy his employer. Emerson wished to reciprocate the gift of days he had received, but because his labors were chiefly intellectual, he perennially lacked sufficient tangible “capital” with which to requite them. Thus an element of guilt seems always to attach to Emerson’s

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objectivizations and personifications of time, and finally we must read his efforts to live “above” time as being at least partially conditioned by regret and self-recrimination, the very qualities he inveighs against in “Self-Reliance” and “Circles.” Emerson was continually trying to placate the implacable Days as they processed unendingly into the future, an image that powerfully suggests a failed rite of mourning— not “morning wishes,” but a wish to mourn. Emerson sacrificed to time, but the smoke from his burnt offerings did not always rise.

4 THE WALKING STICK, THE SURVEYOR’S STAFF, AND THE CORN IN THE NIGHT Thoreau’s Alternative Temporal Indices In all my travels I never came to the abode of the present. —Journal, October 1850 . . . I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor. —“Walking” During the five-year interim separating A Week’s publication from that of Walden, Thoreau’s temporal themes underwent an important conceptual shift. Whereas A Week treats the whole of time viewed geologically, historically, and personally, Walden’s focus rests squarely upon the moment, symbolized by the still waters of the pond itself. While water continued to serve as Thoreau’s chief chronologic symbol, as his attitude toward time modulated from objectivity and aloofness (“Time measures nothing but itself”) to passionate engagement, he fished in it, swam in it, or tested its depth rather than simply being carried along upon its surface. In Walden Thoreau also retains the keen interest in systems of measurement evinced in the earlier book, what Emerson called his gift for “mensuration.” Thus, for example, in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Thoreau proposes to erect in the stream of time a “Realometer” rather than an Egyptian “Nilometer” to measure the significance of the transcendental moment. Yet in the initial chapters of Walden, at least, Thoreau’s chief temporal innovation is the substitution of his own growth for conventional diurnal indices such as the clock, the calendar, or the newspaper. This internalizing of time climaxes in a passage in “Sounds” that some consider, as Walter Harding says, “one of the outstanding expressions of the

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mystical experience in literature.”1 There, Thoreau compares himself while living at Walden Pond to corn growing in the night—that is, growing superabundantly and paradoxically, during a period of notime. Significantly, the image of corn growing in the night recurs as well in a central passage of “Walking,” in which Thoreau professes his belief in an alternative “trinity” of wildness: “I believe in the forest, and the meadow, and the night in which the corn grows.” Finally, as a sort of vertical measure, or gnomon, to indicate the passage of time, the cornstalk is symbolically allied in Thoreau’s writings both with the walking stick upon which he carves “the nick of time” and with his surveyor’s staff. The deep moment in which Thoreau aspired to live had its locational equivalent in his house at Walden Pond, where he led a purposely “marginal” existence—that is, in the margin dividing civilization from wilderness, or, figured temporally, in the seam of the present, bounded on both sides by the twin eternities of past and future. In “Walking” he calls this interstitial existence “the border life,” which he compares to a musical interval in the wood thrush’s song. Taken together, “Walking” and Walden thus define and defend the idea of the Thoreauvian interval, which elapses between conventional minutes and which is situated somewhere along the fence line separating the wild from the town. Within that imaginary temporal and spacial refuge Thoreau experienced the liminal, timeless state of mind that he called a “revery” and treated as a physical location in its own right. As Joel Porte says of the Thoreauvian interval, “[T]his ‘place’ has physical reality for Thoreau: it is the dream-site where the supernal, or supremely poetic, experience impinges on mundane consciousness.”2 As such, it is indispensable to his creativity, which flourished in a mood of dreaming wakefulness. Significantly, however, Thoreau’s interest in demarcating the territory in which he felt himself to be most at home did not begin man1. Harding, Annotated Walden, 108. 2. Joel Porte, “Henry Thoreau and the Reverend Poluphloisboios Thalassa,” 197. The “Thoreauvian interval” whose existence I am predicating has much in common with Leo Marx’s “middle landscape,” that is, an ideal version of the landscape, which “is located in a middle ground somewhere ‘between’” civilization and nature, while simultaneously transcending them (The Machine in the Garden, 23). Yet I would append to this definition the added dimension of temporality, implicit within the musical and chronologic term interval, as well as that of consciousness, in that the Thoreauvian interval divides (or reconciles) conscious and unconscious actions.

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ifesting itself in earnest until after he had abandoned his house at Walden Pond and had begun taking on more work as a surveyor, a change he did not altogether welcome. Although Thoreau had a draft of Walden in hand when he left the pond in 1847, the problem of how to make a living was also then much on his mind (the success of his philosophical experiment at Walden notwithstanding), and to subsidize what was becoming an almost compulsive habit of taking long daily walks, Thoreau began accepting more and more surveying work. He had understood the rudiments of surveying since at least 1840, when he and his brother had kept a school and had taken their pupils on field trips to practice surveying the cliffs overlooking Fairhaven Bay.3 In 1847, while he was at the pond, Thoreau acquired a copy of Charles Davies’s Elements of Surveying and Navigation, and, in 1850, he supplemented the level and circumferator he had owned since his teaching days with a complete set of instruments.4 In the spring or summer of that year he began distributing a handbill advertising his professional services.5 Plainly, Thoreau’s decision to become a surveyor was deliberate and carefully considered. But it also represents his acceptance of a side to his personality that had begun asserting itself more insistently. Already a measurer by nature or by inclination, during the early 1850s Thoreau became aware of a trend in his thinking toward scientific observation, which often entailed making exact calculations of distance, volume, and time. Increasingly, his journal began to incorporate lists of measurements and meticulous descriptions of natural phenomena, and he called 1852, in particular, his 3. See Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography, 83–84. 4. For this information I am indebted to Albert F. McLean Jr.’s article “Thoreau’s True Meridian: Natural Fact and Metaphor.” 5. In “A Thoreau Handbill” (Bulletin of the New York Public Library 59 [1955]: 254; reprinted in Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 461), John D. Gordon transcribed Thoreau’s handbill as follows: LAND SURVEYING Of all kinds, according to the best methods known; the necessary data supplied, in order that the boundaries of Farms may be accurately described in Deeds; Woods lotted off distinctly and according to a regular plan; Roads laid out, &c., &c. Distinct and accurate Plans of Farms furnished, with the buildings thereon, of any size, and with a scale of feet attached, to accompany the Farm Book, so that the land may be laid out in a winter evening. Areas warranted accurate within almost any degree of exactness, and the Variation of the Compass given, so that the lines can be run again. Apply to Henry d. Thoreau.

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“year of observation” (JTA, 4:174). Although he occasionally disparaged this growing fascination with facts and details, he did nothing to resist it, perhaps because he understood that his interest in measurement was integrally associated with other facets of his personality, including his literary creativity. Thus it is probably not coincidental that 1852 was also, according to Robert D. Richardson, a “peak year” for entries in his journal and the year in which Thoreau’s creativity was at its “flood tide.”6 Thoreau’s intensifying interest in the techniques of measuring space was accompanied by a similar interest in the methodologies for measuring time. Richardson speculates that in about July 1852, Thoreau experienced a breakthrough in his thinking about time, comprehending “for the first time” that the year was a circle, and not a square. The four seasons, he now saw, merged continuously, although not always serially: For example, an Indian summer could usher in a resurgence of plant growth, and a January thaw could either recapitulate the previous summer or presage the approaching spring. Yet Richardson also quite rightly points out that readers have sometimes made too much of Thoreau’s interest in temporal cyclicity, an aspect of his temporal consciousness confirmed, at least in the public mind, by millions of glossy calendars that append his epigrams (or phrases easily construed as epigrams) to lush color photographs of natural splendors. Hence in the mass consciousness of America the very thought of Henry David Thoreau has become firmly wedded to the procession of the seasons and the regularity of the natural “clock.” And yet Thoreau’s true interests are represented far more authentically by the appearance of snippets from his writings in equally glossy Sierra Club datebooks that focus upon the events of the day rather than upon the progress of the seasons. As he grew older, Thoreau became more pleasurably aware of individualizing differences between each year, month, and day, and he wrote in his journal on September 12, 1851, “I can hardly believe that there is so great a difference between one year and another as my journal shows.” His sense of the passing moment’s uniqueness lay at the heart of his ambitious project of assembling an indexed chart, what he called his “kalendar,” that would list all the natural events transpiring in the countryside around Concord. To this determination to encompass the totality of the present, some portion, at least, of 6. Richardson, Life of the Mind, 273, 279.

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Thoreau’s growing fascination with scientific measurement during the years following Walden’s publication must be attributed. In a sense, Thoreau’s view of time during this period could be characterized as having become progressively “Darwinian,” in that he began assigning an increasingly significant role to individual temporal differences, as Darwin was assigning to individual traits, in working out the process of natural selection. That similarity may not be entirely coincidental, for in 1851 and 1852 Thoreau was reading both Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Louis Agassiz’s and Augustus Gould’s Principles of Zoology. Thoreau may also have been led to think more closely upon the measurement of time by the disappointingly slow pace at which his own literary career was proceeding. When A Week first appeared in 1849, it contained an advertisement for the author’s second book, Walden, which the publisher, James Munroe, promised would soon become available. This was not to be, however, and the story of A Week’s failure to sell, and Thoreau’s subsequent decision to edit Walden more exhaustively, has become one of American literary history’s better-known parables of artistic perseverance. But another result of Thoreau’s lengthy editing of his manuscript is that Walden itself must be accepted as a sort of temporal pastiche, assembled at different times out of widely divergent materials, so that thematically and stylistically, it is continuous both with the earlier A Week and the later “Walking.” When Walden finally was published in 1854 by Ticknor and Fields, the book was twice as long as Thoreau’s original manuscript had been. As J. Lyndon Shanley has shown, in The Making of “Walden,” Thoreau worked his manuscript through at least seven drafts before eventually sending it to press. Shanley calls the prototype version Thoreau wrote while living at the pond “Walden I.” In 1850 and 1851 Thoreau worked on “Waldens” II and III; these were followed by a year-long lull until he took up the manuscript again with renewed vigor—and much more new material culled from his journal—in about January 1852. Beginning with “Walden IV,” the bulk of Thoreau’s added material went to filling out Walden’s later chapters, particularly “The Ponds,” “Baker Farm,” “Higher Laws,” “Brute Neighbors,” “Former Inhabitants,” “Winter Animals,” “The Pond in Winter” and “Conclusion.”7 Thus from 1849 until 1854, Thoreau was 7. J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of “Walden,” 2, 31.

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more or less continually engaged in reevaluating and reinterpreting his experiment at the pond, and this prolonged period of retrospection generated a constant flow of new material that had to be integrated contentually and stylistically with the remnant text of his first draft. Emending so large a work over so long a time posed many challenges for Thoreau, not the least of which was reconciling the various chronological inconsistencies generated by the ever-increasing lapse of years separating the actual experience of living at the pond from his recollection of it. To complicate matters further, rather than writing Walden as a straightforward chronological “diary” of his experiences at the pond, Thoreau deliberately intermixed various temporal frames of reference, blurring distinctions between past and present. In chapters such as “Sounds,” “Solitude,” and “Brute Neighbors,” Thoreau intermittently abandons his retrospective “narration” of his stay at the pond and uses the present tense to create an impression that events and thoughts are transpiring in real time, that is, while he is in the act of writing. This temporal verisimilitude in Thoreau’s writing style arises naturally, even inevitably, out of his compositional methodology, based, like Emerson’s, upon journal writing. Nevertheless, prose written in the present tense lent itself especially well to being used in a book about learning to live in the present tense. After his return from the pond, revising the Walden manuscript was not the only literary project occupying Thoreau. Between 1850 and 1852 he was also making many of the journal entries that would culminate in the essay now most commonly known as “Walking,” originally published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly as “Walking, or the Wild.”8 That particular piece arose initially out of a lecture called “The Wild,” which, according to Richardson, Thoreau delivered for the first time in April 1851. “The Wild” rapidly became a favorite both of its author as well as of his audiences, and Thoreau reprised it publicly many times in succeeding years.9 The editorial alteration of the essay’s title “The Wild” to “Walking, or The Wild” reflects a topical bifurcation that some (including Thoreau) have regarded as 8. “Walking” was one of the pieces Thoreau revised virtually on his deathbed. He sent it to the Atlantic Monthly in March only two months before succumbing to tuberculosis in May. The essay appeared shortly afterward, in the June issue. For a brief synopsis of the essay’s genesis, see Harding and Meyer’s The New Thoreau Handbook, 60–61. 9. Richardson, Life of the Mind, 224.

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a potential structural weakness in the piece, but which other readers have viewed as one of its many strengths. The first half of the essay is a humorous disquisition upon “sauntering,” while the second half is a passionate and eloquent defense of humankind’s need for the wild. Although “Walking” and Walden would seem, at least initially, to be the products of two very different perspectives of the world—one peripatetic, the other anchored by the side of the pond—they answer to Thoreau’s apparently contradictory needs to ramble and be rooted. For some readers, they also represent the quintessence of Thoreau’s thinking about nature, as well as the high-water mark of his literary style.10 Yet read intertextually, in conjunction with informing passages from their common source (his journal), those two works provide a conceptual basis for understanding Thoreau’s vindication of personal growth as the only true index of time. Thoreau begins Walden by putting time on an overtly economic footing. “Economy” forcefully reminds us that because time is money, it should be regarded as a form of capital. Consequently, getting a living must be frankly recognized as losing a living, since “the cost of a thing is the amount of . . . life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run” (W, 31). Although people could use their time much more productively in pursuing self-culture, says Thoreau, man has become so coarsened by incessant labor that he “has no time to be anything but a machine.” Workers make the fundamental mistake of thinking that if they have more money they will have more leisure time, whereas Thoreau points out that the very opposite is true: The more possessions one has, the less time one has. For example, the farmer who augments his land’s fertility by dressing it with his own livestock’s manure will then also become responsible for the animals’ upkeep as well as for the expense of building and maintaining a barn, with the net result that he will have to invest more of his time into the labor of farming. Thoreau thus enlarges the concept of indebtedness to include not only those who are literally in debt, but also those who owe their time to something or someone else. An interpretation of time as capital also underlies Thoreau’s well-known humorous characterization of his decision to move to 10. Richardson says, for example, “As Walden is Thoreau’s central book, so ‘Walking’ is his central essay” (Life of the Mind, 224).

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Walden Pond as a business enterprise, yet his plays upon words act to distinguish his philosophic objectives from more conventionally materialistic goals: I determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had already got. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish. (W, 19–20)

Thoreau’s “private business” was, at least in part, to grieve his brother’s death both by preserving John Thoreau’s memory in A Week and by solacing himself with the presence of nature. In preparing to go to the pond he refuses to amass the usual capital beforehand, yet he simultaneously professes a willingness to invest “common sense, a little enterprise and business talent.” Thoreau thereby converts the language of entrepreneurship to an expression of his determination to live his philosophy, rather than merely hypothesizing. By the same token, in “Walking” he represents “sauntering” as a “profession” within which “capital” is exchanged for the necessary leisure time: “No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession” (WR, 5:207). In “Economy” Thoreau also gradually builds up a contrast between time determined by economic constraints versus time experienced naturally. The two intersect in his ironical representation of himself to the reader as a “reporter” upon the doings of nature. He says that as a reporter for a “journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions” (18), he recorded day-to-day changes in nature, as well as changes within himself. This particular brand of “journal-ism” paid no wages despite Thoreau’s provision of a valuable “service” to the community by writing a contemporary chronicle of what was going on both in the woods and in his thoughts. Simultaneously, however, Thoreau’s self-characterization as a reporter is a not-so-implicit criticism of the nation’s and the age’s avidity for “news,” a term that he reinterprets forcefully as a synonym for the new, or present, moment. Although Thoreau certainly did not ignore national issues such as slavery, the “President’s War” with Mexico, or the Gold Rush of ’49, his

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advice to the reader in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” to give up a dependence upon the daily newspaper is consistent with an overall emphasis in his writings upon localism—that is, an intense consciousness of one’s immediate surroundings and circumstances. The same spirit of localism applies to time as well, in that he privileges the near-at-hand present over some other person’s or nation’s “current events” experienced at second hand, via newsprint; moreover, in the mid-nineteenth century, any “news” reported in the newspapers was likely to be already stale or “old” news, anyway.11 A third point about time raised in “Economy” is that the present instant cannot be isolated or separated from the rest of time. Once again Thoreau relies upon puns, riddles, and paradoxes to convey this message gently, yet compellingly. Hence his humorous condemnation of “the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity” (8). Thoreau’s last colloquialism is double-edged: While these pious ladies pass the time until the hour of judgment by occupying their hands, they murder the present moment by subordinating it to an intangible hereafter. Like excessive materialism, which could drive people so deeply into debt that their time can no longer be considered their own, eschatological Christianity essentially asked people to mortgage their authentic present on earth against a contingent future in heaven. Time’s essential indivisibility is also the basis for Thoreau’s famous paradox about traveling to Fitchburg faster by walking than someone else who rides the train. The train passenger arrives later, of course, because he first has to earn the purchase price of a ticket, while Thoreau, needing none, could embark immediately on foot and arrive earlier. But Thoreau’s point is that we cannot isolate the time in which it takes to earn money from the time we have “saved” by traveling at a greater speed.12 11. Similarly, in “Life without Principle,” Thoreau says, “Read not the times, but the eternities.” That essay, like “Walking,” was not published until after Thoreau’s death, although the journal entries from which Thoreau built up “Life without Principle” date chiefly from the years 1851–1855. See Harding and Meyer, New Thoreau Handbook, 62. 12. Thoreau’s wager challenges his reader’s sense of the relationship of distance and time in a manner reminiscent of Zeno’s paradoxes. Zeno, the founder of stoicism and one of Thoreau’s intellectual heroes, used logical problems such as Achilles’ futile race against the tortoise, or the assertion that an arrow in flight could not both move

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Yet Thoreau’s approach to time becomes most subversive when he treats time, in “Economy” and elsewhere in Walden, as a concrete space or place. He blurs customary distinctions between the two with a series of riddling, elliptical, and often highly lyrical passages containing tropes based, either explicitly or implicitly, upon units of measure. One of these would be his stated determination in “Economy” to notch the present moment upon his walking stick, an image that will be resurrected at the other “end” of Walden in Thoreau’s description of the artist of Kouroo carving a wooden staff over the course of eternity. In “Economy,” however, Thoreau embeds the present moment in time by marking its precise “location” upon his walking stick: In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. (W, 17)

Here Thoreau delineates the present moment in two ways: first by notching it on the staff that he also uses as a calendrical tally stick;13 and second by “toeing off” the boundary lines where past and future meet to form the present, an image grounded in surveying. The vertical linearity of his image of the walking stick merges, or rather intersects, with the horizontal linearity of his imaginary, surveyed temporal and occupy space, to disrupt customary modes of thinking about time’s relationship to space. Much in the same vein is Thoreau’s claim that he had “travelled much in Concord.” A helpful modern recapitulation of Zeno’s time and space paradoxes, accompanied by commentaries written by noted logicians, philosophers, and mathematicians, may be found in Wesley C. Salmon’s Zeno’s Paradoxes. 13. Thoreau enjoyed Defoe’s adventure, and both Crusoe and Friday appear occasionally in his journal. See Robert Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History, 165; and Harding, Annotated Walden, 14.

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boundaries, to establish a juncture or zero point. Yet Thoreau is not so much interested in fixing the “location” of the present as he is in amplifying it, that is, in expanding the width of that imaginary line separating the twin eternities of past and future. Thoreau signals his intentions by using the verb “improve,” which he uses in its obsolete sense of meaning “to enlarge,” so that the image is one of gouging or whittling a deeper notch into a stick. At the same time, however, Thoreau’s diction gestures deceptively toward the expectations of readers imbued with the Protestant ethic, who would interpret his stated intention of “improving” time as a reference to becoming more industrious and productive. In a book whose central topic is the inutility of excessive work, Thoreau’s use of that phrase generates a mordant irony. Thoreau’s references to notching sticks and toeing lines forcefully draw the reader’s attention to surveying activities, and yet he treats his sometime profession more as a trope than as a trade, with the walking stick itself functioning in the text as a central symbol linking together several interrelated and submerged themes. A wooden staff, in addition to providing added stability for a hiker, could also serve as a calendar, as it did for Robinson Crusoe, or, for the impromptu surveyor, as a unit measure of length, as a rough level, or as a ranging pole. But when he wrote these conjoined paragraphs, Thoreau was not yet a practicing surveyor; they appear in “Walden I,” written while he was still at the pond. Although Thoreau accumulated some of the initial “capital” he needed to begin his enterprise at Walden by doing surveying jobs, in 1847 he was still working only informally and intermittently. Nevertheless, in this passage he may already be contemplating accepting more surveying work as a means of retaining ready access to the woods. Even though, as I have said, Thoreau recognized his own flair for “mensuration,” surveying offered him the important ancillary benefit of admitting him to portions of the woods he might ordinarily have visited only with difficulty and at the risk of being confronted by landowners. Moreover, Thoreau may have begun to conceive of his entire philosophic method as a kind of “surveying,” in that he was constantly employed in fixing the boundaries of experience. His willingness to integrate the “mensurating” techniques he applied to space and time with the more intangible metaphysical dimensions of his pursuits may be obliquely referred to in the passage above as the “secrets” inseparable to his “trade,” which he would

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willingly impart to anyone desirous to know them, as he had once imparted the principles of surveying to his students. Thoreau’s famous and enigmatic reference to hounds, horses, and turtledoves may also be grounded, although more indirectly, in his decision to become a surveyor. At first glance, this paragraph would seem to be a non sequitur, or a topical digression from the paragraph immediately preceding it. Yet the key, I think, to understanding this passage is that Thoreau is identifying another of his many “careers,” that of inveterate trespasser. During virtually all of his walks around the Concord countryside before he became a surveyor, Thoreau was technically trespassing—hence his determination, should he ever become a landowner, never to hang a “No Admittance” sign by his gate. Although Thoreau customarily went out of his way to avoid trampling farmers’ fields by walking along fencerows and ditches, he must have been confronted, occasionally, by indignant farmers wanting to know what he was doing in their fields and woodlots, “in any weather, at any hour.” Before he became widely known as a surveyor, Thoreau could hardly have hoped to excuse his presence by claiming he was engaged upon professional business. Aside from saying, somewhat limply, that they had lost their way, trespassers accosted by owners could claim they had strayed while hunting for game such as “turtledoves,” or that they were tracking some valuable domestic animal that had run away. Because Thoreau did not carry a gun, it is more likely that he would have offered up the latter explanation when challenged, having heard a like excuse offered by a man who blundered across his house at Walden Pond.14 If he did indeed concoct such a story on the spot, Thoreau may have been amused by hearing his interlocutors 14. Thoreau recorded his humorous interview with the interloper in a journal entry written while he was living at the pond; in it Thoreau does a good job himself of throwing his nosy visitor off the scent: Have you seen my hound sir— I want to know What— Lawyer’s office— law books if you’ve seen anything of a hound about here— why, what do you do here? I live here. no I have’nt. haven’t you heard one In the woods anyplace O yes, I heard one this morning— What do you do here— but he was someway off— Which side did he seem to be— Well I should think here this other side of the pond.— This is a large dog makes a large track—he’s been out hunting from Lexington for a week. How long have you lived here— O about a year Some body said there was man up here had a camp in the woods somewhere and he’d got him Well I dont know of any body— There’s Brittons camp over on the other road— It may be there— Is’nt there anybody in these woods— Yes they are chopping right up here

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contribute unwittingly to the plausibility of his lie by helpfully mentioning that they too had heard the fictitious dog barking or horse trotting, or that they had seen just such a bird, now unfortunately vanished. Thoreau, who had set fire to the woods accidentally in 1844, was acutely conscious of the town’s estimate of his character, and he may have been reluctant to have it widely known that he told such fibs to justify his presence on private lands.15 Thoreau’s sensitivity about his townsmen’s opinions of him may also have been to blame for the evasiveness of his own interpretation of his words in a letter written to B. B. Wiley: If others have their losses, which they are busy repairing, so have I mine, & their hound & horse may perhaps be the symbols of some of them. But also I have lost, or am in danger of losing, a far finer & more etherial treasure, which commonly no loss of which they are conscious will symbolize—this I answer hastily & with some hesitation, according as I now understand my own words.16

But what Thoreau may have stood most in danger of losing at that time were the woods themselves, or at least his free, untrammelled enjoyment of them. As I mentioned, Thoreau began considering a career as a professional surveyor, rather than simply as someone who

behind me— how far is it— only a few steps—hark a moment—there dont you hear the sound of their axes. (J, 2:190) 15. Another hint that Thoreau occasionally felt a twinge of guilt over his intrusions upon other people’s property may be found in his journal entry for January 3, 1861, while he is discussing the unpleasant prospect of the American mode of land ownership (and restriction of access to that land) coming to resemble the English system: It is true we as yet take liberties and go across lots, and steal, or “hook,” a good many things, but we naturally take fewer and fewer liberties every year, as we meet with more resistance. In old countries, as England, going across lots is out of the question. You must walk in some beaten path or other, though it may [be] a narrow one. We are tending to the same state of things here, when practically a few will have grounds of their own, but most will have none to walk over but what the few allow them. (J TA, 14:305–6) 16. In an appendix to his Annotated Walden, Walter Harding recapitulates the various interpretations of this passage that have been offered (327–29).

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did surveying as a sideline, at just about the time he left the pond.17 That vocational change marked the end of his residence at Walden not just temporally, but symbolically, as well. Rather than being a resident of the woods, he was reduced to being a visitor, and one whose visits were often made at the behest of others. Nevertheless, Thoreau’s surveying business began to succeed within only one year’s time after he distributed his handbill. His reputation grew to such a point that the selectmen of Concord, Lincoln, and Sudbury employed him to perambulate those towns’ boundary lines, which had fallen into dispute. Despite being compensated quite adequately for his services, Thoreau continued to feel ambivalent about his métier, as shown by a 1851 journal entry: Sep. 20th 3 Pm to Cliffs via Bear Hill. As I go through the fields endeavoring to recover my tone & sanity—& to perceive things truly & simply again, after having been perambulating the bounds of the town all the week, and dealing with the most common place and worldly minded men, and emphatically trivial things, I feel as if I had committed suicide in a sense. I am again forcibly struck with the truth of the fable of Apollo serving King Admetus—its universal applicability. A fatal coarseness is the result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been associating even with the select men of this and the surrounding towns, I feel inexpressibly begrimed, my pegasus has lost his wings, he has turned a reptile and gone on his belly. Such things are compatible only with a cheap and superficial life The poet must keep himself unstained and aloof. Let him perambulate the bounds of imagination’s provinces the realms of faery, and not the insignificant boundaries of towns. The excursions of the imagination are so boundless—the limits of towns are so petty. (J, 4:84–85)

In losing his house at Walden, Thoreau also lost a sense of personal independence, a sense of living without limits, and a sense that, if he was dirtying his hands, at least he was doing so with dirt, rather than with commerce. His description of the purity of his remembered house site at Walden in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” stands in contrast to the triviality and materialism he discerns in the characters of the selectmen with whom he walked the township bounds. When 17. Shanley says that Thoreau “took up the profession of surveying” in about 1847 (Making of “Walden,” 9–10).

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Thoreau had taken occupancy of his house at Walden on July 4, 1845, the raw boards in its as-yet unplastered walls gave it, he thought, a “clean and airy look” (W, 84). Although Thoreau’s accent upon a nearly virginal purity here is consistent with Walden’s overall emphasis upon new beginnings and “morning time,” his imagery in the rest of that chapter also emphasizes the newness of his house as a political entity. Even the symbolic significance of his move-in date, July 4, rests not just solely in his “independence” from material wants, but also in his establishment of a new republic, a sovereign state that has, like other states, agreed-upon boundaries. One problem with modern life, Thoreau says in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” is that trivial cares have so overburdened us that we have become like nations having several borders that must be continually negotiated and defended, if necessary: “Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment” (92). At Walden, however, his house sits in a space that figuratively resembles an idealized frontier in that it fronts on only two sets of neighboring “parcels,” civilization and wilderness. In so representing his house as an unspoiled, radically simplified demi-Utopia, Thoreau palpably demonstrates his allegiance to America’s historic cultural construction of itself as the “City on the Hill,” the new Jerusalem that the Puritans hoped would remain immune to the Old World’s territorial squabbles and moral iniquities. Yet he simultaneously transcends conventional national aspirations by fixing the era of his residence at Walden in a virtually ahistorical, greatly expanded Present. He introduces the topic almost surreptitiously, by way of a pun in the seventh paragraph of “Where I Lived and What I Lived For”: “The present was my next experiment of this kind . . . putting the experience of two years into one.”18 Thoreau’s use of the word present here is pregnant with meaning, in that while at Walden he was conducting an experiment in time, as well as in economics. His text, as he explains, compresses two years into one, in the same way in which A Week had compressed two weeks into one, so that the reader is put on notice rather early in Walden that Thoreau intends to 18. Emphasis added. In Ronald Clapper’s system of organizing Thoreau’s successive drafts of Walden, this version is equivalent to “D” (see “The Development of Walden: A Genetic Text,” 263).

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take some liberties with time. After giving the reader a fairly detailed description of the house’s actual site above the pond’s shore, Thoreau also situates it chronologically, with the result that the reader’s sense of physical location becomes conflated and confused with his sense of temporality. Consider, for example, Thoreau’s deployment of the adverb nearer in the first sentence of the following paragraph: Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. (W, 87–88)

Thoreau’s use of the word “actually” in the final sentence is similarly subversive. “Actually,” his house was not that far removed from either the common road or from the railway track. His point here is that by erecting a structure that is both actual and ideal, he is enabled to live outside the limits of conventional time, in a continuous “now” that is, by definition, forever new. Thus Thoreau fulfills expectations raised by the chapter’s title, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” yet perhaps not in ways that a reader might typically expect. Thoreau’s treatment of time becomes even more disruptive as the second chapter of Walden progresses. Near its conclusion he makes his famous boast, “Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in.” That evocative figure appears toward the end of three astonishingly dense paragraphs, numbers 21 through 23, which threaten constantly to fall apart into a string of non sequiturs, but which are actually held together precariously by a suite of rhetorical strategies. Here is the passage, which contains some of the most beautiful writing Thoreau ever produced: Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.

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The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry,—determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamppost safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-

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paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way though these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine. (W, 96–98)

The potentially jarring discontinuity of thought in these paragraphs may be partially attributable to the fact that in the earliest versions of Walden, many of these sentence groupings originally existed at some distance from one another. As he worked his book through various drafts, Thoreau shuffled sentences, paragraphs, and whole pages around rather freely, especially among the early concatenated chapters “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” “Reading,” and “Sounds.” For example, in Shanley’s “Walden I,” Thoreau’s sentences about living one day “as deliberately as Nature” originally followed by two or three pages his description in “Sounds” of his doorstop reverie during which he characterizes himself as growing “like corn in the night,” so that when he extended his invitation to live deliberately, he had already provided an example of the benefits to be enjoyed by so living. Also, the entire passage that begins with Thoreau’s image of “fishing” in time and continuing all the way until “here I will begin to mine,” contained now in paragraph 22 of “Where I Lived,” originally preceded not only his statement that “God culminates in the present moment,” but a good deal of what would eventually constitute the “Reading” chapter, as well. Moreover, In “Walden I,” the “fishing” passage’s concluding declaration, “here I will begin to mine,” was originally succeeded immediately by a poem that Thoreau did not retain in his final draft. That poem begins with the line, “I seek the Present Time, / No other clime,” and the rest of the verse expresses Thoreau’s Emersonian determination to make the best of his present circumstances in Concord, rather than seeking his fortune elsewhere. Thus Thoreau’s trope of “mining” was evidently originally intended to indicate his determination to “seek” the present moment by “digging” for it, an image that is supported by the underlying symbolic presence of rivers, which also “rive” the landscapes through which they flow. Yet one more organizational change Thoreau made to the materials of what is now paragraph 22 was to introduce into them the long sentence beginning “Let us settle ourselves downward” and ending with Thoreau’s suggestion that his contemporaries dig down to lay the foundations of “not a Nilometer, but a Realometer” and so on.

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Thoreau did not add these words until “Walden II,” written in about 1850, and thus the passage constitutes one of the few truly novel additions Thoreau made to material that he must have recognized from the start as being crucial not only to his message in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” but to the whole of Walden, as well. Used specifically to represent time, the image of water functions as a subtle unifying device among these sentences, many of which were, as we have seen, originally imported from various locations in the manuscript’s earlier redactions.19 Beginning with the idea of “drenching” reality in the sublime, Thoreau’s prose advances downstream like Ulysses’ ship, past the “rapids” and “whirlpools” of seductive “meridian” (i.e., noontime) social dinners that threaten to waste his time until he reaches the shallows, where mud and “alluvion” may be dredged to find a “bottom” upon which to erect a stabilizing “Realometer,” an imaginary device that indexes the rise and fall of society’s “shams and appearances.”20 Thoreau’s series of water-related images climaxes in his famous depiction of himself “fishing” in the stream of time, although his finny quarry remains as yet unnamed, and his trope is grounded in drinking the waters of time as much as it is in fishing them. Then Thoreau abruptly disorients his reader by inverting the sky and the river, so that the stars become “pebbles” at the bottom of clear water, and the point of view is directed upward. The activity of fishing, which is a sort of looking (although admittedly, without always finding) shifts smoothly then back down to digging, another variety of “looking,” expressed first through the concept of mining, 19. The centrality of water in Thoreau’s work has been expressed most succinctly, perhaps, by Joel Porte, who asks, “Can there be any doubt about Thoreau’s primary orientation toward water?” (“Thoreau and the Reverend,” 201). If Heraclitus was the presocratic philosopher with whom Emerson felt the greatest affinity, for Thoreau it was Thales, who maintained that water, not fire, was the primary element of which the universe was constituted. A useful comparison of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s symbolic treatments of water may be found in Nina Baym’s “From Metaphysics to Metaphor: The Image of Water in Emerson and Thoreau.” 20. In his essay “Walden’s False Bottoms,” Walter Benn Michaels points out the essential indeterminacy of Thoreau’s “bottoms,” whether of Walden Pond or of character. Although I agree with Michaels that Thoreau is as apt to disparage attempts to establish foundations as he is to advocate searching for them, I disagree with his contention that readers of Walden are, through Thoreau’s manipulation of the moral and epistemological choices available to them, finally trapped in a “game” they cannot possibly win.

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which is already latent in Thoreau’s reference to pebbles such as those the forty-niners were finding at the bottoms of their sluices. Thoreau’s “mining claim” is the “here” within which he digs, and since that particular word (which I shall interpret as a pronoun, rather than as an adverb) appears virtually at the conclusion of “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” here must designate his house at the pond, rather than, as it had in “Walden I,” the present day. Thus his site at Walden Pond, his “here,” is the answer to both of the rhetorical questions implicit within the chapter’s title, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.” Moreover, Thoreau’s reference to “burrowing” harkens back to his earlier statement in “Economy” that he had dug his house’s root cellar by widening a woodchuck’s existing burrow, so that Thoreau becomes, in effect, the second “woodchuck” to occupy the site. Correspondingly, Thoreau represents his construction of a house at Walden Pond as that of an animal burrowing into the hillside, or as a miner working his claim, except that he will “dig” his way with his cleaving, delving intellect rather than with claw or shovel. All his paralleled activities of sailing, angling, drinking, and digging terminate in his final image of dowsing, a kind of mining for water. The “richest vein” where he proposes to set up shop is the hidden spring of the present moment, a sort of temporal mother lode. In the mystical revery depicted in “Sounds,” Thoreau refines the ore uncovered by his temporal explorations. Although in “Reading” he discusses the usefulness of reading “timeless” literature, such as the classics, to achieve a state of timelessness, in “Sounds” Thoreau concentrates instead upon integrating himself fully with nature while he sits in his cabin’s doorway. The central theme of “Sounds,” expressed through the image of corn growing in the night, is growth within the present moment: “I grew in those seasons like corn in the night.” This concept seems paradoxical on its face. How can an organism live without the stimulus of light? Yet Thoreau’s trope is grounded, as is so often the case, in natural fact. During midsummer, maize grows at a rate that is proverbial, rising up from the ground so quickly that it makes an audible noise, and during its most rapid period of development its growth even laps over into the evening hours. Corn is also a distinctly American plant, and in growing corn next to his beans Thoreau was following an agricultural practice that the Pilgrims had adopted soon after landing upon the American shore. Thus the growth of maize is also an indigenous and native growth, highly appropriate

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to its place and time. In saying he grew during his residence at Walden Pond “like corn in the night,” Thoreau implicitly associates himself with a form of organic development that is simultaneously wild, in its unchecked rankness, yet domestic, like a cultivated crop. The entire paragraph in which the passage falls, like the conclusion of “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” is densely allusive, rhetorically complex, and conceptually challenging. I propose to approach it from four different perspectives: through its textual history, among Thoreau’s various drafts of Walden; through its rhetorical strategies; through the medium of Thoreau’s journal, in which the image of corn growing in the night acquires its manifold meanings; and finally through a parallel reading of the excerpt from “Walking,” in which he provides an alternative trinity—“I believe in the forest, and the meadow, and the night in which the corn grows.” Here is the paragraph, the second in “Sounds”: I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mind; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that “for yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day.” This was sheer idleness to

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my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flower had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. (W, 111–12)

Thoreau’s rhetorical goal in this passage was evidently to represent the timelessness of his sojourn at Walden Pond. Although many of these sentences survived from “Walden I,” Thoreau’s emendations and additions point toward a concentration of temporally themed materials. In “Walden I,” he initially approaches his topic more indirectly and discursively: I read very little however during the summer, for my thoughts would run upon my labor mainly, or rather where they pleased, and I had not leisure to drill myself. I only read one sentence of Homer to a week of hoeing—as for instance how Ajax struggled with the Trojans to ward off fire from the ships of the Greeks, while Patroclus was supplicating Achilles for his armor & his Myrmidons. I read no more than this—at once—still remembering & repeating it—but I imagined more things than are in the Homer while I hoed. Sometimes in a spring morning when the season of work had not yet arrived or later in the summer when it was already past, having performed my accustomed ablutions, I sat in my sunny door way from the earliest day, wrapt in a reverie, amid the pines and hickories and sumacks, while the birds sang around and flitted noiseless over my head and out at the open window—in undisturbed solitude & stillness, except when a bough fell like a fan broken by its own weight, in my sumack grove, when the atmosphere was perfume & incense, and every sound the key to unheard harmonies, until by the sun’s rays falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I am sensible that I waxed and grew in these intervals, as corn grows in the night, and they were far better than any work of my hands. I realized what the oriental philosophers meant by contemplation & the forsaking of works. It was quite impossible to have performed anything, and wise persons would not propose that any deed should be substituted therefor. They were little intervals during which I journeyed, and anticipated other states of existence. For the most part indeed I knew not how the hours went. I was accustomed to say to myself—certainly I am not living that heroic life I had dreamed of, and yet all my veins are full of life, and nature whispers no reproach. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine—and I defer to other men in my thought, as if there were

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somewhere busier men. It was morning, and lo! It is now evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Yet my nature is almost content with this. What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond adoing? I must know a little more and be forever ready. Instead of singing like the birds, I sometimes silently smile at my incessant good fortune. As the field-sparrow has its trill sitting on the hickory before my door, so have I my chuckle or suppressed warble, which he may hear out of my nest. I don’t know that I bear any flowers or fruits. Methinks if the birds & flowers try me by their standard I shall not be found wanting, but men try one another not so.21

By condensing all this material into the published version’s single paragraph, Thoreau generates a more unified, sustained discussion about time experienced subjectively, reporting first upon his experience of timelessness and then defending himself against imagined subsequent accusations of idleness. In addition to Thoreau’s consolidation of his thoughts about time, he makes pointed changes to the original material’s tone, content, and emphasis. For example, the note of self-doubt Thoreau sounds in the tertiary paragraph of the “Walden I” version is much less pronounced in the final, published text. Similarly, his tangential observations about Homer, whom he discussed elsewhere (in the material that would develop into “Reading”) were removed, as were superfluous details about what he saw and smelled while “rapt”/“wrapt” in reverie.22 The published version also accords more emphasis to time considered as place; hence his mention of the Puri Indians (in whom he did not become interested until about 1852)23 and his comparison of the Puri’s highly literal and directional indication of the time of day to Western civilization’s reliance upon 21. Shanley, Making of “Walden,” 151–52. 22. In the earlier version, one of the things Thoreau reports hearing while in his reverie was the sound of a fan of sumac leaves dropping, but in the published version, the sumac bough appears two pages farther along in “Sounds.” I speculate that one of his reasons for moving it was to concentrate the reader’s attention more exclusively upon corn as an exponent of prodigious growth, rather than the sumac. Sumac itself grows so quickly that, as Thoreau’s reference indicates, the weight of its leaves may cause fans to snap off from the stem. Moreover, the sumac achieves a rapid vertical growth; as Thoreau writes elsewhere in Walden, “The sumach, Rhus glabra, grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first season” (114). 23. See Walter Harding’s note in Annotated Walden, 109. The Puri, a Brazilian tribe, were described in Ida Pfeiffer’s A Lady’s Voyage Round the World, published in 1852.

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more abstract indices such as clocks and calendars. Moreover, Thoreau constructs temporality as locality when he says, “I love a broad margin to my life.” In “Walden I” he had written that his reveries occurred “within intervals during which I journeyed,” but by preferring “margin” over “interval,” Thoreau achieves a greater emphasis upon a concrete, realized space.24 Thoreau’s “interval” reappears, significantly, in “Walking,” when he says that there are “intervals” in the wood thrush’s song to which he wished he could “migrate,” almost as if those intervals were newly opened frontier lands. In that passage “interval” possesses, somewhat astonishingly, musical, temporal, and locational overtones simultaneously. This conflation seems especially appropriate if we consider Thoreau’s description in Walden of his life at the pond as “bordering” upon conventional time and space. Although to his fellow townsmen this generous “margin” of time might seem sheer idleness, Thoreau cogently asks, in the “Walden I” version of “Sounds,” “What is this pond adoing?” At Walden he is content simply to exist, like the pond itself, within an amplified present. Furthermore, he declines to have his experience of time judged according to “town” standards that fail to promote unity and organic growth. During his transcendental moments Thoreau exists outside of conventionally measured time, or time “minced into hours,” living instead according to the standard of the “birds and flowers,” or of growing corn. Although the materialistic world of capitalism and commerce— signified synechdochically by the rumble of a traveler’s wagon—would indict him for indolence, he lives in accordance with the natural measure of time, the “natural day,” which allows him to pass his time, and grow, at his own rate. Thoreau’s determination, as a philosopher, to put his theories into practice by going to the pond is matched by his determination, as a writer, to recapture linguistically the present he discovered there in “Sounds,” much as he had already done in A Week. Reproducing the timeless state in which he had lived, rather than simply “reporting” upon it, was evidently one of Thoreau’s primary motivations for writing the book. Beginning as early as “Walden I,” he used 24. Porte says of the “location” constituted by Thoreau’s reverie, “[T]his place has physical reality for Thoreau: it is the dream-site where the supernal, or supremely poetic, experience impinges on mundane consciousness” (“Thoreau and the Reverend,” 199).

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various linguistic strategies to manufacture a sense of immediacy or temporal verisimilitude. In the following sentence from the justcited passage in “Sounds,” for example, Thoreau uses verb tenses and adverbs both to reenact a compression of time and to establish a temporal point of view: “[I]t was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished.” Only two pages farther along into “Sounds” in Walden, Thoreau begins a new section by saying “As I sit at my window this summer afternoon,” which bears a close resemblance to Emerson’s temporal verisimilitude in “Self-Reliance” as he watches roses grow outside his window. Moreover, Thoreau’s editing of the passage once again demonstrates an effort to distill and concentrate its temporal content. As originally rendered in “Walden I,” the passage read “I sit at my window this summer afternoon like a priest of Isis and observe the phenomena of 3000 years ago still unimpaired.”25 This comparison of himself to a priest sounds faintly self-congratulatory and pompous, and his reference to “3000 years” of natural history is chronologically unclear— does he mean the historical age of Egypt when the god Isis was worshiped, or some point in the truly ancient past before man became the dominant species in the North American landscape? In any case, in a chapter devoted to evoking the present moment, references to past days and ages threatened to become a potential distraction. Yet another example of Thoreau’s editing to achieve greater temporal immediacy is apparent in his disposition of paragraphs in the first few pages of “Sounds.” In the “Walden I” version, the three paragraphs quoted previously were run into the rest of the text, so that they merged with several preceding paragraphs devoted to discussing the reading he had done while at the pond. In the final version, however, the material describing Thoreau’s “mystical” experience is given greater prominence by being placed in the second paragraph of a discrete chapter, “Sounds,” where it follows a comparatively brief introductory paragraph in which Thoreau revisits the third chapter’s topic, books, only to reject them summarily: “I did not read books the first summer: I hoed beans.” In the finished version of Walden Thoreau also helps orient the reader in time by bracketing groups of paragraphs with extra line spaces. After Thoreau’s comments concerning books, which create a bridge be25. Shanley, Making of “Walden,” 158.

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tween this chapter and its predecessor, “Reading,” “Sounds” begins with paragraphs written almost exclusively in the past tense (numbers two through four); then, after a white-space caesura, paragraphs that shift to the present tense (numbers five through thirteen); another caesura, followed by a single transitional paragraph in the present tense (number fourteen); and then a final reversion to the past tense, which predominates until the end of the chapter. Plainly the intervening present-tense section is meant to simulate, reenact, or perform the interval of “no-time” that Thoreau characterizes as his “reverie” in the chapter’s second paragraph. Thus the chapter itself subverts sequential, conventional time and provides a demonstration of the sort of temporal suspension Thoreau experienced during his “reveries.” The interval of “no-time” during which Thoreau grows at Walden Pond is not “dead” time—quite the contrary. His image of corn growing in the night connotes intense unconscious, as opposed to conscious, activity. The night itself, associated with rest, the unconscious, and the wild, nourishes all diurnal organisms and promotes their growth. Thoreau adopted the image of corn growing in the night even before he built his house at the pond, and references to it in his journal collectively generate a context that can aid our understanding of what he may have meant by it when he planted that important phrase in Walden, as well as in “Walking.” In his journal, the image evolves from a simple observation of a natural fact to a mature figure Thoreau employed to denote time being used efficiently to promote natural growth. On February 26, 1840, only two weeks after writing the initial version in his journal of his “Criticism of Aulus Persius Flaccus,” in which he observes that “Time measures nothing but itself,” Thoreau concludes an entry with an isolated, terse remark, “Corn grows in the night” (J, 1:113). Where he had acquired this curious nugget of information Thoreau does not reveal, and, since he is writing in the depth of winter, it certainly was not the fruit of direct observation. In succeeding months he returned to the image frequently in his journal, and eventually it acquired an emblematic or talismanic significance for him, much like the “telegraph harp” or the “sand foliage” he witnessed at the railway’s deep cut. On January 23, 1841, one year after his initial mention of the fact of corn’s nocturnal growth, Thoreau resurrects it as part of a meditation about routine’s usefulness as a sort of refuge for the conscious mind:

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Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it. It is the fence over which neighbors lean when they talk. All this cockcrowing and hawing and geeing, and business in the streets, is like the spring board on which tumblers perform, and develope their elasticity. Our health requires that we should recline on it from time to time. When we are in it, the hand stands still on the face of the clock, and we grow like corn in the genial dankness and silence of the night. Our weakness wants it, but our strength uses it. Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other—let them not call hard names, nor know a divided interest. (J, 1:229–30)

Note that Thoreau describes the night’s “dankness” and silence as being “genial,” or congenial, to growth, an early indication of his association of the image with the benefits of unconscious activity. The phrase next turns up in his journal entry for June 7, 1841, where it appears as part of a comparison of conventional western time to the long “Eastern” or Asian epochs, during which progress was measured in spiritual, rather than materialistic, terms: We are accustomed to exaggerate the immobility and stagnation of those eras—as of the waters which levelled the steppes.—but those slow revolving “years of the gods” were as rapid to all the needs of virtue as these bustling and hasty seasons. Man stands to revere—he kneels to pray. Methinks history will have to be tried by new tests to show what centuries were rapid and what slow. Corn grows in the night. Will this bustling era detain the future reader longer? Will the earth seem to have conversed more with the heavens during these times? Who is writing better Vedas? How science and art spread and flourished—how trivial conveniences were multiplied That which is the gossip of the world, is not recorded in them—and if they are left out of our scripture too what will remain? (J, 1:313)

Here, corn growing in the night represents an alternative paradigm of progress that is measured not in mechanical innovations, but through the refinement of religious and moral sentiments. The “night” in which the corn grows, or in which civilization flourishes, is an expanse of unhistorical years never recorded in conventional histories. The rise of a civilization resembles the growth of individuals in that their rate of development is neither constant nor easily measured. Thus

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although time may be measured in uniform units, its effects are unpredictable and idiosyncratic. Over time, the image of corn growing in the night began to connote for Thoreau an interval of “no-time” during which events of true significance, rather than the “trivial” events such as might be reported in newspapers, transpired. Although these extratemporal phases of existence could coincide with the passage of centuries, or the “years of the gods,” as they do in the journal entry just cited, Thoreau continued to associate them most intimately with the experience of a single night, or of a representative night. In July 1850, Thoreau employed the image of corn’s nocturnal growth as part of a description of night’s alternative reality, which corresponds, point for point, to daytime phenomena: Many men walk by day few walk by night. It is a very different season. Instead of the sun there are the moon and stars—instead of the wood thrush, there is the whippoorwill—instead of butter flies fire flies winged sparks of fire—for every thing has wings set to it at last—instead of singing birds the croaking of frogs & the intenser dream of crickets— The potatoes stand up straight—the corn grows—the bushes loom—& in a moon-light night the shadows of rocks—& trees & bushes & hills—are more conspicuous than the objects themselves. (J, 3:92)

Nighttime, or “no-time,” growth was accomplished not through activity and conscious effort, but through passivity, relaxation, and unconscious effort. In early 1851, Thoreau even uses the image of corn growing to endorse getting a good night’s sleep: “None of your four-hour nights for me me [sic]— The wise man will take a fool’s allowance— The corn would not come to much if the nights were but four hours long” (J, 3:180). Thus he establishes even more firmly an identity between himself and the corn, saying that he, like it, requires sufficient “negative time” in which to flourish. This interval of “antitime” is reminiscent of the night in which the “contemplative Moonee,” described in the “Monday” chapter of A Week, dwells while other people are going about their conventional daytime pursuits. Thus, during the time in which Thoreau was writing “Walden I” and “Walden II,” he already associated the image of corn growing in the night with a waking dream state and its attendant physical, mental, and spiritual revitalization. Yet as an emblem of nonrational thought and growth, “corn growing in the night” also came to participate in the

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domain of what Thoreau was increasingly coming to think of during the early 1850s as “the wild,” and by the time he was putting together his lecture “Walking, or the Wild,” the phrase had acquired its mature complexity of meaning for him. Thoreau’s inclusion of it there as the tertiary term in his alternative “trinity” of wildness—the forest, the meadow, and the night in which the corn grows—indicates that he invested so much personal significance in the idea of corn’s nocturnal growth that it finally acquired the status of a religious metasymbol. The idea of growth achieved outside of time is intrinsic to the quasireligious message of “Walking,” which is that we will not grow unless we can learn to live extemporaneously, as part of nature. The passage in which Thoreau presents his credo consisting of a wild trinity serves to define the limits of the “interval” between wildness and civilization, just as Walden had defined the present by showing the “nick” where past and future meet: I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock spruce or arborvitæ in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,— as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw. There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood thrush, to which I would migrate,—wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which, methinks, I am already acclimated. (WR, 5:225)

Richardson reads “Walking” as being so “pointedly secular” an essay that he interprets Thoreau’s natural trinity as being a deliberate parody of the Christian credo.26 Yet I find Thoreau’s displayed attitude toward Christianity in “Walking” neither mocking nor dismissive. Rather, he agitates for a more liberal and more immediate application of some Christian beliefs by jolting his readers’ sensibilities with modified versions of conventional Christian terms and symbols. Thus it could be 26. Richardson, Life of the Mind, 226.

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argued that in “Walking” Thoreau is not being aggressively secular so much as he is attempting to redefine and enlarge the limits of Christian piety. Correspondingly, his replacement of “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” with forest, meadow, and the night in which the corn grows was probably meant as an indication of the depth of his personal faith in the wild or, rather, in the wild and in the semicivilized lands bordering it. The intermediateness of Thoreau’s wild trinity becomes more apparent if we scrutinize each of its components in turn. “Father” may be displaced by “forest” for reasons other than simple alliterative coincidence. For Thoreau, the forest is the foremost symbol of the wild, the place where wildness dwells. The second component, the meadow, is as “natural” and wild as the forest, yet milder in appearance and susceptible to being used for pasturing livestock, such as, for example, sheep. Thus rather than identifying the middle term of the trinity as Jesus, the Son, Thoreau may be drawing indirectly upon another traditional Christian icon for Jesus, the lamb, which prospers in the environment the meadow provides. Although the meadow does not, like Jesus, signify reconciliation of God and man in a single person, it retains its connection with human beings through an association with human endeavor, interceding between the wild forest and the domesticated farmer’s field of grain. Finally, the night in which the corn grows illustrates the transferral of wildness to civilization. During the night, a period of mystery, wildness is experienced as growth, health, and a sense of well-being, the mind having been rejuvenated by unconscious thought. Thus Thoreau’s symbolism mediates between humankind and the wild, rather than, or in addition to, mediating between humankind and divinity. Like the naked countenance of Jehovah that cannot be witnessed by mortal eyes, the primal wild is so inhuman or nonhuman that no civilization may “endure” even its glance. But in the buffering zone between wild and civilization, the unconscious and consciousness, lies the Thoreauvian interval, communicating with both of its neighbors. There a person might remain close enough to wild nature to derive a benefit from it, yet not so close that he or she becomes essentially dehumanized or uncivilized. The mediateness of Thoreau’s position manifests itself as well in his carefully conditional language. Although Thoreau admires the Hottentots for

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their ability to eat the kudu’s marrow raw, he distances himself from them with a figure—“as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.” Thoreau’s subtle modification of Christian iconography is in keeping with the overall tenor of “Walking,” which is more evangelistic and passionate than the more meditative Walden. Simultaneously, Thoreau’s employment of religious terminology in “Walking” nimbly deflects potential accusations of blasphemy even while undermining many assumptions of the conventionally religious. Thoreau often proselytizes for the wild in a tone of voice that successfully integrates the comic with the holy, so that the reader is finally at liberty to take the message of the essay as seriously as he chooses. Thoreau’s primary rhetorical weapons are, as usual, mocking humor, irony, and paradox. For example, the etymology he provides for “saunterer” at the beginning of his essay as one who journeys to the holy land, a sante-terrer, is at once facetious and deadly serious: Walking is a holy activity, and the saunterer’s destination is a state of mind and spirit, rather than a tangible location on a map. To convert his listeners and readers, Thoreau also employs a strategy of substitution, as when he interposes his wild trinity, and he is subtly subversive again toward the end of the essay when he proposes an alternative gospel, a “gospel of the present moment.” Unlike the existing gospels, his would be prospective, rather than synoptic. Yet like some of the other gospels, the gospel of the present moment rehearses the story of Peter’s renunciation of Jesus, with the crucial difference that in Thoreau’s version, it is the common man who has betrayed himself. Moreover, the cock that crows during Peter’s denial is transformed in Thoreau’s gospel to a manifestation of the temporal optimism with which the rooster is associated at the conclusion of Walden and elsewhere in Thoreau’s writings: Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament,— the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has

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got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world,—healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note? (WR, 245–46)

Here the cock Peter heard crow as he forswore Jesus becomes a redemptive symbol, a natural emblem of the propriety and rectitude of living in the present moment. The cock of scripture is imported into the mundane, yet nonetheless spiritually momentous, barnyard next door. Its crowing, says Thoreau, does not come down to us from an ancient time (as his deceptive syntax might lead us to expect), but rather from a time that is even more recent than ours, that is, an ideal continuous present. Thoreau’s irony in his concluding figure helps drive his point home. Slave-owners complaining that fugitive slaves had “betrayed” them by fleeing to the North lobbied for passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Thoreau simultaneously indicts both the institution of slavery and conventional temporal attitudes by inferring that all men betray themselves when they ignore opportunities offered to them for a new life in the present moment. In “Walking,” Thoreau appends one other important natural referent to forest, meadow, and cornrow, and he invests his descriptions of it with similarly religious overtones: the swamp. Swamps are yet another locational equivalent of the Thoreauvian interval. Part water and part land, they are often found lying adjacent to cultivated lands, communicating with them while still retaining their wild and primitive character. Thoreau writes of swamps in “Walking” with a passionate intensity, as if he had discovered they had become crucial not only to his art, but also to his well-being. After he left Walden Pond, he no longer lived at the modest remove from society that he preferred; moreover, in losing the pond he also lost an important inspiration for his writing. As he began taking on more work as a surveyor, however, his professional visits to various secluded situations in the Concord area brought him into increasing contact with swampland, where he discovered he felt quite at home. “Hope and the future,” Thoreau wrote in “Walking,” “for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps” (226–

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27).27 Thoreau learned to prize swamps, first, for their tremendous biological diversity, and second, for their comparatively undisturbed state. Widely regarded as being uninhabitable, difficult and expensive to drain, swamps were more likely than virtually any other feature in the landscape to survive the “civilizing” depredations of landowners. Thoreau says in “Walking” that he had even contemplated buying any of various farms for himself simply because they contained “a few square yards of impermeable and unfathomable bog. . . . That was the jewel which dazzled me” (227). Thus Thoreau pictured himself living close to, or even actually in, a swamp, in the same way that he had imagined himself living at Walden Pond, another watery homesite. But swamps appealed to him as well as loci of fecundity where growth was nurtured. A benefit conferred by swamps that Thoreau often touted was their muck, which could be used to dress farmlands rather than resorting to “heating manures,” which, as we have seen, he considered “foreign” additions to the soil that abetted the spread of disease. As a site of increased productivity, then, the swamp served the same function for Thoreau as the night in which the corn grew— that is, it promoted growth and development naturally, rather than artificially. Thoreau also equated a field that had been dressed with manure, his locational antithesis of a swamp, with overwork, in that a person’s life could become overly complex, in somewhat the same way he had said that the territory of a life could acquire too many “borders.” In “Walking,” accordingly, a paragraph critical of the practice of manuring is immediately succeeded by one in which Thoreau bemoans the folly of the student who exhausts himself by staying up late to study, when he would have been much better off, Thoreau says (and as he had once said of himself), if “he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.” Thoreau then cites, in support of his own claim that “[t]here may be an excess even of informing light” (238), the French chemist Niepce’s discovery of the principle of actinism, or photochemical reactions within organic and inorganic matter. He quotes Niepce’s observation that “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic 27. Thoreau predicted to Emerson that, after he died, the words swamp oak would be found written on his heart. Thus Thoreau aligns himself simultaneously both with his ideal landscape and with his totemic tree, the oak (see Chapter 6).

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kingdom.” This is the equivalent of the night in which the corn grows, an interim of timelessness during which an individual—and indeed, the whole earth, Thoreau implies—recuperates and rejuvenates. But Thoreau interjects that he would not wish to see “every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports” (238). Thus he does not condone unlimited growth, even if unforced and unconscious, for individuals or for society, saying that wildness and semiwildness, forest and meadow, should constitute the majority of a man’s substance. Knowledge is good, says Thoreau, yet we also require “Useful Ignorance” (239), a “negative knowledge” that serves us, as vegetable mold or swamp muck serve plants, as a reserve of energy and nourishment. This is why Thoreau believes in the forest and the meadow and the night in which the corn grows; the presence of the first two makes possible the third. Yet although Thoreau says in “Walking” that he would prefer the “Dismal Swamp” to “the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived” (228), a substantial number of the surveying jobs he took on involved measuring off clients’ swamps so that they could be drained and converted to cropland, a fact that Walter Harding suggests preyed upon Thoreau’s conscience.28 By working as a surveyor, Thoreau was therefore actively engaged in helping to destroy one of the environments that had nourished his growth and that had seemed to him a plausible place in which to live. His participation in his own metaphorical “destruction” helps explain his characterization of his feelings, while working for the selectmen of Concord, as being “suicidal.” Thoreau may have been internalizing his reservations about becoming an agent of swampland destruction in the following passage in “Walking,” which is, once again, rhetorically dense, highly allusive, and religiously resonant: Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and 28. Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 186.

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cheap. A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old posthole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy Stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor. (212)

Perhaps as a result of having once set the woods on fire himself, Thoreau recurred to the image of a forest engulfed in flame. Here, he derives some measure of redemption by transposing the idea of burning the woods to burning the wooden fences whose proliferation he feared would destroy the woods even more effectively than flames could. Yet Thoreau’s own participation in the destruction of the wild, performed as a surveyor in the service of some “worldly miser” looking to maximize his farm’s tillable acreage, is projected as well through deeply ambivalent images. In Thoreau’s infernal vision, the swamp is figured as both hell and heaven, a “boggy Stygian fen” of greed that has entrapped the greedy miser and a “paradise” inhabited by animals, the “angels” who fly around his head. The miser is searching for an old post hole that had demarcated a corner of his property, and, with the assistance of his satanic surveyor, he succeeds. The supernatural agency of this surveyor is further suggested by his accomplishment of the miraculous, that is, finding an existing post hole in a swamp’s boggy floor. The site itself is marked off with the three stones conventionally used to signal a boundary stake’s location, although in the paragraph’s larger religious iconography, the three stones acquire additional symbolic significance as yet another inversion of the trinity. Thoreau finally identifies the miser’s surveyor overtly as “the Prince of Darkness,” and in that fiery and Mephistophelian figure Thoreau projects his own guilt for having aided in the destruction of the wild, first by burning the woods, and then by surveying the swamp, last refuge of the wild.29 29. “Walking” contains a second version of this Faustian scene in which Thoreau is more explicitly a participant, although here his role is more that of a dispassionate observer than of a Mephistophelian ally:

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In the person of the land-owning miser Thoreau also embodies his fears about how he might have changed had his contemplated purchase of a parcel of swampland been successful. As landholder, Thoreau would have been able to preserve the swamp, yet he also would have risked becoming transformed into someone who might indeed paint a “No Admittance” sign on his gate, if the gate guarded a pathway into his cherished bog. In “Walking” Thoreau depicts the private ownership of woodland property as being potentially instrumental in America’s reversion to the European model of land ownership, in which a disengaged and indifferent aristocracy held title to virtually every square foot of land lying outside the public roadway: But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be multiplied, and mantraps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come. (216)

Thoreau’s apparent altruism and ostensible spirit of communalism here may nevertheless have helped conceal, or at least rationalize, a considerable degree of self-interest generated by his particular and specific needs as someone virtually addicted to walking cross-country in whatsoever direction he chose. In his relations to the land, Thoreau discovered himself caught up in a contradiction: Although he admired some of the farms he saw, he could not well afford to become a landowner, and yet so long as he continued to ramble freely across I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions, “Leave all hope, ye that enter,”—that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp which I could not survey at all, because it was completely under water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did survey from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class. (230)

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other people’s properties, he remained, at least in the eyes of the law, a trespasser. Working as a surveyor gave him greater access to the countryside, yet it also threatened to compromise him both by making him an agent of nature’s destruction and by inflaming any latent materialistic desires he might be harboring. In the paragraph above, the transitive verb improve must be read again, I think, as signifying “enlarge,” literally to make larger. As the countryside around Concord was bought up by well-to-do farmers and gentry such as the Emersons, finding opportunities for making his daily walks without interference would have become progressively more problematical for Thoreau. He derived some reassurance from the thought that none of man’s works, not even the fenced boundary lines that he had himself surveyed, would survive the millennia: The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary. (242)

Thoreau’s figure of outlines fading, which comes on the heels of his description of “actinism” in the text, is grounded in the technology of the daguerreotype, which Niepce helped originate. If no chemical fixer was applied to the glass photographic plates, they quickly surrendered their images. This fact Thoreau appends to the phenomenon of a painted picture’s colors fading over time, so that any original image that the artist had painted over is revealed. Thoreau’s point, of course, is that nature will eventually erase all vestiges of humankind’s arbitrarily imposed boundaries, yet secondarily, he salves his conscience with the thought that the fences whose construction he had helped promote would one day disappear through a kind of chronologic actinism, and the landscape would revert once more to its original and Edenic state. Thoreau’s conflation of time and place to describe the “interval” in which he could prosper is finally made more comprehensible if we

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reenvision his writing, surveying, and walking in the larger historical and locational contexts of his existence in Concord. His anxiety about whether his actions were helping to preserve or destroy the present, both in the larger environment and in his own life, effectively counterbalances his stated belief that he had been born in the “nick of time.” At one level, Thoreau’s sense of his own good fortune derived from an awareness that he lived in a crucial place and time, that is, in the historic interval before a comparatively unspoiled New World landscape became completely overwhelmed by civilization. Concord, as Thoreau liked to point out, presented a walker with a richer variety of landscapes than any other town he had seen, due largely to the fact that the land surrounding Concord was still on the verge of becoming consolidated into strictly demarcated townships and blocks of privately held lands, all of them staked out, of course, by surveyors. Although the countryside around Concord was by no means still free and wild, Thoreau lived during the last decades when land ownership in Concord was still a comparatively informal affair. Because stone or wooden fences were expensive to build and troublesome to maintain, farmers quite naturally tended to erect them first to enclose the most arable portions of cleared lands. As a result, during Thoreau’s lifetime the land around Concord was only semirural, consisting of small farms intermixed with pockets of “wild” (in the sense of “unfenced”) lands.30 Conscious of the temporal and environmental opportunity he was being offered, Thoreau chose, rather than “improving” any wild lands he should chance to own, to “improve” the never-to-be-repeated present moment, which was a kind of golden age for the walker before the “evil” days of expanded private ownership inevitably arrived. Thoreau’s ambivalence about his own profession as surveyor and, indeed, about the potential danger he posed as a human being to nature is finally resolved (literarily, at least) in his figure of the walking stick, the same stick upon which he says in Walden that he wishes to “improve the nick of time.” His wood staff almost certainly served him not just as a supportive “third leg” while hiking, but also, as I have said, as a crude surveyor’s tool. Thus the single symbol of the stick comprised both his greatest joy, walking freely in nature, and his 30. For a thorough physical description of Concord’s landscape during Thoreau’s lifetime, see David R. Foster’s Thoreau’s Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape, which I discuss at some length in this book’s penultimate chapter.

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greatest fear, the destruction of nature through private ownership. The tension generated by these irreconcilable opposites he could at least resolve to some extent in himself via the concept of growth, signified by another vertical icon, the corn plant. Yet within the context of his life as a writer, rather than as surveyor, Thoreau could also hope to reconcile his divergent impulses by conceiving of his own book as a “staff.” Specifically, Walden is to be identified with the staff carved by the artist of Kouroo, at the book’s conclusion. Thoreau added the parable of the artist of Kouroo to his manuscript late in the compositional process, that is, in “Walden V,” written, according to Shanley, in late 1852 or early 1853. The tale’s oriental setting is consistent with the fact that, as Shanley points out, Thoreau did not begin adding the majority of his references to Indian and Chinese tests to the Walden manuscript until after late 1851.31 In the Bhagavad Gita, Kuru is one of the lands under the hero Arjuna’s protection. Richardson speculates that Thoreau came upon the fable itself in R. Spence Hardy’s Eastern Monachism, which tells the story of a Buddhist monk, Rathapala of Kuru, who advocates a rejection of materialistic desires as the means of acquiring true knowledge. Critics have often seen in the images of the artist and his staff symbols of both Thoreau and of Walden,32 and the parallels are indeed striking. The artist’s patient carving of his staff is analogous to Thoreau’s diligent reworking of his Walden manuscript over the course of several years, and the emphasis Thoreau places upon purity in his fable reminds us of his attribution of that quality to his house at the pond. Yet the question remains—why symbolize Walden as a staff? The artist of Kouroo carves his staff while in a timeless reverie directly comparable to that which Thoreau himself experiences in “Sounds,” during which he “grows like corn in the night.” The woodcarver’s staff grows too when he is done, so much so that by itself it constitutes “a world with full and fair proportions.” The staff thus becomes not just an artifact but also a world, a “place” within which the artist can dwell. Walden served a similar purpose for Thoreau: As the book grew, he grew, and when it was completed, he had not merely recapitulated his life at the pond, but had rather cre31. Shanley, Making of “Walden,” 3, 30. 32. Richardson, Life of the Mind, 337; see, for example, Peck, Thoreau’s Morning Work, 130.

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ated something wholly new and unique. Like the artist of Kouroo as well, Thoreau commences his project in the woods, and although he subsequently spent several years revising his manuscript, that time elapses “outside” of conventional time, so that it is not “subtracted” from his life, in the sense that Thoreau may feel reassured that his two years spent at the pond were not wasted. Within Thoreau’s subjectively experienced time, the two years are equivalent both to an instant and to an eternity. Similarly, the Kouroo artist devotes tens of thousands of years to his task, enough time for the earth’s northern pole to point at a star other than Polaris: “By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times.” Although it is a scientific fact that Earth’s axis describes a circle at intervals of millions of years, pointing at different pole stars, Thoreau’s identification of kalpa as the name Hindus gave Polaris is mistaken. Instead, as Thoreau himself remarked in his journal in 1842, a “calpa” is really a unit measure of time, defined as one day in the life of Brahma, or 320,000,000 years: Menu understood this matter best when he said. “Those persons best know the divisions of days and nights, who understand, that the day of Brahmà, which endures to the end of a thousand such ages, gives rise to virtuous exertions; and that his night endures as long as his day.” What is a day if the day’s work be not done? What are the divisions of time to them who have nothing to do? What is the present or the future to him who has no occasion for them who does not create them by his industry! 4. 320,000,000 years says Murray form “the grand anomalistic period called a calpa, and fantastically assigned as a day of Brama.”33 “the Maha Yug, or great divine age, through which mankind are now passing, consists of four human ages, the last and worst of which is at present revolving. These ages, of unequal and continually decreasing length, are the Satya Yug, which lasted Treta Yug,

⫺1,728,000 years ⫺1,296,000

33. Hugh Murray, Historical and descriptive account of British India, from the most remote period to the present time (1832) (see Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading, 242).

The Walking Stick, the Surveyor’s Staff, and the Corn in the Night Dwapar Yug, Cali Yug, which is to last

171

⫺864,000 432,000

Of the dark era in which we live, only about five thousand years have elapsed.” (J, 1:412–13)

Thus in reading about the Hindu conception of temporality, Thoreau came to confuse a phenomenon of time with the name of the unit measure of time requisite for that phenomenon to take place. Nevertheless, his statement that “Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times” while the woodcarver was working upon his staff indicates that Thoreau at least retained some sense that the “calpa” was associated with vast passages of time. As his journal entry shows, Thoreau equated a mastery of time with the performance of virtuous work, so that “by his industry,” the Kouroo artisan creates both a present and a future that are discrete from conventional divisions of time. Those who do not perform worthy work, however, are subject to mutability, like the friends of the Kouroo woodcarver who “grew old in their works and died.” Because carving and notching are essentially equivalent actions, both the artist of Kouroo and Thoreau, in creating their works of art, make nicks in time. Both enlarge the present moment—and in the case of the Hindu artist, at least, to an almost infinite degree. By gouging out more space for the present, both interceded in the linearity of time to create an added dimension of depth. The stick thereby expands the present into a place as well as a time, its borders pushing outward against past and future. Denied the opportunity to occupy permanently the homesites he most desired for himself, Thoreau “surveyed,” in his imagination, the bounds of a utopia built for one, which could be realized, finally, only in his art. Moreover, by being an artist who created “virtuous” works, Thoreau could resolve ambivalent feelings generated by his day-to-day activities as a surveyor. He did not write the paragraph describing the artist of Kouroo, the eleventh paragraph in the “Conclusion,” until 1853, when he had already worked semiprofessionally as a surveyor for three years and had seen the demand for his services growing almost daily. Yet in his parable, Thoreau converts his talent for mensuration from a means of destruction to one of renovation. Although the artist of Kouroo does not realize it, he is not just a carver, but also a measurer, like Thoreau; more than that, he is himself a unit of measure, for as soon as he has finished work on his

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stick, a cycle of time much larger than a kalpa culminates, and a new order begins. Thus it is the carver, and not the stick itself, that determines the “length” of time. While the artist of Kouroo is engrossed in his work, “old cities and dynasties” have come and gone, fading like images on a daguerreotypist’s glass plates, and the completion of his project only inaugurates the generation of “fairer and more glorious ones.” In the same way, Thoreau, whose surveying expertise helped towns extend their boundaries to the point of encroaching upon the “interval” of continuous self-culture and growth he had defined for himself, turns his talent for measurement to his own spiritual advantage by establishing the fairer outlines of Walden. In so doing, he may have been using his avocation as artist to replace, if only figuratively, the wild acres his vocation as surveyor had helped destroy. Then, in the conclusion of Walden, he, like the artist of Kouroo who was his surrogate, could cap the “staff” of his own work with its jeweled, finishing ferule.

5 ANSWERING THE SPHINX The Evolution of the Emersonian Metamorphosis Metamorphosis is nature. —Emerson, Journal, 1841 The rushing metamorphosis Dissolving all that fixture is, Melts things that be to things that seem, And solid nature to a dream. —“Woodnotes II” “Suffice it for the joy of the universe,” Emerson wrote in “Experience,” “that we have not arrived at a wall, but at interminable oceans.” Walls and oceans are both types of the surfaces with which, Emerson says in that essay, we must learn to content ourselves, without being able to penetrate to first causes or to comprehend nature’s innermost secrets. Yet water yields, as walls do not, to the touch. Fluxional and mobile, the sea has symbolized change and the genesis of forms at least since the Greeks worshiped the sea god Proteus. Emerson’s abiding curiosity about how matter is organized into form and how matter is ultimately translated into force or “law” explains his fascination with the concept of the metamorphosis. The pertinence of the Emersonian metamorphosis to our present consideration of how time was perceived by the transcendentalists is that it represents objects as events, that is, as transient phenomena. Emerson believed that our lives are best imagined as movements not through time, but through matter: Like a wave or a gust of wind, the fact of our existence moves through nature, changing it as it changes us. Because Emerson evinced so much interest in the structure of matter, some modern readers have gone so far as to impute to him a prescience about twentieth-century particle physics,1 but the attribution seems to me both superficial and 1. See, for example, Gay Wilson Allen’s comment in the preface to his biography that Emerson’s “theories on the spiritual nature of matter . . . anticipated what has

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anachronistic, like Moncure Conway’s claim that Emerson anticipated the theory of evolution. Rather than looking ahead from Emerson to Einstein, I suggest that if we truly wish to discover what the term meant to him, and what he meant when he used the term, we must look instead to the past. The Emersonian metamorphosis synthesized several historical and cultural lines of thought that included the presocratic philosophers, Plato, Ovid, Lamarck, and Goethe. Further, Emerson’s construction of the word undergoes its own metamorphosis, evolving from what he has to say in Nature to what he says in “The Over-Soul,” in “The Sphinx,” and, finally, “The Poet.” The metamorphosis figures among a relatively small set of core ideas that recurred throughout Emerson’s intellectual career, including compensation, character, correspondence, polarity, undulation, and the principle of representativeness. Perhaps more than any of the rest of these, however, the metamorphosis delimits the juncture at which idealism and realism, intellectuality and materiality, meet. Put otherwise, it describes the very point of contact between thought and thing, the mechanism by which one became the other. Accordingly, when the word appears in Emerson’s poems and essays, it is as likely to signify internal or spiritual transformation as much as it does external change. As Robert D. Richardson observes, the metamorphosis is Emerson’s “myth of the growth of consciousness.” But the word itself can seem as slippery as Proteus himself in the grasp of Menelaus. Daniel Shea observes that Emerson used the word at various times to signify “the soul’s awakening; the perpetual miracle of nature; the leap of natural fact into spiritual fact as symbol or metaphor; simple process; process as becoming and amelioration; the dynamic of nature by which spiritual law is visibly incarnated; and, in the social order, the decay of institutions and their replacement by increasingly humane and therefore divine systems of organization.” We might say then that the term comprises, at a minimum, nature’s multiplicity, the growth of the self, and the property of language to describe transformation, whether in the phenomenal world or within the self. Yet the common denominator in this conceptual mélange remains the action of thought upon matter. As Richardson points out, Emerson “wished to understand not only matter but the directing and been called the ‘Tao of Physics.’” Allen’s reference here is to Fritjof Capra’s 1977 book, The Tao of Physics (Waldo Emerson, xii).

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organizing of matter,” particularly by the instrumentality of thought, for as Emerson said, “Order is matter subdued by mind.”2 In the Emersonian scheme of things, thought and act are virtually interchangeable. For example, the transformation of water to steam in the boiler of Watt’s engine found its equivalent or complement, he proposed, in Watt’s original insight that steam could be harnessed to power an engine. Thought changed matter as much or more than fire, water, or air did, and it was as much a part of the natural order as they. In Emerson’s writings thought is not commonly contemplative or meditative, but active, kinetic, incarnative; conversely, as he says in “Natural History of Intellect,” “Matter is dead Mind” (CE, 12:17). He preferred the word thought to intellect, the two terms having the same tension and relation to each other as do Reason and the Understanding. Following the path blazed by Kant, Emerson presents changes in consciousness as being at least as important and valid as sensory perceptions of external change. Yet grasping the subjectivity of Emerson’s use of the term metamorphosis is also indispensable to understanding its temporal significance. By relocating the agency of change from the purely physical realm to the cognitive arena of thought, the Emersonian metamorphosis provides an antidote both to time experienced as duration, and to changes wrought over the course of time, or mutability. Emerson’s idealistic philosophy absorbed a preliminary definition of the metamorphosis from Plato and neoplatonists such as Plotinus. Emerson was especially fond of the Timaeus,3 from which he extracted the idea that time was an imperfect, because incomplete, representation of change. In the Timaeus Socrates says that in the beginning, God, or the Eternal Being, wished to make the universe resemble eternity as much as possible. Yet because eternity was unmoving and unchanging, and the universe was, by its nature, moving and alive, the universe could not reproduce with absolute fidelity the original upon which it had been patterned. This fundamental disparity between prototype (eternity) and copy (the apprehensible universe) gives rise, 2. Richardson, Mind on Fire, 323; Daniel B. Shea, “Emerson and the American Metamorphosis,” 38; Richardson, Mind on Fire, 171, 536; Richardson calls attention to the phrase, found among Emerson’s notes for an unfinished lecture, “Power and Terror of Thought.” 3. See Allen, Waldo Emerson, 455.

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Socrates proposes, to our conception of time, which is really no more than our involuntary response to the presence of ceaseless activity and change. When the world began, Socrates says, the Eternal Being had, like the God of Genesis, provided an index to time by dividing time into hours, days, years, all demarcated by movements of the heavenly bodies, and yet our subsequent categorizing of time into past and future is purely our own invention, unrelated to God’s original intent: [God] determined to make a moving image of eternity, and so when he ordered the heavens he made in that which we call time an eternal moving image of the eternity which remains for ever at one. For before the heavens came into being there were no days or nights or months or years, but he devised and brought them into being at the same time that the heavens were put together; for they are all parts of time, just as past and future are also forms of it, which we wrongly attribute, without thinking, to the Eternal Being. For we say of it that it was and shall be, but on a true reckoning we should only say is, reserving was and shall be for the process of change in time: for both are motions, but that which is eternally the same and unmoved can neither be becoming older or younger owing to the lapse of time, nor can it ever become so; neither can it now have become nor can it come to be in the future; nor in general can any of the attributes which becoming attached to sensible and changing things belong to it, for they are all forms of time which in its measurable cycles imitates eternity.4

All this should sound quite familiar to readers of Emerson. We have already seen the degree to which he stressed the present moment, whose immediacy rendered both past and future not only trivial in comparison, but also virtually interchangeable. We have also seen, in “Uriel,” Emerson characterize the unfallen world as being antetemporal, as Socrates here says was true of the prototypal universe. Yet perhaps the greatest lesson Emerson absorbed from reading the Timeaus (in whose very title the word time is phonetically latent) was the idea that change could be decoupled from duration, or lapse of time. Change need not imply a before and an after: Seen properly, the universe was a simultaneous event, in which the present moment ripples progressively outward rather than decaying into the past or ushering in the future. 4. This translation of the Timaeus is that of Sir Desmond Lee, in the 1977 Penguin Classics edition, 50–51.

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Emerson’s transcendentalist idealism valorized this spatial (or spheral) approach to time over a linear or sequential one, and on at least one level of denotation, the term metamorphosis signifies in his writings a timeless movement or progression through the various dimensions of contemporaneous experience. Yet the idealistic component of the Emersonian metamorphosis also serves to affirm the validity of a teleology that replaces or supercedes both common chronology and Christian eschatology. Conventional time’s sole telos is the future, a moment humanity has plucked—arbitrarily, if we accept Socrates’ line of reasoning—out of eternity. Orthodox Christianity also evaluates the present moment in the context of its relationship to especially significant and miraculous moments, some of which lay in the past and some of which are yet to come. Christianity’s promise of eternal life was made implicitly or explicitly at the expense of the present, which was interpreted eschatologically either as an opportunity for redeeming past acts or as preamble to salvation. The Emersonian metamorphosis, on the other hand, while it preserves Christianity’s progressive teleology, relocates the approach to godhead from linear chronology to encompassing consciousness. As he tersely put it, “They call it religion. I call it consciousness” (JMN, 7:28). In Nature Emerson proposes that since both time and space are products of our fragmentary and incomplete understanding of the dimensions of eternity, we should understand them as being largely illusory. Echoing Socrates, he says that their utility subsists solely in their power of individuation, or, as he put it, space and time exist “that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and individual.” Yet a delineation of differences is, for virtually all the transcendentalists, merely the first step of cognition. A persevering consciousness passes beyond differentiation to an apprehension of unity and identity, and finally to a self-identification with the Other. Once a perception of unity has been achieved, ostensibly immutable limitations of time and space such as chronology and distance drop away, to be replaced by more enduringly real natural laws that, although they may comprise the laws of physics, ultimately transcend materiality and empiricism. Emerson writes: How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the laws of physics! What noble emotions dilate the mortal as he enters into the counsels of the creation, and feels by knowledge the privilege to BE!

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His insight refines him. The beauty of nature shines in his own breast. Man is greater that he can see this, and the universe less, because Time and Space relations vanish as laws are known. (CW, 1:25)

Further: . . . when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to inquire, Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves. Therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. (38)

In proclaiming the Self the primary ground of authority for determining how one fact should be related to another, Emerson moves beyond radical subjectivity to disputing the actuality of things. We will remember his claim in the “Idealism” chapter of Nature that “Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of the existence of matter.” Emerson then vaults over Lockean empirical skepticism to assert, quite transcendentally, that “Matter is a phenomenon, not a substance.” That is, matter is contingent, and its contingency arises not so much out of the limits of our empirical knowledge as it does from an incomplete understanding of an object’s entire context as manifestation of eternal law. If, however, we may learn to overcome our dependence upon physicality, then we may hope to enter the precincts of divinity. The discovery that matter is only transitory and conditional, and that the indenturing of our lives to time is predicated upon a surrender of our autonomy, as communicants of eternity, amounts to a revelation, says Emerson. We become rejuvenated, or feel that we have become entirely new beings: We become physically nimble, and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and

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the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that with a perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have no affinity. (34–35)

During such prophetic moments time no longer exists as sequence, the cognitive stage of individuation having been left behind. “Idealism,” says Emerson, “sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul” (36). Emerson’s figuring of phenomenologic reality as a “picture” God paints on eternity reverts to Socrates’ description of time in the Timeaus as a pictorial (or cinematic) representation of movement. Thus Emerson’s exposition of the physical world’s symbolic connection to an eternal reality retains a Platonic emphasis upon imitation or mimesis, rather than upon actual incarnation. In this regard he diverges from the faith of some of his more mystical contemporaries, such as, for example, Emily Dickinson. Rather than seeing God as being immanent within the world, Emerson saw evidence everywhere of God’s method. Emerson theorizes the still-diffuse idealism of Nature in “The OverSoul,” yet he continues to resist formalizing or codifying transcendentalist belief. Rather than devise a new theology, Emerson proposes that issues of religion should be regarded as falling under the rubric of man’s “natural history,” a shrewdly chosen phrase that manages to incorporate both an air of scientific objectivity and one of Romantic natural supernaturalism. Toward the beginning of that essay, he asks, “Why do men feel that the natural history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving behind what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless?” (CW, 2:159). A “natural history” of man would be distinguishable from metaphysics in that it would have a foundation in fact; it would treat man genetically, rather than historically, and it would emphasize man’s integration into the natural realm he inhabits. Moreover, by emphasizing the natural rather than the supernatural, fact rather than fable, a natural history of man would speak to the intellect, and not just to the excitable heart. Similarly, in his lecture-essay “A Natural History of Intellect,” Emerson calls for, while attempting to provide,

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“an enumeration . . . of the laws and powers of the Intellect,” with the same “exhaustive accuracy of distribution which chemists use in their nomenclature and anatomists in their descriptions . . .” (CE, 12:3). Although drawing the intellect within the circle of belief had always been implicit within Deist and Unitarian theologies, Emerson assigned to it a new role as adjunct to revelation. The intellect’s primary objective was to discover bonds of relatedness between the self and other, and not to murder by dissecting. “[T]he blindness of the intellect begins,” Emerson says in “The Over-Soul,” “when it would be something of itself” (CW, 2:161). Like Thoreau, who described his head as “an organ for burrowing,” Emerson saw the intellect as being somewhat akin to the senses, yet without their limitations, more a mode of perception than an epistemologic tool. For Emerson, thought encompassed not only reason, but also intuition, instinct, and insight. As an apostle of Kant and Hegel, and critic (yet not without admiration) of the “Scotch Goliath” Hume, Emerson downplayed the importance of empirical knowledge, which he believed accounted for only a portion of phenomenologic experience. In “The Over-Soul,” he says: The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree, that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits, is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time,— “Can crowd eternity into an hour, Or stretch an hour to eternity.” (162)

That Emerson should employ a quotation from Byron’s poetic drama “Cain” to justify his position in an essay about religion is such a deliberately confrontational act that I think it worthwhile to stop for a moment and look at the entire passage in context. In “Cain,” Byron’s antihero is branded and ostracized not just because he has killed his brother Abel, but also because Lucifer had goaded him into questioning God’s motives in making human lives mortal. Emerson’s quotation is drawn from Lucifer’s description of the way in which he and the rest of the archangels experience time: With us acts are exempt from time, and we Can crowd eternity into an hour,

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Or stretch an hour into eternity: We breathe not by mortal measurement— But that’s a mystery. (Act 1, ll. 535–39)

Although mortality and mutability are the lot of men and women, a condition dictated by possession of their fleshly bodies, time does not exist to God and the angels, Lucifer says, since they are insubstantial. Instead, they experience time as they wish, independent of temporal indices, because their own autonomic processes, such as respiration, are not synchronized with the passage of ordinary moments. Emerson’s inclusion of Byron’s lines in “The Over-Soul” is apt, for he is proposing an analogous transfer of the experience of temporality away from external measures of duration to the authority of the individual. Moreover, Emerson’s repudiation of an exclusively physical world, begun in Nature, undergoes a subtle, twofold shift by the time he writes “The Over-Soul.” First, transcendence of the world’s materiality is made to seem less instantaneous, and more progressive and teleological. Emerson says, “After its [the soul’s] own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its progress to be computed. The soul’s advances are not made by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a straight line; but rather by ascension of state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis,—from the egg to the worm, from the worm to the fly” (CW, 2:163). Second, Emerson identifies the agent that facilitates our vanquishing of physical limitations such as time and space as being the intellect, and not the spirit: “The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in a degree from the conditions of time.” Emerson’s choice of the verb redeems, in an essay proposing to reexamine the foundations of religious belief, may indicate that he is revising the antinomian doctrine of salvation through good works by suggesting that redemption from time may be achieved instead through a right exercise of Reason. For Thoreau, on the other hand, one of the signal virtues of organic growth was its lack of reflective thought. The individual self could grow “like corn in the night,” that is, incrementally and unconsciously. Thoreau’s analogy for self-culture does not depend upon the intervention of the intellect, nor does it have any intrinsic goal other than its own continued growth. For Emerson, however, self-culture is emphatically a function of thought, whose goal is to “realize” or reify

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the world as it has been subjectively experienced. Thus the Emersonian metamorphosis makes and unmakes the physical conditions under which the self subsists, assembling materiality out of ideation and converting solid matter into fluid law, dissolving walls into water. Yet this alternation between concrete fact and transcendent law was not aimlessly recursive; rather, like Thoreau’s pattern of organic growth, it was developmental, the self proceeding through the various stages of consciousness in a manner analogous, as we have already seen, to a worm ascending the upward spiral of form until it could become a man. While Thoreau’s archetypal icon for personal growth was the plant, Emerson’s organic emblem for self-culture is the most irreducible unit of individual identity carried within the plant, the “monad,” a philosophic-scientific term and concept he inherited from Pythagoras, Leibnitz, and, above all, Goethe. Reading Goethe enabled Emerson to discover a crucial connection between the use of metamorphosis as paradigm for the growth of individual consciousness and its simultaneous application in science as a descriptor of a palpable natural process.5 Goethe was one of Emerson’s “representative men,” that is, a type of the hero, and what Emerson especially admired about the “Weimar man” was his eclecticism and mastery of form. In his essay “Goethe: Or, the Writer,” the concluding chapter of Representative Men, Emerson calls him “hundred-handed, Argus-eyed.” Gifted in the fields of botany, art, classical literature, chemistry, architecture, and optics, Goethe applied to the problem of understanding the genesis of form an intelligence that was at once empirical and aesthetic. Goethe’s own celebrated insight into the process of organic metamorphosis struck him with the force of Emersonian revelation, except that it happened in Padua’s Orto Botanico, not Boston Common. The moment 5. Richardson says, in Life of the Mind: . . . Goethe’s concept of the metamorphosis of plants . . . became for Emerson and Thoreau a key to understanding the innermost process of nature itself. What Emerson called “the metamorphosis” and symbolized by “the proteus” was more than a natural process; it became for him the master symbol of all natural processes. Before the ideas of evolution and natural selection became our catchall explanation of natural change—and our all-but-universal and therefore invisible metaphor for social change—the Romantic generation, from Goethe to Whitman, expressed its conception of the role of change in nature, quite detached from any notion of progress, in the idea of metamorphosis. (30)

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when Goethe experienced what Frederick Amrine calls his “botanical epiphany” is recounted in his famous essay Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen, published in 1790 and read approvingly by both Emerson and Thoreau.6 As he was examining the leaves of a date palm, Goethe suddenly understood that all of a plant’s parts—root, stem, or flower— were articulations of a single underlying pattern, the shape of the leaf. Goethe wrote: Leaves may be indented, deeply incised, or formed of many leaflets; in the last case they prefigure complete small shoots. The date palm affords a striking example of such graded diversification of the simplest leaf form. In a sequence of several leaves, the midrib is carried progressively further into the lamina; the fan-like simple leaf becomes torn and divided; and the end result is a highly complex leaf, vying with a branch.7

Goethe believed that the leaf form, or “eye” of the leaf, constituted the Monade for which he had been searching, the central archetype of all plant life. The principle of the “archplant” or “Urpflanze”8 manifested itself both structurally, as the leaf form was repeated throughout the various parts of a plant, and functionally, as when a plant’s stalk could transform itself into reproductive organs, in the plant’s flower. Among higher organisms, Goethe perceived a like metamorphosis in the relationship of spine to skull: While walking along the Lido at Venice he stepped accidentally upon a sheep skull buried in the sand and realized in another flash of insight that the skull is only a vertebra that has become specialized.9 In a chiefly symbolic sense, Goethe’s divination that the metamorphosis was nature’s foremost developmental principle anticipated the theory of evolution, which presents change in organisms as the interaction of a species’ genetic potential with the 6. Frederick Amrine, “Goethe’s Italian Discoveries as a Natural Scientist (the Scientist in the Underworld),” 57. 7. Reprinted in ibid., 62. Translated by Agnes Arber, in her article “Goethe’s Botany: The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) and Tobler’s ‘Ode to Nature’ (1792),” which appeared in Chronica Botanica 10 (1946): 72. 8. The meaning of Goethe’s phrase is clarified by Gustaaf Van Cromphout, in Emerson’s Modernity and the Example of Goethe: “By Urpflanze Goethe did not mean a primordial plant from which all other plants had developed in the course of evolution; rather, he thought of it as the essential plant archetypally present in all existing plants” (107). 9. See Amrine, “Goethe’s Italian Discoveries,” 62.

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incidence of accident and the passage of time. For Goethe, however, his realization that the leaf was the fundamental shape of all plants served primarily to corroborate a preexisting belief that organisms carried within themselves the law of change as well as the apparatus to implement it; in this regard, the natural principle of metamorphosis agreed completely with the cognitive model of continuous growth or self-culture. As Gustaaf Van Cromphout observes, in Emerson’s Modernity and the Example of Goethe: Goethe . . . conceived of human individuality as a process analogous to the patterns of development he had observed while engaged in his botanical studies. As [Friedrich] Gundolf has pointed out, Goethe was the first German (and given Germany’s intellectual preeminence at the time, one may say the first European) to think of human life as a “conscious self-developing,” as a “process of self-development achieving consciously what a plant achieves unconsciously.” Though Goethe came to regard metamorphosis as the universal principle of change, as the principle effecting the development of animals and man no less than of plants, he considered man the highest incarnation of this natural law of development because in him, once again, the process became aware of itself. . . . This metamorphic interpretation of human development was Goethe’s greatest contribution to the Romantic and, more specifically, to the Emersonian theory of the individual. Through the Goethean idea of metamorphosis, Emerson could preserve both man’s continuity with the rest of nature and his uniqueness. (121)

Moreover, Goethe accepted the existence of the metamorphic principle within organic forms as confirmation of the presence of the divine in nature. Amrine points to the centrality in Goethe’s oeuvre of the term Gott-Natur, which he says has been mistranslated as “Godly nature,” when more properly it should be rendered as the compound noun “God-and-Nature.” Gott-Natur appears most prominently, Amrine says, in Goethe’s poem “Bei Betrachtung von Schillers Schädel,” in a passage delineating the relationship of mind to matter, and mind to nature: Was kann der Mensch im Leben mehr gewinnen, Als daß sich Gott-Natur ihm offenbare? Wie sie das Feste läßt zu Geist verrinnen, Wie sie das Geisterzeugte fest bewahre.

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To what more noble end our life we use Than knowing God-and-Nature, which are one? Firm matter melts which She as Mind renews, And She makes firm what fertile Mind has done.10

Just as the identity of God with nature was demonstrated through the latter’s untiring generation of form, the identity of mind with God was demonstrated in the former’s capacity to generate forms out of the imagination. If an individual’s powers of perception and imagination were highly developed enough, he himself became an exemplar of nature’s (and God’s) metamorphic method. Such was the case, Emerson affirmed, of Goethe himself: He has contributed a key to many parts of nature, through the rare turn for unity and simplicity in his mind. Thus Goethe suggested the leading idea of modern botany, that a leaf or the eye of a leaf is the unit of botany, and that every part of a plant is only a transformed leaf to meet a new condition; and, by varying the conditions, a leaf may be converted into any other organ, and any other organ into a leaf. In like manner, in osteology, he assumed that one vertebra of the spine might be considered the unit of the skeleton: the head was only the uppermost vertebra transformed. . . . In optics again he rejected the artificial theory of seven colors, and considered that every color was the mixture of light and darkness in new proportions. It is really of very little consequence what topic he writes upon. He sees at every pore, and has a certain gravitation towards truth. (CE, 4:275)

Emerson’s characterization of Goethe as a man who “sees at every pore” resonates with his description in Nature, quoted above, of nature’s ability to renew itself through man rather than outside of man: “[T]herefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.” In light of Goethe’s description of the Urpflanze’s ability to articulate various botanical structures from the same underlying leaf form, Emerson appears to be figuring Goethe as his own discovery, that is, as a man so perceptive and versatile that he could imitate (or exemplify) the Urpflanze’s metamorphic power in his intellectual method. 10. Ibid., 74–75.

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Endlessly protean, yet essentially immutable, the monad signified for both Goethe and Emerson the persistence of character in a sea of flux. The idea of the monad also informs Goethe’s and Emerson’s shared concept of representativeness, that is, the presence of the one in many, and the many in one. As Emerson writes in his poem, “Each and All,” “All are needed by each one; / Nothing is good or fair alone.” On a temporal level, the principle of representativeness was enacted through a consideration of the moment as a concentrated eternity, or as temporal microcosm. Van Cromphout writes of Goethe and Emerson: Both writers recognize the moment, for example, as an incarnation of spirit. In Goethe’s conception, the moment not only eternalizes the temporal, but also temporalizes the eternal. His “eternal moment” is neither an isolated segment of time nor a rising above time into an atemporal eternity. Instead, the moment is eternity embedded in the fullness of time. “Every moment,” Goethe told Eckermann, “has infinite worth because it is the representative [Repräsentant] of all eternity.” The moment thus constitutes the fusion of time and eternity, or more precisely, the moment is eternity realizing itself in time. Though the inspired moment was a central preoccupation in Romantic (and much post-Romantic) literature, Emerson’s approach to it is Goethean in that he often emphasizes eternity’s immanence in the moment rather than the moment as a means of transcendence.11

Although the concept of representativeness might initially seem synonymous with imitation or mimesis, an important distinction should be observed. For Socrates (or Plato), an underlying inconsistency between the Eternal Being’s perfection and the “imitative” world of change was responsible for the genesis of time and individuation. For Emerson, however, an essential connection remained between temporality and eternity, so that the relationship between them was not fairly characterizable as that of copy to original. A “representative” element or chronologic monad persisted in the fabric of time, serving as confirmation of time’s continuity with eternity, and it is in this regard that the biological or organic content of the Emersonian metamorphosis impinges most directly upon its temporal dimension. Van Cromphout’s final observation is, I think, entirely valid: By living within the moment, Emerson did not aspire to “transcend” or live 11. Van Cromphout, Emerson’s Modernity, 46.

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“above” time so much as to apprehend temporal reality’s coincidence with eternal law. Emerson’s adoption of Goethe’s botanical metamorphosis as a type or emblem of the manifestation of divinity through the vehicle of man’s consciousness was congruent with his own teleologic privileging of Homo sapiens—and yet not entirely consonant with Goethe’s own pantheism, which, in perceiving life as an irrepressible, dynamic, and yet not necessarily human force in nature, actually had more in common with Thoreau’s exaltation of growth as a universal principle. As I indicated earlier, Emerson’s humanism prevented him from accepting the essential sameness of all species that Darwin’s theories, and indeed Goethe’s affirmation of the ubiquity of the monad, presupposed. Even before The Origin of Species appeared, Emerson’s implicit privileging of humankind compelled him to disagree with Lamarck and other materialistic protoevolutionists. Like Lyell and Agassiz, Emerson resisted Lamarck’s contention that over time, one species could metamorphose into another. Each strain, all three men argued, had to be unique and insular. They essentially treated entire species as individuals, since each possessed distinctive traits no other species could acquire. Thus the worm, in aspiring to be man, underwent a process that was more spiritual than mechanical, nature having refined its “technique” in the interim separating the genesis of the worm from the genesis of man. Yet although Emerson criticized, as we have seen, the stereotypic scientist of his era for becoming too preoccupied with classification at the expense of intuiting bonds of relationship linking the observer to his specimen, from a philosophical standpoint he himself was not completely comfortable with the ramifications of discovering an underlying kinship between mankind and “lower” forms of life. Thus at some point the metamorphosis, considered as a “law” of organic development, became problematical within the larger context of Emerson’s philosophic system, and the rupture may be localized within the differences separating Emerson’s affinity for Goethe from his resistance to Lamarck. Goethe, writing as both poet and naturalist, came closest to epitomizing Emerson’s ideal synthesis of subjective and objective responses to nature. This integration of self and other was an authentic and “spherical” realization of unity, as opposed to the fragmentary and incomplete apprehension of unity that results from the classification

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and division of phenomena. Emerson distinguishes between the two approaches in a journal entry penned shortly after he wrote Nature, during the period in which he began reading intensively in all the sciences: October 13, 1836 Observe this invincible tendency of the mind to unify. It is a law of our constitution that we should not contemplate things apart without the effort to arrange them in order with known facts and ascribe them to the same law. I do not choose to say, “God is within me—I do not like your picture of an external God. I suppose there is one Spirit, and only one, the selfsame which I behold inly when I am overcome by an aweful moral sentiment, and he made the world.” I do not choose to say this. It is said for me by tyrannical instincts. Hence Goethe, beholding the plant in an hour of Reason and seeing a petal in transition from a leaf, exclaims, Every part of the plant is a leaf; a petal is a leaf; a fruit is a leaf; a seed is a leaf—metamorphosed; and slow-paced experiment makes good this prophetic vision. In like manner, the skull is with him a vertebra of the spine metamorphosed. For seven colors he seeks the simplest mixture, viz.: Darkness and Light. Newton sees an apple fall and says, “the motion of the moon is nothing but an apple-fall, the motion of the earth is nothing but a larger apple-fall. I see the law of all nature”; and slow observation makes good this bold word. The universal law is the single fact. The system of Lamarck is an imperfect result of the same force. It aims to find one monad or organic life which shall be the common element of every animal, and becoming an infusory [i.e., microscopic organism], a poplar-worm, or a man according to circumstances. It says to the canker-worm, “How dost thou, Brother? Please God you shall yet be a philosopher!” And in the same audacious spirit our Weimar man would say, the monad is man or plant only according to the element of darkness or light which it unfolds. Another demand of this constitution is, There shall be no miracle. Another is, A moment is a concentrated eternity. All that ever was is now. Nature teaches all this herself, the spines of the shell, the layers of the tree, the colors of the blossom, the veins of the marble.12 12. The transcription of the journal entry I use here is the one that appears in the Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. The original passage may be found in JMN, 5:219–20. As was the case for his journal entry for October 27 of the same year, quoted in the first chapter of this book, some of the material in this entry provided material for Emerson’s lecture “Humanity of Science.”

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Emerson’s use here of the term metamorphosis draws obviously upon evolutionary, or rather “developmental,” biological theory. Read in this context, metamorphosis does not connote just change, but rather progressive change, of the sort represented by Emerson’s ascending spiral. One point in common between Goethe’s and Lamarck’s developmentalist schemes is their identification of the monad as the unchanging agent of all change, the principle in nature that preserves identity while simultaneously facilitating the process of metamorphosis. Viewed retrospectively, however, Lamarck’s monad is more clearly an ancestor of the gene—a term that would not be coined until 1911, more than a decade after Mendel’s laws of heredity had been codified.13 Nevertheless, on at least one occasion Emerson used, perhaps somewhat presciently, the phrase “genetic atoms” in referring to the elemental constituents of plants and animals.14 He himself took a lively interest in genetics, performing experiments upon his property at Concord by grafting stocks of fruit trees, and he was familiar with Lamarck’s postulation in 1809 that organisms acquired their forms chiefly through an “inheritance of acquired characteristics.”15 Emerson did not object to Lamarckian materialism as a model of developmental change in species, yet he thought it “imperfect” in comparison with Goethe’s, which preserved the Hegelian notion that the arrival of mankind inaugurated self-awareness in nature.16 That the “worm” is somehow related to man is implicit within the symbol of Emerson’s ascending spiral, and yet his underlying discomfort with the idea of such close consanguinity is perceptible in his ambivalent joke about the cankerworm’s aspiration to become a “Philosopher” like himself. 13. See Cohen, Revolution in Science, 36. The OED lists as its first appearance of the word gene the following statement, made by W. Johannsen in American Naturalist: “I have proposed the terms ‘gene’ and ‘genotype’ . . . to be used in the science of genetics.” 14. “These are not plants and animals, but the genetical atoms of which both are composed.” In “Walter Savage Landor,” CE, 12:348–49. 15. Emerson’s thoughts upon the topic of heredity are to be found primarily in the essays “Fate” and “Experience.” 16. Van Cromphout asks, “[H]ow can something as immutable and as tenaciously itself as the . . . Monade change at all? Goethe’s answer was that it could change and yet remain itself because the change was a matter of metamorphosis. It is, after all, of the essence of metamorphosis that earlier forms are not obliterated but aufgehoben, in the Hegelian dual sense of the term, that is, preserved while transcended” (Emerson’s Modernity, 121).

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The very ludicrousness of such a metamorphosis is, for Emerson, a clear sign that the materialists’ position was flawed. Yet Lamarck’s assertion that species begat other species inevitably brought Emerson face to face with the possibility that he himself was indeed the descendant of worms, and his progressive, developmentalist theology, which preferred to look “forward” to mankind’s unification with deity, rather than “backward” to man’s origins in primordial slime, retreated to the sanctuary provided by Goethe’s less mechanistic, and more poetic, emphasis. Emerson may have been drawn to Goethean and Lamarckian essentialist theories in the first place because both pointed toward the existence of underlying principles governing life in the same way that the laws of physics ruled inorganic matter, and in this regard their conclusions appeared to confirm, for Emerson, the earlier wisdom of the presocratic philosophers, especially Heraclitus and Pythagoras. The latter I shall wait to discuss until I turn to Ovid’s recapitulation of his ideas in the final book of The Metamorphoses, but from Heraclitus, Emerson absorbed two ideas that became cornerstones of his idealism. The first of these is that change is perpetual:17 “All is flux,” Heraclitus wrote, and Emerson acquiesced to the propriety of his famous figure of time as a river—“Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow.” Second, Emerson was attracted to the Heraclitean precept that fire is the primary element of which all things are constituted, and to which all things must return. Emerson adopted Heraclitean fire as a figure for Thought, which possessed the same capacity to melt solid-seeming matter back into its constituent laws. Thus Emerson could define “fate,” for example, as “a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought, for causes which are unpenetrated.” Because they could be invoked to help justify a critique of pure materialism, the Heraclitean concepts of ceaseless change and refining fire helped bolster Emerson’s idealism. If change were the rule, empirical observations were always necessarily tentative and contingent; if Emerson’s “kosmos” was fabricated out of laws, thought—not touch—was the most valid and trustworthy epistemologic tool. 17. Richardson said of Heraclitus’s value to Emerson, “What Heraclitus holds out is the possibility of believing in perpetual change and in fixed laws at the same time” (Mind on Fire, 104).

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One way in which thought could be used to dissolve the solidseeming world, Emerson believed, was through the agency of poetic language. And yet the metamorphic power of poetry could be invoked only if the poet were in close rapport with nature, author of all changes and architect of all forms. Emerson’s distinction between “true” and “false” poetic language underlies his poem “The Sphinx,” his foremost poetic elucidation of the relationship between the metamorphosis in language and the metamorphosis in nature. Emerson regarded “The Sphinx” as his favorite among his poems, perhaps because he felt it came closest to expressing faithfully what he regarded as the central mystery and paradox of man’s relationship to nature. Nevertheless, as befits its title, “The Sphinx” is also an elusive and enigmatic work that has generated a considerable body of critical commentary.18 Even Thoreau played Oedipus to Emerson’s Sphinx, writing an extensive and not very coherent gloss of the rather lengthy poem in his journal before finally concluding, “You may find this [exegesis] as enigmatical as the Sphinx’s riddle—Indeed I doubt if she could solve it herself” (J, 1:286). At its most basic level, the poem dramatizes Emerson’s tautology “Metamorphosis is nature,” and indeed the protean Sphinx in the poem is overtly identified as Nature, the “great mother.” The central enigma of the poem is, however, how nature manifests herself in man: Alone of all natural creations, says the Sphinx, man remains alienated and disengaged from the world around him. Emerson’s riddle is a commentary upon the original legendary riddle that employs the vehicle of paradox to convey the various stages of human development, as signified by a man’s posture—from quadruped to biped and then tripod, infancy to maturity and then to infirmity. (Cruel question to ask of a man hobbled by a club foot!) Emerson’s Sphinx, on the other hand, observes that only man, once he has passed beyond the stage of 18. As Lawrence Buell points out, “ . . . ‘The Sphinx’ [is] a work of special authority in the Emerson canon since he placed it at the head of his collected poems” (Literary Transcendentalism, 182). Buell also points out in a subsequent note that Edward W. Emerson, when he assumed his role of editor of his father’s work, “removed the poem from its lead position for fear that its obscurity would frighten readers away from the volume.” In his essay “The Riddle of Emerson’s ‘The Sphinx,’” Thomas R. Whitaker provides the names of several critics who have offered up analyses and evaluations of the poem: Francis Bowen, Ralph Rusk, George E. Woodberry, and Frederic Carpenter (110).

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infancy, does not stand “erect” in nature, but rather walks in a stoop, ashamed of himself and “poisoning” the ground upon which he treads. As in the Greek legend as well, a passerby, a “poet,” essays a solution to the Sphinx’s riddle. He concurs with the Sphinx’s characterization of man, yet the poet also suggests that the Nature-Sphinx does not comprehend man’s idealistic impulse to seek the best, which necessarily sets him apart from the rest of unconscious, unreflective nature. At this juncture, however, the poem’s action takes an abrupt and surprising turn. The Sphinx rejects the poet’s answer and, rather than tearing him to pieces for having failed to solve her puzzle, she embarks upon a series of transformations or metamorphoses that serve to illustrate all that man has continued to hold himself apart from, in a manner analogous to Uriel’s rumored incarnation of himself in multiple forms and forces. Most critics have read “The Sphinx” as an affirmation of Emersonian optimism, or, alternatively, as a confirmation of nature’s inscrutability; the latter strikes me as being the more tenable interpretation. If the poem were indeed merely an expression of Emersonian optimism and idealism, it might be expected to end after the poet replies to the Sphinx’s challenge. But Emerson supplies a more complexly ambivalent answer. When the poet rashly reproves the Sphinx for having failed to identify idealism as the underlying reason for man’s restlessness, saying that her eyes must have become muddied by age, the Sphinx rouses herself and demands to know by what right the poet has spoken her name aloud. To name something implies a willful separation of it from the self, but, she tells the poet, she is he— “I am thy spirit . . . Of thine eye I am eyebeam.” Thus the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle is, as it was for Oedipus, “man,” but now her answer is insistently personal and accusatory: “Thou art the unanswered question”: “Thou art the unanswered question; Couldst see thy proper eye, Alway it asketh, asketh; And each answer is a lie. So take thy quest through nature, It through thousand natures ply; Ask on, thou clothed eternity; Time is the false reply.”

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Because man is a “clothed eternity,” the Nature-Sphinx says, any answer to the question of his own identity that depends upon a contingent future—whether or not that future should be a better or more ideal time than the present—is invalidated by its own false temporality: “Time is the false reply.” Implicit within the Sphinx’s response is the idea that man does not become, but rather is, if he will only realize it. Then, when the Sphinx throws off her former, only apparent, lethargy and, through the process of metamorphosis, effortlessly manifests herself in shape after shape, instantly and timelessly, she illustrates by example the consanguinity of all created things.19 But Emerson also reached back to yet another classical model in representing the metamorphosis as natural process: Ovid’s The Metamorphoses. Emerson thought the epic-length poem vulgar and crude the first time he read it, but he came to appreciate Ovid’s myths of human beings being transformed by the gods into other natural objects as the classical world’s essential intellectual and artistic paradigm for the process of change. From Ovid Emerson also may have absorbed the idea of metamorphosis as symbolic change, or what Daniel Shea calls the “metaphor of metamorphosis.”20 Ovid explicitly attempts to integrate myth with history by organizing his anthology of the major Greco-Roman myths chronologically, beginning with creation legends, then continuing on to the archaic historical epoch of Homer, and ending, finally, with the death of Julius Caesar, virtually in the “present” when the poem was being written. Nevertheless, Ovid professes himself a skeptic about the veracity of these fabulous tales, and he says repeatedly that he presents them primarily as illustrations of the law of mutability, which he says governs all things. His stories of gods transforming themselves into mortals, animals, or other natural phenomena, and of mortals being similarly transformed by the gods, 19. In his “Natural History of Intellect,” Emerson provides an answer to his own riddle: To Be is the unsolved, unsolvable wonder. To Be, in its two connections of inward and outward, the mind and Nature. The wonder subsists, and age, though of eternity, could not approach a solution. But the suggestion is always returning, that hidden source publishing at once our being and that it is the source of outward Nature. Who are we, and what is Nature, have one answer in the life that rushes into us.” (CE, 12:16) 20. Shea, “Emerson and the American Metamorphosis,” 41; see also 38–39.

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serve not as statements of fact, but rather as a cumulative argument for the inevitability of change, a theme that, for a culture with such longevity as Rome’s, has a distinctly monitory quality. Emerson, who himself lived during a period of profound national and religious restlessness, may have found a kindred spirit in the old Roman poet, who employs myth as a vehicle for discussing change’s cultural, psychological, and spiritual ramifications. Ovid’s invocation in The Metamorphoses makes clear that his poetic subject will be not arms and the man, but rather change, which prevails in both art and in history: Now I shall tell of things that change, new being Out of old: since you, O Gods, created Mutable arts and gifts, give me the voice To tell the shifting story of the world From its beginning to the present hour.21

The world has changed over time, says Ovid, and even the story of how it changed has changed. History merges with myth, and the gods’ amours are presented as being continuous with contemporary Roman politics. As Virgil had before him, Ovid wrote The Metamorphoses as a literary justification of and homage to Augustus’s rule—despite his personal antipathy for the emperor, who eventually exiled him to the northwest coast of the Black Sea in A.D. 8. Ovid sought to surpass his idol and rival by making sure that The Metamorphoses was not only longer than the Aeneid, but that it endorsed Augustan rule mythically and symbolically, whereas Virgil had concentrated upon historical and cultural continuity, personified in his hero, Aeneas. The Metamorphoses, however, has no hero, an omission that is consistent with the emphasis the poem places upon the transience of individuals and the ephemerality of form. Ovid, whose impiety was cited (along with immorality) as justification for his banishment, does not exhibit an especially high degree of reverence for the Olympian gods whose bawdy exploits he recounts. Instead, he extols nature goddesses such as Pomona, who tends her beloved orchards with a pruning hook. As Horace Gregory observed, Ovid’s religiosity consisted largely of nature worship.22 Accordingly, the several individual metamorphoses 21. I am using Horace Gregory’s translation published in 1960 by Mentor Classics. 22. See Gregory’s introduction to The Metamorphoses, xx.

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in Ovid’s poem are symbolic representations of organic processes such as fertility, growth, speciation, and decay. Like Goethe and Emerson, Ovid took an interest in the variety, adaptability, and suitability of organic form, and he accepted the fact of organic change as evidence of a much more pervasive and powerful universal impulse toward change that encompassed time and space—the true metamorphosis, the essential principle of mutability that dominated even the gods’ existences. Ovid reserved the final book of his long poem for an elucidation of the metamorphosis as cosmic principle, and his discussion there draws heavily upon Heraclitean views, as voiced by Pythagoras, who appears as a character. In book 15, Numa Pompilius, Rome’s ruler after Romulus and second of Rome’s original “seven kings,” goes abroad seeking wisdom about how to rule his young city-state. At Crotona he interviews Pythagoras, who possesses a reputation for answering questions beyond other men’s ken. Pythagoras explains to Numa the theory of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, and recommends a vegetarian diet, since human beings may be reincarnated as the animals they dine on. Finally he expostulates upon the nature of change and time: “And so I ride (which is my metaphor) A full-sailed ship upon an endless sea, A universe where nothing stays the same, Sea, sky, wind, earth, and time forever changing— Time like a river in its ceaseless motion; On, on, each speeding hour cannot stand still, But as waves, thrust by waves, drive waves before them, So time runs first or follows forever new: The flying moment gone, what once seemed never Is now, which vanishes before we say it, Each disappearing moment in a cycle, Each loss replaced within the living hour.”

Pythagoras concludes by prophesying a long life for Rome, yet this reassurance is ambivalently combined with his insistent message about the transitoriness of all things. Ovid himself seems to grasp the difficulty of reconciling Pythagoras’s message to Numa about mutability with a guarantee of longevity for any political regime, for Pythagoras’s speech shifts abruptly from predicting success for Rome to reiterating the constancy of change:

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His metaphors proliferating as luxuriantly as organic forms, Ovid’s Pythagoras represents change as prevailing even beyond the limits of fleshly existence. Numa subsequently departs, reassured (although it is not clear why he should be) that Rome’s future is secure. In closing his poem, Ovid follows epic convention by asserting the deathlessness of his own poetry, which, he says, will last as long as Rome herself, thereby echoing Pythagoras’s optimistic predictions. Ovid’s literary description of change had much to offer Emerson. Not only did Ovid vindicate an identification of change as the primary rule for all existence, but he also integrated within that overall principle change at the cognitive, artistic, historical, natural, and supernatural levels. Emerson must have understood that Ovid was presenting an alternative to more literal historical chronicles such as those composed by Tacitus. The Metamorphoses is more a history of change, a poetic record that extends back to the origins of time, and not just of mankind. Yet Ovid’s influence upon Emerson may finally have been most lasting in the Roman poet’s treatment of language as a crucial component of the overall larger, ongoing metamorphosis. Such is the theme of Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” a meditation upon, among other things, the symbolic nature of language, which is demonstrated most palpably in the functioning of metaphor. Emerson accepted metaphors as complex linguistic, psychological, and metaphysical phenomena. Part of the aesthetic pleasure we derive from reading a well-wrought metaphor is that it strikes us as being apt and true. These moments of insight validate Emerson’s assertion that the intellect could, like fire, dissolve the substance of matter and reduce it to law. In this regard, an ability to see relationships and express them as metaphors stands for the entirety of thought, or as thought exercised to its fullest extent. Moreover, through the agency of figural language, the law of thought could at last become synony-

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mous with the law of nature, for metaphors captured or incarnated nature’s own shape-shifting ability. As Emerson wrote in his journal, “The metamorphosis of nature shows itself in nothing more than this; that there is no word in our language that cannot become typical to us of nature by giving it emphasis. The world is a dancer: it is a Rosary; it is a torrent: it is a Boat: A Mist, a Spider’s Snare; it is what you will; and the metaphor will hold. . . . Swifter than light the World transforms itself into that thing you name” (JMN, 8:23). The susceptibility of the World to be transformed into Word certified, to Emerson, nature’s endorsement of the poet’s efforts. A poet’s manipulation of metaphorical and symbolical materials aligned him with nature; thus, unlike the rash poet in “The Sphinx,” whose use of language dissociates him from nature, the ideal hero-poet in “The Poet” succeeds in his characterization of nature because he and she are in essential harmony: As the eyes of Lyncæus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For through the better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form; and, following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. (CW, 3:12)

Like the argonaut Lyncaeus, Emerson’s poet has eyes that are preternaturally acute, except that the poet’s “eyesight” derives from his ability to perceive analogies, expressed in metaphors. Poets’ visions, in turn, bring about a metamorphosis in their readers, for to them, as well, the world will never look quite the same way again. In assimilating poets’ metaphors, readers perceive, and perhaps for the first time, the essential metamorphosis of object into law, and back into object: If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have

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really got a new sense, and found within their world, another world, or nest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop. (17)

The “fact” that all objects possessed symbolic content proved, platonically, that an object was not exhausted by its physicality. Yet the Emersonian metamorphosis was not merely a recurring conversion of thing to thought, but also a developmental and teleologic process; the perceiving poet knows that every creature wishes to “ascend into a higher form.” Emerson associates this particular aspect of the metamorphosis with “melody,” or rather with the discrimination of melody. Like a combination of notes, objects could be paired with their meanings to form a harmonious whole. Emerson explicitly connects this figure drawn from the arts to the increasingly fashionable developmental theories being promulgated among the biological sciences: “Like the metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms is their change into melodies.” But poets’ participation in the universe’s grand scheme of development allies them more nearly with priests than with scientists, and correspondingly Emerson’s language throughout “The Poet” emphasizes the religious dimension of the poet’s profession. When they change the way we see the world, poets become semidivine agents of change or “liberating gods,” and the teleologic role Emerson imputed to poets rested directly upon their authority as determinants of symbolic significance. Poets promote that “ascension, or the passage of the soul into higher forms” when they employ figurative language as an intellectual tool to divulge the presence of ideas within things. Moreover, by discerning incremental patterns within seemingly random change, the Emersonian metamorphosis-metaphor elapses outside of conventional time: Thou [Poet] shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy.” (CW, 3:23)

Thus it bears repeating that, in accordance with what Emerson learned from reading Plato and the presocratic philosophers, the Emersonian metamorphosis decouples change from duration. When we do not see poetically, our eyes remain time bound—the transience of our own

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lives prevents us from perceiving the metamorphosis. Then we mistakenly attribute the phenomenon of change to the passage of time, and because we grow old, we interpret change chiefly as deterioration or entropy. But true change is directionless: Organic decay is offset by organic growth. Through reading Plutarch, Emerson encountered a metaphor used by Heraclitus to express change’s nondirectionality, that of bodies being made and unmade of clay: For, as Heraclitus saith, it is the same thing to be dead and alive, asleep and awake, a young man and decrepit; for these alternately are changed one into another. For as a potter can form the shape of an animal out of his clay and then as easily deface it, and can repeat this backwards and forwards as often as he pleaseth, so Nature too out of the same materials fashioned first our grandfathers, next our fathers, then us, and in process of time will engender others, and again others upon these. For as the flood of our generation glides on without any intermission and will never stop, so in the other direction the stream of our corruption flows eternally on.23

Emerson adopted Heraclitus’s trope and put it to music in “Merlin.” At the conclusion of that poem, Emerson’s hero-bard chants: Subtle rhymes with ruin rife Murmur in the house of life, Sung by the Sisters as they spin; In perfect time and measure, they Build and unbuild our echoing clay, As the two twilights of the day Fold us music-drunken in.

Emerson’s poetic technique in these lines is masterful. Like vessels being shaped on the potter’s wheel, we are made of clay that “echoes” both our creator’s design and the sound of creation itself. In almost “perfect” trochaic tetrameter, Emerson captures the lulling, murmuring regularity of mechanical processes, and his own alternating images of life and death, building and unbuilding, also imitate the directionless reshaping of the Parcae, as they spin our lives on potters’ wheels rather than on their looms. The last line represents the potter’s collapse or folding of a still-wet vessel back to the lump from which it 23. Edmund G. Berry, Emerson’s Plutarch, 128.

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had been made, and the phrase “music-drunken” denotes both that the vessel has served its purpose—its contents have been consumed—and that it has itself become intoxicated by the hum of the wheel upon which it was fashioned. The “hands” that collapse the vessel’s side inwards are most saliently the two twilights of life, youth and age, so that the “day” used metonymically to express our being is stripped of any linear orientation, and our lives contract back instead to the point from which they had begun, when the “melody” of our metamorphosis from idea to being and form had first begun. But the hands in this poem are also Emerson’s: By using humming, hypnotic lines to draw us closer to his meaning, Emerson enacts his own metaphor, so that we too become “drunken.” Thus the poet Emerson, who had once forfeited his position as minister by refusing to perform the rite of communion, ceremoniously offers his readers instead the cup of metamorphosis.

6 INCHES’ WOOD Thoreau’s Re-membered Cultural Landscape To see the ghostly outline of an old landscape beneath the superficial covering of the contemporary is to be made vividly aware of the endurance of core myths. —Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory . . . memory, which we call history . . . —Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Whether approached from a literary or a scientific standpoint, Thoreau’s late writings about trees resist categorization—and therein lies their chief virtue for readers who find in them a unique poetry of fact. But until only rather recently, the prevailing critical consensus was that Thoreau’s last phase of writing represented a decline from the peak achieved in Walden and “Walking.”1 This devaluation is undoubtedly partially attributable to the historical schism between the humanities and the sciences that C. P. Snow memorably deplored in his essay “The Two Cultures.” Literarily trained critics found it difficult to accept Thoreau’s escalating scientism, and scientists carped at his lack of training, at his eclecticism, and at his occasionally mistaken field identifications.2 During the past three decades this 1. See, for example, this comment by Odell Shepard upon Thoreau’s journal in the years after 1857: The last volumes of the “Journals,” at least in their superficial aspect, seem to show an almost complete triumph of the observer in Thoreau over the thinker and poet. As though determined to make an exhaustive report upon the flora and fauna of Concord, he fills hundreds of pages with minute records of things seen and heard, things measured and counted, written for the most part in the dry and spiritless style of the professional scientists against whom he had so often railed. (The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, 292) 2. Gary Paul Nabhan writes, in his foreword to Faith in a Seed, “In much the same way that literary critics have dismissed the quality of Thoreau’s later scientific

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cultural rift has been repaired somewhat by an increased willingness among critics to apply an interdisciplinary approach to problems, as well as by an efflorescence of fine nature and scientific writing, which has come to constitute virtually a distinct literary genre in its own right and is indeed now taught as such on many college campuses. Consequently, science has finally been accepted as falling within the domain of literature, without having to be relegated to the still marginalized precincts of science fiction. Of course the transcendentalists themselves never saw science and letters as being fundamentally incompatible. What they objected to was science’s propensity for becoming rigidified within taxonomies that, by their very existence, implied a separation of the observer from the observed, thereby running counter to the transcendentalists’ insistent monism. Moreover, because transcendentalism emerged during the significant cultural and historical juncture when the earth’s clock was being recalibrated by geologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, and anthropologists, it represents an early attempt to achieve a heuristic synthesis, a unified field or ground of temporal knowledge. As such, it reexamines the relationship between several different ways in which time is experienced: as memory, as history, as natural history. Thoreau’s quantitative studies of trees as exponents of time flowed continuously out of his consideration of the “wild” self in “Walking.” By counting tree rings, by working out the mechanisms of forest succession and of seed dispersal, and by examining how domesticated trees such as the apple reverted to becoming “wild” apple trees, Thoreau could hope to recover the lost original wild world that had generated human beings as they are. During the late 1850s Thoreau’s attention was being drawn to trees by a number of converging developments both in natural history and in local patterns of land use. Most importantly, he read The Origin of Species soon after it was published, during a critical shift in his own thinking about long-term natural processes. He had already read Lyell’s delineation of deep time in his Principles, which would provide a sufficient temporal context for Darwin’s process of natural selection to unfold in, and subsequently for Thoreau’s own ripening theory of forest succession. In addition, Darwin’s identification of natural selection as the mechanism for species writing, botanical and zoological taxonomists have maligned his early attempts at plant and animal study” (xiv).

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change confirmed for Thoreau the superiority of “developmental” theories over those that called for miraculous intervention, such as Agassiz’s theory of special creation or the widespread notion that trees could be spontaneously generated without requiring the presence of seeds. “Developmental” theories such as Darwin’s also appealed to Thoreau because they did not, like scripturally based theories, treat virtually all known time either as an anticlimax to a divinely inspired genesis or as prologue to salvation and immortality. In his journal he wrote, on October 19, 1860, “The development theory implies a greater vital force in nature, because it is more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation.” This continuously transpiring present partakes of the true transcendental moment, the “everlasting now.” Moreover, Darwin’s explication of natural selection allowed Thoreau to discern competition’s role in determining the formation of forest landscapes. Trees in a forest compete with each other for food, water, and especially for access to light. As he grasped the significance of adaptive strategies, Thoreau began to see why some species such as the willow produced huge mast crops of seed, in what had before seemed an astonishing waste of species resources: We need not be surprised at these results when we consider how persevering Nature is, and how much time she has to work in, though she works slowly. A great pine wood may drop many millions of seeds in one year, and if only half a dozen are conveyed a quarter of a mile and lodge against some fence, and only one comes up and lives there, yet in the course of fifteen or twenty years there are fifteen or twenty young trees there, and they begin to make a show and betray their origin. It does not imply any remarkable rapidity or success in Nature’s operations. (J TA, 14:220–21)

Thus by the late 1850s all the necessary ingredients were in place for Thoreau to begin approaching forests as natural mechanisms whose operation was conditioned and governed by time. Yet time also governs how we ourselves interpret Thoreau’s analyses of natural processes. We may never have been in greater jeopardy of misunderstanding how Thoreau construed the landscape than now, when he has been made to serve, posthumously, as unofficial spokesperson for the conservation movement. The popular depiction of Thoreau at Walden as a wilderness-dwelling hermit is an anachronism generated by a culture caught up in its own nostalgia for an unspoiled,

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antetechnologic life that probably never existed, and which it probably would not have enjoyed very much anyway, had such a life ever been achieved. But Thoreau himself was no Luddite. He liked machinery, and he took a keen interest in manufacturing operations of all sorts, including the process of pencil making, which depended upon a steady supply of wood casings.3 At some level he approached nature as a manufactory in its own right, with similar transferrals of power from one component to another, similar governing controls and methods of achieving equilibrium. Thoreau generally applauded the invention of labor-saving devices, especially improved farm implements, if he thought that the farmers who used them might save more time for cultivating themselves rather than just their fields. Notwithstanding his criticisms in Walden of farmers who indulged in a kind of agricultural hubris either by buying up too much land or by raising livestock, on the whole Thoreau admired farmers and the business of farming. In thinking about how agricultural economies might be achieved, Thoreau typically adopted a chronologically eclectic or pan-temporal approach, combining new methods with old to yield the maximum possible return of time. He especially enjoyed discovering classical references to agricultural practices he regarded as being still vital and useful. He read and reread Virgil’s Georgics and Cato’s De Re Rustica, and, despite his doubts about the wisdom of dressing farmlands with manure, he was struck by the contemporaneousness of Cato’s admonition to farmers, “Sterquilinium magnum stude ut habeas” (Study to have a great dung heap). Encountering such timeless wisdom helped validate Thoreau’s conviction that time did not really move: Despite the application of new technologies and new techniques to the problem of getting a living, the human condition itself underwent little change. Thoreau’s interest in farming also prompted him to search for ways of balancing agriculture with the preservation of natural areas. This was a complex problem, forest and field having always existed in an uneasy tension. Agriculture’s impact upon the “wild” or latent natural landscape has lately become an object of study for a group comprising historians, economists, and ecologists, the last of whom have contributed the useful phrase “cultural landscape” to describe the shared locus of their investigations. In his book Thoreau’s Country: 3. See Richardson, Life of the Mind, 227–28.

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Journey through a Transformed Landscape, David Foster, an ecologist, defines a cultural landscape as one that has been “shaped by the interaction of human history and the natural environment.” New England was and is such a cultural landscape, for, as Foster says, “Nearly every acre of the countryside has been directly affected by past land use; in fact, most of the modern forest is located on former agricultural land that was grazed by cattle, tilled for crops, or cut regularly to provide a farmer with wood for fuel.” Although Foster concentrates on the importance of the cultural landscape as a factor in determining Thoreau’s own attitudes toward the farmlands of New England, the idea that the visible terrain is a sort of compromise or hybrid generated by the unfolding of human activity within a natural setting would seem, at least on its face, to be especially pertinent for nations in which lands had been farmed intensively for centuries, or even for millennia—and indeed, as Foster points out, many of the important early studies in the creation of cultural landscapes were performed in England and Scandinavia.4 On this side of the Atlantic, European immigrants’ large-scale, sustained land use makes New England the most appropriate region for investigating the phenomenon in North America. An alternative and predominantly historical perspective upon the cultural landscape may be found in Simon Schama’s admirable study Landscape and Memory, an encyclopedic treatment of Europeans’ and Americans’ management (or mismanagement) of their greatest forests: England’s New Forest, Poland’s Białowie˙za, Germany’s “Hercynian” forest, France’s Fontainebleau and America’s western redwood forests. Yet Schama’s book also introduces personal history into the matrix of the cultural landscape by providing an autobiographical account of his own family’s involvement with the woods. Through his father, Schama traces his descent to a community of Hasidic woodcutters that worked the forests of Baltic Lithuania. Although Schama himself was raised in London, he professes to detect a vestigial, perhaps culturally determined, interest in sylvan landscapes, and he uses this 4. Foster, Thoreau’s Country, 10. Foster traces the origins of the concept of “cultural landscape”: “The notion of a ‘cultural landscape’ . . . emerged in Scandinavia in the 1930s; the ecological and historical background of this concept is well described by Knut Faegri from Bergen and other authors in The Cultural Landscape: Past, Present and Future, edited by H. Birks and colleagues” (236).

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personal testimonial to illustrate a landscape’s power to influence national, regional, and individual identities. Schama also establishes the intimacy between landscape and memory by recalling his own profound response, as a child, to having told to him any myths sited in the woods, such as, for example, Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. He writes, [I]f a child’s vision of nature can already be loaded with complicating memories, myths, and meanings, how much more elaborately wrought is the frame through which our adult eyes survey the landscape. For although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible. Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock. Objectively, of course, the various ecosystems that sustain life on the planet proceed independently of human agency, just as they operated before the hectic ascendancy of Homo sapiens. But it is also true that it is difficult to think of a single such natural system that has not, for better or worse, been substantially modified by human culture. Nor is this simply the work of the industrial centuries. It has been happening since the days of ancient Mesopotamia. It is coeval with writing, with the entirety of our social existence. And it is this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have.5

Landscape and Memory concludes with a chapter largely critical of Thoreau’s cultural portrayal of the American landscape in his writings. In examining Thoreau’s application of the term “the wild,” Schama discerns a seeming incongruity between message and methodology. The literary and literal space Thoreau inhabited at Walden Pond, which I have called the “Thoreauvian interval” and which Leo Marx perceived as a variant of the “middle landscape,” located midway between wilderness and civilization, Schama dismisses as a thoroughly tamed and defanged “suburban refuge.” Correspondingly, he finds Thoreau’s praise of wildness to be chiefly an exercise in imaginative, and somewhat romantic, hyperbole. Schama questions whether Thoreau really ever desired to live in a true wilderness, recalling our attention to Thoreau’s essentially gregarious personality and frequent visits to and from his acquaintances while at Walden Pond. When 5. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, 6–7.

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Thoreau subsequently presented himself in his lyceum lectures as an “uncompromising wild man,” Schama suggests that he was actually “repress[ing] his conflicted feelings about the co-existence of the savage and the social.”6 Schama also takes Thoreau to task for neglecting or ignoring the importance of history, a critical component of the cultural landscape. He cites Thoreau’s statement that “He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past” (a sentiment actually more Emersonian than it is Thoreauvian), as evidence of Thoreau’s “amnesia” about history. Moreover, Schama links Thoreau’s supposed hostility to history to his deliberate representation of himself, in his writings and on the lecture circuit, as nature’s advocate: “Thoreau’s rejection of history,” says Schama, “was based on the fierce conviction that it was irreconcilable with nature.”7 Thoreau much preferred myth to history, Schama says, not because, as Thoreau himself says, “To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography” (WK, 60), but because myth, by its very indistinctness, was freed of the musty smell given off by the solely historical past: Myth, Thoreau readily acknowledged, could supply a library of nature’s memory commensurate with its raw power and beauty. But, unorthodox as he was in most things, he was entirely of his time in assuming history and culture to be sheared away from myth. “Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted,” he asserted, beginning a lament which continues to our own day. . . . Archaeology was the enemy of mythology, for it presupposed a stale continuity of human habitation. The very idea of culture layered over culture on the same site turned Thoreau’s stomach, and he rejoiced that, as he imagined, the three acres Emerson had given him on Walden Pond had never seen any form of human settlement. Whether or not there had been Indian cultures by the deep, clear waters of the pond made no difference, since they were somehow exempt from the kind of social exploitation of nature he attributed to civilizations.8

Schama imputes Thoreau’s desire to sever myth from history to a culturally naive nationalism. Thoreau wished, Schama suggests, to 6. Marx, Machine in the Garden, 256; Marx discerns, in Walden, a version of the reinscribed American pastoral ideal. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 576, 572. 7. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 574. 8. Ibid., 575.

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preserve humankind’s ancientness while simultaneously asserting the possibility of new American beginnings, untainted by European or “Old World” cultural encumbrances. If we remember Thoreau’s dismissal of some elements of the ancient past, such as Egyptian temples and pyramids, Schama’s point seems well taken, initially. Yet to say that Thoreau rejected history because it could not be reconciled with nature seems to me a fundamental misrepresentation of his position vis-à-vis the past. Although Thoreau was indeed occasionally prone to engage in some chauvinistic chest-thumping and to impugn the authority of the past as guide to the present, he was not particularly hostile to Europe or to European history.9 Rather, he was continually on the alert to discover ways in which human history interacted with natural history. Schama’s imputation of historical amnesia to Thoreau is implicitly founded, I think, upon a misreading of Thoreau’s revolutionary approach to time. The transcendentalists’ passionate assertion that we should live in the present rather than in the past is not tantamount to a rejection of history; and to see it in such a light is to distort their entire project. Because the rise of transcendentalism coincided with a deeper and more sophisticated scientific comprehension of time’s true magnitude, Emerson and Thoreau were among the first generation of westerners faced with the intellectual challenge of integrating ahistorical time with history. The fact that they lived and wrote in a country that was still comparatively young may be viewed, depending upon one’s own cultural perspective, as having induced in them a form of myopia, as a historical coincidence, or as a material contribution to the radical newness of their ideas. By his fourth decade, Thoreau had come to comprehend Concord in several spatial and temporal dimensions simultaneously. As surveyor, he had helped set out the town’s boundaries. As amateur lo9. I say this despite the following comment about Thoreau made by Emerson in his eulogizing essay: “His preference of his country and condition was genuine, and his aversation from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt” (CE, 10:459). This was Emerson’s observation upon Thoreau, of course, and it was made in conjunction with his preceding statement, “No truer American existed than Thoreau.” By the time he died, Thoreau had earned some notoriety as an abolitionist, particularly through his vociferous defense of the insurrectionist John Brown. Emerson, eulogizing his friend in 1862, may have been at some pains to assert his late friend’s underlying patriotism.

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cal historian, anthropologist, and archaeologist, he had probed the lives of old Concordians, both those who had arrived upon American shores and those indigenous to the region. As the town’s selfappointed “journalist” and natural historian, Thoreau even sought to reassemble the town’s primeval landscape, a task that required him to overcome several obstacles. For one thing, during his lifetime the countryside around Concord bore little resemblance to the wildlands Puritan pioneers had encountered two hundred years earlier. Concord, by Thoreau’s reckoning the oldest inland town in North America, was already thoroughly pastoral and domesticated by the time he was born there in 1817. Remnants of the original forest that had once blanketed New England were to be found only in small, nonarable pockets of land lying in swamps or upon precipitous hillsides. Thus “the wild” that Thoreau posits in “Walking” as a source of the world’s “preservation” was for him, as citizen of Concord, already largely hypothetical—a fact he nevertheless neither evades nor glosses over. Although Thoreau’s depiction of “the wild” in “Walking” is rendered at least somewhat suspect both by his romanticism and by a manufactured nostalgia for a time when he supposed humankind had lived in greater harmony with nature, his great accomplishment in that essay is his resiting of “the wild” in the human psyche. “Walking” is therefore a masterpiece of early psychology as much as it is a seminal document for the conservation movement. Thoreau locates the “wild” in the “West” both of America and of ourselves, and this explicit analogizing of outer to inner landscapes exemplifies the transcendentalists’ larger project of determining a common ground between nature and humankind, between the real and the ideal. According to Thoreau, the “West” of the self was not, like its geographic complement, unexplored so much as it was simply ignored or forgotten. Consequently, we are dispossessed, Thoreau argues, of our own unconscious selves, which had originally developed in concert with the rest of nature, but from which we have become progressively alienated. In remembering the world as it had been, we may hope to reclaim ourselves, thereby reconstituting, in essence, nature’s primal, undivided body. We would now probably classify Thoreau’s last, ambitious investigations into the landscape of Concord as “longitudinal” studies. Alternatively, considering how thoroughly the natural sciences were becoming imbued with geologic paradigms during Thoreau’s lifetime, we might more accurately describe his researches through time’s various

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layers as stratigraphic. He approached forests in the same way archaeologists did ruined cities or geologists did a railroad cut sliced through solid rock. Both archaeology and geology implicitly represent elapsed time as the ground upon which we walk; the present is “above time,” in the sense that we are supported by the past—it holds us up. Yet to the geologist, the ambient landscape represents not just the past, but contingent time as well, for the forces that shaped the land are still at work, albeit without tending in any particular direction. Like uniformitarian geology, Darwin’s process of natural selection treats time as being dynamic and incremental, without being developmental. When the same “uniformitarian” model is applied to human history, however, we are presented with certain moral and existential quandaries. We like to think that we have learned from our collective experience, that we have heeded George Santayana’s famous warning about what happens to those who forget history. This inherently hopeful, linear, teleologic construction of human history unfolds, however, in the midst of a natural world that is nonlinear, nondevelopmental (at least in a teleogic sense), and, therefore, virtually ahistorical—if history consists only in what Homo sapiens has done. Thus we are confronted with the problem of applying to ourselves, as a species, a model of behavior that does not receive confirmation in the world around us. In the sense that we live among what we have wrought, that is, that we exist in a cultural landscape that is the product of human activity interacting with continuously operating natural forces, landscape is memory; however, we neglect the greater part of time if we equate chronology with our own memories rather than also asking what the landscape itself remembers. Approached from the perspective of philosophy, Thoreau’s efforts to apprehend nature on its own terms rather than upon man’s are equivalent to looking for a fundamental ground of nature, a sound “bottom” that, as he said, “I cannot put my foot through.” Thus the idea that a plant could be spontaneously generated seemed to him “a vulgar prejudice” that had everything to do with humanity’s desire to have its faith in miracles confirmed and little to do with accurate observation or a confidence in the efficacy of cause and effect. Instead, Thoreau borrowed and transformed the language of miraculous intervention by applying it to processes rather than to phenomena. “Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been,” Thoreau wrote first in his journal, and then in his manuscript

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“The Dispersion of Seeds,” “I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.” Thoreau’s determination to discover what was real, factual, and true in nature provides the philosophic basis of his attempts to determine long-term natural processes. Seen in this light, “the wild” becomes merely another phrase for describing that which is real, or the normal state of affairs in the natural world. Thus we may be doing yet another disservice to Thoreau when we treat his longitudinal, “stratigraphic” analyses of nature and time merely as pioneering studies in ecology and conservation. Our attribution of a prescience to him about these “Green” areas risks subjecting his writings to a sort of eco-revisionism that may obscure their authentic philosophical value. Thoreau’s effort to penetrate the landscape to discern the veritable outline of time, and, therefore, of reality, deserves respect on its own terms as a thoughtexperiment of considerable daring. Thoreau believed that errors such as a belief in spontaneous generation were themselves generated by a widespread inability to comprehend nature’s “language,” or the means by which nature expressed itself through tangible objects. Languages also may be said to resemble natural processes in that they are systematic and governed by definable rules. As Gary Paul Nabhan writes, in his foreword to Bradley Dean’s compilation of Thoreau’s late nature essays, Faith in a Seed, Thoreau’s efforts to con what he called the “language” of the fields around Concord arose out of a “faith in natural order [that] made him believe . . . there was a deep structure to all vegetational patterns that could be ascertained by any diligent student.” Scientific nomenclatures represent, at some level, humankind’s first, halting attempts to understand nature’s dumb speech, yet scientists who cling to taxonomies rather than attempting to unravel the forest’s longterm processes neglect nature’s “predicate.” As Nabhan says, “More than any other botanist of his time, Thoreau moved past the mere naming of trees—the nouns of the forest—to track its verbs: the birds, rodents, and insects that pollinate flowers or disperse seeds, and all the other agents that shape the forest’s structure.”10 As transcendentalist, Thoreau was already predisposed to favor kinesis over stasis; consequently he looked for a language enacted in a temporal context, rather than a language that immobilized its subject like a butterfly pinned 10. Nabhan, foreword to Thoreau, Faith in a Seed, xvi.

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in a specimen case. Although Thoreau labored to learn botany’s binomial designations for the plants he encountered during his walks, ordinarily he was impatient with taxonomies, and in attaching language to nature, he customarily adopted the essentially Emersonian position that true, nontaxonomic language was “fossil poetry” because it somehow preserved the “outline” of the concept it was originally formulated to describe. Such a language would go beyond being merely descriptive to becoming imitative, even performative. Thoreau experiments with “natural” language in the famous “railroad cut” passage in the “Spring” chapter of Walden, when he dwells sensuously upon the sound of the word lobe, finding in it a vocalization of the earth’s impulse to “express itself outwardly in leaves.” In “Walking,” moreover, Thoreau proposes that a language consonant with nature would resemble a gramática parda, a grammar tawny as the leopard, and his phrase marries locution to science as least as effectively as “fossil poetry” does. This wild language, or, more properly, this body of wild knowledge, would be, he says, “a kind of mother-wit” similar to instinct, yet one that was more highly ordered and capable of being inflected. By the fall of 1860 Thoreau was beginning to ponder how Concordians garbled the “language” of forests in the ways they misused their forest lands. Most saliently, the woodlands surrounding town were disappearing at an astonishingly rapid rate. As early as 1845, when Thoreau had gone to live at Walden Pond, the landscape of New England was, as David Foster points out, “near its peak of deforestation and was being farmed and used as intensively as it ever has been.” During Thoreau’s adulthood only a few small vestiges of primitive-growth forest remained, and even these were being steadily reduced. Virtually all the visible woods around Concord were secondgrowth, and only rotting stumps remained from the mixed oak and pine forests that once dominated the landscape. By the 1850s, timber had become not a resource in Concord, but a crop, and one that had to be tended carefully to ensure that adequate supplies would remain available. Wood was in high demand both as fuel and as building material. Each winter, the average southern New England household was consuming from ten to thirty cords of firewood; moreover, accelerated railway construction was requiring large quantities of wood for making sleepers. During Thoreau’s youth, the trees around Walden Pond itself were regarded by Concord citizens as a sort of communal

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woodlot, and its precincts were shrinking so rapidly that Emerson and others had begun purchasing tracts such as the one upon which Thoreau built his cabin just to save them from the axe. From 1846 onward, says Foster, wood became so valuable that Concordians scavenged planks from old barns and driftwood from riverbanks, and we may remember that Thoreau procured some of the wood he needed at Walden by “recycling” planks from James Collins’s railroad shanty. Virtually every usable tree was being cut down as soon as it was twenty to forty years old, or roughly a third of the age that a tree left unmolested could be expected to achieve, a practice that, Thoreau determined, wasted the increased volume of lumber a tree harvested in its prime could supply.11 Thoreau’s sound ideas about woodlot productivity, or what he called “forest geometry,” coupled with his insights into how trees propagated themselves and where particular species grew, persuaded several of his fellow townsmen, including Emerson, to employ him informally from time to time as a forester.12 Thoreau approached these tasks with his customary intelligence, diligence, and eclecticism. He had become thoroughly familiar with Concord’s indigenous trees, which he appreciated for their aesthetic qualities as well as for their utility. For the picnic grove Emerson wished to have planted on his property at Walden Pond, Thoreau selected the graceful yet durable white pine, knowing that it could tolerate the abundant sunshine available in a forest opening. Other property owners sought Thoreau’s advice about how and where to plant woodlots composed of the more desirable hardwoods, particularly oak, the species that began virtually 11. Foster, Thoreau’s Country, 10, 13, 100, 135. 12. Thoreau’s business-minded approach to the raising and cutting of timber is, as I have said, somewhat at odds with our contemporary image of him as a pioneer conservationist. Foster makes this point as well: Thoreau is often perceived and cited by twentieth-century readers as the proponent of a wilderness ethic that led to a strongly preservationist sentiment. . . . Nevertheless, Thoreau actually lived in a landscape where the woods were relatively few and heavily cut, where fields and farms predominated, and where people were actively and incessantly working the entire countryside for all available natural resources. Although he railed occasionally against the tameness of Concord’s nature and dreamed of the wilder landscape of the colonists, in fact Thoreau thoroughly embraced his agricultural landscape and its people and spent much of his time in the forests conceptualizing plans for the sound management of woodlots. (Thoreau’s Country, 228)

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to monopolize Thoreau’s attention. His rambles through the woods alerted Thoreau to the fact that local populations of hardwoods such as oak, hickory, and chestnut were diminishing, and that in places where farmers had cleared stands of them to create pastures, pitch pines and white pines were likely to spring up. As he put the problem in “The Dispersion of Seeds”: The noblest trees, and those which it took the longest to produce, and which are the longest lived—as chestnuts, hickories, and oaks—are the first to become extinct under our present system and are the hardest to reproduce, and their place is taken by pines and birches, of feebler growth than the primitive pines and birches, for want of a change in soil. There is many a tract now bearing a poor and decaying crop of birches, or perhaps of oaks, dying when a quarter grown, and covered with fungi and excrescences, where for two hundred years grew oaks and chestnuts of the largest size. The time will soon come, if it has not already, when we shall have to take special pains to secure and encourage the growth of white oaks, as we already must that of chestnuts, for the most part. These oaks will become so scattered that there will not be seed enough to seed the ground rapidly and completely. The observations in the chestnut woods also suggest that you cannot raise one kind of wood alone in a country unless you are willing to plant it yourself. If no oaks grow within miles of your pines, then of course the ground under the pines will not be filled with little oaks, and you will have to plant them there—or put up with poor pines at last. Better have your wood of different kinds in narrow lots of fifty acres, and not one kind covering a township.13

After making a thorough inventory of Concord’s woodlots, Thoreau concluded that, with the exception of the provident few such as George Minott, who managed his ten-acre lot so efficiently that he could harvest eight cords of firewood from it year in and year out, local farmers had badly mismanaged their woodlands. Their poor stewardship was largely a legacy of old New England’s original embarrassment of sylvan resources, which had seemed to render all efforts at forest conservation superfluous or needlessly bothersome. But farmers’ abuse of their woodlands may also be attributed to the fact that North American forest dynamics were only casually observed and, 13. Faith in a Seed, 130–31.

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therefore, poorly understood. The earliest English colonists had emigrated from a country in which few primitive woods remained, so the majority of them knew little about forest topographies when they arrived in America. As Schama points out, as early as the Norman invasion, the spread of agriculture in England had reduced forest coverage to only 15 percent of the nation’s land area. Moreover, the decimation of England’s forests accelerated abruptly toward the close of the sixteenth century when huge quantities of wood were consumed by the country’s burgeoning ironworks industry. Thus, as Schama observes, “[J]ust at the time when Robin Hood’s Sherwood was appearing in children’s literature, stage drama, and poetic ballads, the greenwood idyll was disappearing into house beams, dye vats, ship timbers, and iron forges.”14 What little forestland remained was tightly held by the crown, the nobility, or the church, so that the average middleclass, seventeenth-century Englishman disembarking upon an American shore knew little about the woodlands he saw beyond the patent fact that they were stunningly extensive. New England farmers’ neglect of their woodlands may also be construed as a vestige of the pioneer mentality, which chiefly saw wood as being, as Thoreau said in Walden, an “encumbrance.” Despite a rich knowledge of woodlore, or of how to get a living in the woods, early generations of American settlers developed almost no native cultural history of woodland preservation. Few farmers looked beyond short-term gains to be made by stripping their woodlots and burning off the residue. Fire itself was one of the more misunderstood factors in the normal growth cycles of North American forests. Thoreau, known around Concord as “the man who had set fire to the woods,” was particularly, even painfully, conscious of fire’s potential to destroy forests and to create them. Many native species—the pitch pine, for example—had adapted to the presence of intermittent fires sparked by lightning, and some species even depended upon heat to stimulate seed production and dispersal. Thoreau also realized that tree seedlings in burned-over areas responded to a new abundance of available sunlight by sending up a wealth of fresh shoots. If seedlings were prevented from sprouting, however, they eventually went to rot, and thus Thoreau was particularly acid in his comments about an anonymous landowner who clear-cut his woodlot, burned off the un14. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 142, 154.

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derbrush, and then sowed the ground with winter rye, which shaded out any surviving oak seedlings left beneath the forest floor and virtually guaranteed that the land would not recover for decades. “That he should call himself an agriculturalist!” sneered Thoreau. “He needs to have a guardian placed over him. . . . Let us purchase a mass for his soul. A greediness that defeats its own ends” (J TA, 14:131). A more common problem than outright abuse, however, was simple neglect. Farmers who owned pastures tried to keep the encroaching woods at bay by mowing down any invading pine seedlings, a task that soon became so wearisome that a few seedlings would inevitably escape their attention, with the result that a hybrid landscape was created that was good neither for grazing nor for growing timber: The custom with us is to let the pines spread . . . into the pasture, and at the same time to let the cattle wander there and contend with the former for the possession of the ground, from time to time coming to the aid of the cattle with a bush-whack. But when, after some fifteen or twenty years, the pines have fairly prevailed over us both [i.e., cows and farmers], though they have suffered terribly and the ground is strewn with their dead, we then suddenly turn about, coming to the aid of the pines with a whip, and drive the cattle out. They shall no longer be allowed to scratch their heads on them, and we fence them [the pines] in. This is the actual history of a great many of our wood-lots. While the English have taken great pains to learn how to create forests, this is peculiarly our mode. It is plain that we have thus both poor pastures and poor forests. (J TA, 14:151)

By the middle of the nineteenth century, New England’s farmers faced somewhat the same situation that their English ancestors had, in that extensive hardwood forests were rapidly becoming the stuff of myth or of memory rather than tangible features within the landscape. In the countryside around Concord, with the exception of a few small remnant populations such as Blood’s and Wetherbee’s groves, virtually all of the primitive oak woods that had once surrounded Concord had vanished by the time Thoreau reached adulthood. Consequently, there was no longer any “baseline” he could use in determining what an extensive, healthy New England hardwood forest looked like or how it functioned. To discover how oaks grew in the wild, just about the only recourse still available to him was to study the decomposing stumps of trees harvested almost a century earlier. By counting their rings he could determine the average oak’s life span and rate

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of growth; moreover, variations in the widths of the rings provided some rough climatological data. Because he was delving into what was rapidly becoming the distant past, Thoreau compared his task of reassembling the vanished forest from the evidence supplied by rotting tree trunks to that of a geologist examining strata, or an archaeologist examining ancient artifacts. He wrote in October 1860: Perhaps I can recover thus generally the oak woods of the beginning of the last century, if the land has remained woodland. I have an advantage over the geologist, for I can not only detect the order of events but the time during which they elapsed, by counting the rings on the stumps. Thus you can unroll the rotten papyrus on which the history of the Concord forest is written. (J TA, 14:152)

As we saw in Chapter 2, Thoreau associated ancient Egyptian culture with a selfish, egocentric materialism, transferred here to the poor sylvan husbandry of his neighbors. Thoreau’s trope opposes the geologist’s “natural” model of antiquity to a corrupt version of history “written” on the vegetable fibers of the forest itself, figured as “papyrus.” This “rotten” version of history consists of Concordians’ abuse of their woodlots, primarily the result of preferring immediate gains over sound management and conservation practices. Yet Thoreau’s tropes themselves are strikingly efficient and economical. A stump’s concentric growth rings provide a “history” of the vanished tree, comparable to the history of a vanished civilization recorded on a roll of papyrus. Both of these types of cylindrical “chronicles” contain overlapping layers, which, were they to be “unrolled,” might also resemble the strata investigated by geologists—except that Thoreau possesses, in the tree rings, a more precise chronologic ordering of the time in which the tree grew. Thus Thoreau’s trope may be thought of as referring indirectly to three different sorts of inscribed time, studied by three different types of the historian: organic time, studied by the dendrochronologist; ancient history, uncovered by the historian or archaeologist; and the history of the planet, revealed to the geologist. We might go even further in assuming that the cultural landscape may be “read” accurately only if such syncretic methods are applied. Certainly the Concord landscape had not been “read” correctly by Thoreau’s fellow townsmen. They had treated the landscape as materialistically as Thoreau believed the Egyptians had their own, with the result that little demonstrable progress had been made in

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man’s relations to the natural world, despite the passage of thousands of years. A lack of insight into natural processes and a failure to see beyond the temporal limits of a single lifetime had generated a corrupt history that was difficult to comprehend, or reassemble. Yet the history of Concord’s trees, however lamentable, was nevertheless more easily reconstructed, Thoreau goes on to say, than the lives of the people who had lived beneath them: It is easier far to recover the history of the trees which stood here a century or more ago than it is to recover the history of the men who walked beneath them. How much do we know—how little more can we know—of these two centuries of Concord life?

That men do walk underneath the trees in Thoreau’s reimagined forest is critically important to notice. Although he fully understood that the human race had, despite the traditional Mosaic chronology’s obfuscating narrative, arrived relatively late upon the earth’s stage, he did not question the propriety of including human beings in his composite portraits of an undisturbed natural order. The ideal natural landscapes about which Thoreau writes are rarely, if ever, unpeopled. Human beings, and their history, were as native to the landscape as the trees they walked beneath, or, perhaps, exploited for profit. Accordingly, Thoreau took it upon himself to integrate the record provided by history and myth with his growing comprehension of underlying natural mechanisms, a synthesis we might characterize with the single, collective word memory. Thoreau set about his task of reassembling the vanished woods by continuing to do fieldwork and by consulting silvicultural authorities. But he had only a limited number of resources upon which to draw. Although he was well acquainted with surveys and guidebooks such as George Emerson’s A report on the trees and shrubs growing naturally in the forests of Massachusetts, published in 1846,15 and François Michaux’s illustrated The North American sylva, most of the books that actually addressed forest management were British. Thoreau read John Evelyn’s great seventeenth-century treatise Sylva, or a discourse of forest-trees; Gilbert White’s The natural history of Selborne; and 15. A concise summary of Thoreau’s reading upon the topic of silviculture is available in Richardson’s Life of the Mind, 303. George Emerson was cousin to Waldo Emerson, a connection that may have helped bring the book to Thoreau’s attention.

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William Gilpin’s Observations . . . on the Western Parts of England and Remarks on forest scenery and other woodland views, relative chiefly to picturesque beauty illustrated by the scenes of New Forest, in Hampshire.16 From Gilpin, Thoreau borrowed the idea of dividing woodlands into categories, ranging from primitive, untouched woods to “artificial woods” that had been planted like crops, from seed. Thus he conceived, as a starting point for determining how woodlands grew, at least a rough taxonomy. Yet he also saw that the single factor most important for understanding how forests formed was seed dispersal. He observed that in the wild, oak seedlings were most likely to succeed to full growth not, paradoxically, in oak groves, but among white pines, which could hardly be expected to have dropped acorns. He soon realized that this intermixture of species resulted almost exclusively from the activities of squirrels, who buried acorns underneath the soft, easily excavated mats of pine needles. Afterward, whenever a white pine died or toppled over, an acorn the squirrels had forgotten was likely to spring up and take advantage of the niche previously exploited by the pine, for oaks tolerated partial shade well. In this way, oak succeeded pine; moreover, pine could succeed oak, for wherever oak forests burned or were cut down, sun-tolerant pines sprang up from seeds blown there by the wind. This exquisite balance between oak and pine was maintained almost entirely by wildlife, particularly squirrels and nut-eating birds such as jays. On October 31, 1860, he wrote in his journal: Yes, these dense and stretching oak forests, whose withered leaves now redden and rustle on the hills for many a New England mile, were all planted by the labor of animals. For after some weeks of close scrutiny I cannot avoid the conclusion that our modern oak woods sooner or later spring up from an acorn, not where it has fallen from its tree, for that is the exception, but where it has been dropped or placed by an animal. Consider what a vast work these forest-planters are doing! (J TA, 14:199)

Thoreau was struck by the apparent accidentalness of the entire process, powered by the trees’ massive overproduction of seed, by the chance loss or neglect of a seed by seed-eating animals, and by various tree species’ different responses to the exigencies of frost, fire, 16. Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading, 173, 236, 176, 289, 186.

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drought, and disease. This entire natural economy, developed over the course of millennia, required a sufficient number of years for each phase of its cycle to transpire. Yet humankind disrupted the pattern in any of several ways: by shooting squirrels for sport, a practice Thoreau came to deplore once he discovered how crucial they were to the perpetuation of forests; by selectively harvesting one species (oak) more than its cyclic partner (pine); and, most significantly, by clearing woodlands extensively for pasturage. Thoreau wrote up his conclusions about the process of forest succession, a term he is credited with coining, in an address delivered before the Middlesex Agricultural Society in September, 1860.17 Thus Thoreau came to master the mechanism of forests’ regeneration of themselves. Yet to discover an effective means of remedying the various injuries human habitation had inflicted upon the sylvan landscape, Thoreau still needed, as I have said, a baseline, or some quantifiable insight into the natural state of affairs in an unmolested forest. Evidence provided by oak stumps told him little beyond the average age and size of trees that had managed formerly to grow to maturity. Thoroughly familiar as he was with the surrounding countryside, and indeed with the topography of the entire state of Massachusetts, Thoreau could not remember hearing of any large remaining primitive oak forests. He had just about resigned himself to having to recreate an oak wood solely in his imagination when an acquaintance mentioned to him in 1860 that such a forest existed a scant eight miles west of Concord. Thoreau was initially somewhat skeptical: Oct. 23. Anthony Wright tells me that he cut a pitch pine on Damon’s land between the Peter Haynes road and his old farm, about ‘41, in which he counted two hundred and seventeen rings, which was therefore older than Concord, and one of the primitive forest. He tells me of a noted large and so-called primitive wood, Inches Wood, between the Harvard turnpike and Stow, sometimes called Stow Woods, in Boxboro and Stow. Also speaks of the wood north of Wetherbee’s mill near Annursnack and belonging to W., as large and old, if not cut. (J TA, 14:167) 17. See Foster, Thoreau’s Country, 134; Thoreau had probably read Linnaeus’s description of ways in which various landscape features could “succeed” one another, over time. See also Richardson, Life of the Mind, 382–83.

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Thoreau would go to see Inches’ Wood for himself just two weeks later, but during that brief interlude, he continued to study the appearance and disposition of oaks growing in clusters. On November 5 he visited one of the largest local concentrations of oaks, Blood’s grove. This woodlot, covering only about a dozen acres, was actually a relict of a much larger primitive oak forest. Thoreau keenly observed the trees’ sizes and shapes, as well as their distribution by species. He saw “red, black, white, and swamp white oaks,” many having circumferences of six to seven feet. From examining the number of rings in a decayed stump, Thoreau estimated that the trees were, on average, “a hundred to a hundred and sixty years old” (J TA, 14:217). In this comparatively dense thicket of moderately large trees he was surprised to discover that several trunks rose smoothly for “thirty to forty feet” before branching out. Isolated pasture oaks, which were generally the only truly large oak trees still to be found around Concord, tended to put out branches at lower heights, since they did not have to compete for sunlight, as forest oaks did. In Blood’s grove, the oaks’ competition with each other for light, soil, and water resulted in a surprisingly regular and uniform appearance: I was struck by the orderly arrangement of the trees, as if each knew its own place; and it was just so at Wetherbee’s lot. This being an oak wood, and like that, somewhat meadow [sic] in the midst, the swamp white oaks with a very few maples occupied that part, and I think it likely that a similar selection of the ground might have been detected often in the case of the other oaks, as the white compared with the red. As if in the natural state of things, when sufficient time is given, trees will be found occupying the places most suitable to each, but when they are interfered with, some are prompted to grow where they do not belong and a certain degree of confusion is produced. That is, our forest generally is in a transition state to a settled and normal condition. (J TA, 14:218)

Thoreau did not have enough knowledge and information at his disposal to understand how climax forests were created, but he could plainly see that an undisturbed forest grew until it reached a plateau of maturity in which the great majority of trees were of similar heights and shapes, having been selected, through competition, to achieve the maximum degree of exposure to sunlight. As a result, the forest canopy in a mature oak forest would present a fairly uniform and

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unbroken appearance, while the shaded understory would be comparatively empty and sparsely occupied by shrubs, grasses, or smaller trees. Over time, virtually all the niches favorable to the growth of particular species would have become occupied, so that, except for low “meadow” areas that were too wet to support most species of oak, the forest became remarkably homogeneous. In a woods disturbed by man, on the other hand, no one tree species ever achieved such dominance, and as a result, the forest became suspended more or less in a transitional state. Thoreau thought that such interruptions of natural processes were also responsible for the prevalence of white pines in Concord’s forests. Although some white pines were almost always to be found intermixed with stands of oak, they were more likely to gain a foothold in a partially cleared forest. Eventually, white pines could overshadow and kill any young oaks, whether grown from seeds or from seedlings, and thus slowly come to prevail, unless squirrels (if they had not been shot) planted acorns beneath their fallen needles and began the cycle all over again.18 On November 9 Thoreau and a companion, the feckless but enthusiastic Ellery Channing, traveled the short distance from Concord to West Acton and Boxboro by train. During the last few miles of their trip they trekked cross-country until they reached the fringe of Inches’ Wood. As they penetrated more deeply into the forest, Thoreau became more and more deeply impressed by what he was seeing. This was no remnant woodlot, but rather a mature oak forest apparently a thousand acres in extent. The trees were uniformly large—eight to ten feet in diameter, and generally around 160 years old. Most of the white 18. As Foster points out, a culturally determined landscape may come to seem the norm in a terrain prevented from attaining its natural equilibrium. For example, during the Industrial Revolution, so many farms in New England were abandoned that the region became thickly forested with white pines, so many, in fact, that botanists at Harvard and at Yale designated it on their maps at the turn of the century as the “White Pine Region” (Thoreau’s Country, 138–39). In 1985, Foster says, when a tornado destroyed “The Cathedral Pines,” a 20-acre stand of old-field white pines owned and preserved by The Nature Conservancy in western Connecticut, some environmental proponents were dismayed to discover that as the forest recovered, the fallen trees were gradually replaced by hardwoods and hemlock, and very few white pines. They did not realize that they were witnessing the natural succession of tree species that Thoreau had documented over a century earlier, and that the forest of pines, beautiful as it was, represented an aberration or transitional state in the natural production of forests (223).

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oaks rose in “stately columns of thirty or forty feet” before branching out, unlike spreading pasture oaks. When viewed from a hill, the forest canopy, stripped of most of its leaves, presented “a mass of gray brush,—contorted and intertwisted twigs and boughs. . . . It is an endless maze of gray oak trunks and boughs stretching far around.” Moreover, seen from close up, “The great mass of individual trunks . . . is very impressive” (J TA, 14:226). The trunks were “remarkably straight and round, and have so much regularity in their roughness as to suggest smoothness.” Clearly, this was a mature, primitive oak forest of the kind that Thoreau had believed to be extinct in Massachusetts. He marveled that he had lived so close to one for virtually his entire life without ever knowing it existed. Although the brevity of the autumn afternoon compelled them to cut their visit short, Thoreau’s interest had been piqued. On the following day he made some inquiries into the woods’ history. They turned out to have been, in pre-Revolutionary times, part of an immense grant made by the crown to a man named Jekil. Although the grant had originally included much of what would eventually became Boxboro and West Acton, Jekil had fenced off the heart of the woods as a deer park patterned on the English model. Subsequently, during the Revolution, Henderson Inches had opportunistically approached Jekil’s Tory heirs and prevailed upon them to sell the land to him at a bargain. Since that time, the lands had remained in the hands of the Inches family, which made a good living by selling lumber cut from small sections of the forest. Although family members had received several offers to buy parts of the remaining land, they were holding out, Thoreau was told, until it could be sold in one body. For its part, the township of Boxboro was in no hurry to see the land disposed of, since it generated a considerable annual revenue in property taxes. Thus Inches’ Wood existed in a sort of commercial limbo, having proven too large and valuable to be sold. Perhaps because he had not been alerted before to the woods’ existence, so near to Concord, Thoreau was struck by the irony that what he considered to be the single most remarkable feature of Boxboro, its great oak wood, had been left a blank space upon his map of Massachusetts: How little there is on an ordinary map! How little, I mean, that concerns the walker and the lover of nature. Between those lines indicating roads is a plain blank space in the form of a square or triangle or polygon or

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segment of a circle, and there is naught to distinguish this from another area of similar size and form. Yet the one may be covered, in fact, with a primitive oak wood, like that of Boxboro, waving and creaking in the wind, such as may make the reputation of a county, while the other is a stretching plain with scarcely a tree on it. (J TA, 14:228)

But even if Inches’ Wood did not appear on any map, it left a vivid imprint on Thoreau’s imagination.19 Back in Concord, he summoned up his empirical impressions of what it had been like to stand in a primitive forest: When, in the midst of this great oak wood, you look around, you are struck by the great mass of gray-barked wood that fills the air. The leaves of these old oaks are now fairly fallen, and the ground is densely covered with their rustling reddish-brown scales. A peculiarity of this, as compared with much younger woods, is that there is little or no underwood and you walk freely in every direction, though in the midst of a dense wood. You walk, in fact, under the wood. . . . Seeing this, I can realize how this country appeared when it was discovered. Such were the oak woods which the Indian threaded hereabouts. . . . We have but a faint conception of a full-grown oak forest stretching uninterrupted for miles, consisting of sturdy trees from one to three and even four feet in diameter, whose interlacing branches form a complete and uninterrupted canopy. Many trunks old and hollow, in which wild beasts den. Hawks nesting in the dense tops, and deer glancing between the trunks, and occasionally the Indian with a face the color of the faded oak leaf. (J TA, 14:230–31)

Thoreau’s sense of having experienced an epiphany at Inches’ Wood is signaled by his rhetoric in this passage, which races so far ahead of itself that it borders upon parataxis. The intensity of Thoreau’s reaction derived from the realization that he had glimpsed a natural past that, although on the verge of being effaced not just from the map, but from existence itself, remained immanent. Although Thoreau’s depiction of the forest as it had once been is admittedly somewhat self-consciously arcadian and romantic—as signaled by his inclusion of such heraldic creatures as hawk and deer, as well as by the ephemeral figure of the vanishing Indian—it is also fresh, highly specific, and scientifically perceptive. For example, the Indian’s face is the color of the oak 19. Channing was affected, too. Afterwards he remembered “Inches Oak-wood” as having been “princely” (Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, 264).

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leaf because his race had evolved in a landscape thickly planted with oaks.20 The absence of understory would compel animals, Thoreau saw, to den within the trees, many of which would have attained such an age and size that their trunks could provide numerous hollows. For the same reason, deer would have to shelter behind the trunks themselves, any low-lying cover having been shaded out of existence by the dense canopy. Although Thoreau did not know the term ecology, he characterized Inches’ Wood as a fully achieved microcosm, a web of interdependencies. His tropes recur repeatedly to images drawn from the manufacture of cloth: Indians “thread” their way among the warp of the tree trunks, while twigs overhead are interlaced as if knitted together. The fabric of nature in Inches’ Wood remains yet unraveled, and everything is still of a piece. Moreover, Thoreau injects himself, and perhaps even the reader, into this coherent landscape by employing the pronoun you in his imaginary reenactment of his visit, only a sentence or two before he introduces the Indian as another forest occupant. In Inches’ Wood, man remains a natural, “wild” element in the landscape, rather than a disruptive invader.21 Thoreau returned to Inches’ Wood one week later, on a beautiful Indian summer day. This time, he came fully prepared to savor the experience, and he looked the forest over methodically and in some detail. It was, he saw, smaller than he had at first thought: Although 20. In “Walking,” Thoreau writes, “A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man—a denizen of the woods. ‘The pale white man!’ I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says, ‘A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields’” (673). 21. Foster writes: Finally, Thoreau helps us to appreciate the aesthetic value of the cultural landscape in America. It is ironic to recognize today, when a high value is placed on nature, wilderness, and old-growth landscape, that America’s premier nature writer and propounder of conservation and wilderness values lived at a time when the New England landscape was arguably the most tamed and most dominated by human activity in its entire history. Every site that he saw, every wood and swamp and meadow that he walked for inspiration, was shaped by a combination of human and natural forces. Walden was a woodlot whose solitude was disturbed by the ring of the axe and the scream of the locomotive. Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming presence of people in everything that he viewed, Thoreau was able to find nature and elements of wildness everywhere he looked and to appreciate and even thrive on natural and cultural influences. (Thoreau’s Country, 222)

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the woods extended spurs of old-growth trees out from its edges, including a stand of ancient chestnuts, its four-hundred-acre core consisted chiefly of massive white oaks. Thoreau made an inventory of the various tree species he saw represented in the wood, and he found a sufficient number of white pine seedlings growing close to the ground to confirm his theory that pine woods succeeded oak forests: If these oaks were cut off with care, there would very soon be a dense white pine wood there. The white pines are not now densely planted, except in some more open places, but come up stragglingly every two or three rods. The natural succession is rapidly going on here, and as fast as an oak falls, its place is supplied by a pine or two. I have no doubt that, if entirely let alone, this which is now an oak wood would have become a white pine wood. (J TA, 14:247)

Thoreau also noticed that he neither heard nor saw much evidence of wildlife. With no low understory to provide food and shelter, squirrel and blue jay populations remained at low, stable levels. The dense shade also discouraged the growth of weeds or grasses, yet Thoreau thought the ground beneath the oaks still delightfully diverse and attractive: The greater part of this wood is strewn with large rocks, more or less flat or table-like, very handsomely clothed with moss and polypody. The surface of the ground is finely diversified, there being hills, dells, moraines, meadows, swamps, and a fine brook in the midst of all. Some parts are very thickly strewn with rocks (as at the northwest), others quite free from them. Nowhere any monotony. It is very pleasant, as you walk in the shade below, to see the cheerful sunlight reflected from the maze of oak boughs above. They would be a fine sight after one of those sticking snows in the winter. On the north end, also, the first evidence we had that we were coming out of the wood—approaching its border—was the crowing of a cock. (J TA, 14:249)

In many ways, Inches’ Wood represents Thoreau’s ideal terrain, his true “middle landscape.” Wild yet accessible, inhabitable by man without having become overrun, it combined all the qualities that Thoreau, an inhabitant of a small country town, found most desirable. The cock Thoreau hears as he exits the forest is one of those

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emblematic roosters that populate his writings, a symbol of the border life that is forever new, yet also thoroughly domesticated and familiar. In a temporal context as well, the rooster signifies the eternal present, bordering here upon the eternally recurrent, still immanent, organic past. Thus Inches’ Wood was a reification not only of Thoreau’s ideal natural landscape, but also of the Thoreauvian temporal interval. Seeing Inches’ Wood and primitive groves such as Blood’s and Wetherbee’s confirmed Thoreau’s sense that the natural world moved in vast cycles made feasible by the provision of a virtually infinite supply of time. That is, patterns such as the one dictating that after 160 years an oak forest would be replaced by a pine wood could have become so finely tuned only within an unthinkably immense period of time. Within that great temporal space, man’s brief second of existence dwindled almost to insignificance despite the seemingly irrevocable changes he made to the landscape, for the organic past never really went away, but rather remained continuously latent behind, beneath, or within the landscape. In one imaginative tour de force that appears in his journal on November 23, a week after his second visit to Inches’ Wood, Thoreau draws upon all his knowledge of the growth habits, respective longevities, and patterns of succession among dozens of plant species to imagine what New England’s landscape would look like, if man were to be temporarily removed from it: At first, perchance, there would be an abundant crop of rank garden weeds and grasses in the cultivated land,—and rankest of all in the cellar-holes,—and of pinweed, hardhack, sumach, blackberry, thimbleberry, raspberry, etc., in the fields and pastures. Elm, ash, maples, etc., would grow vigorously along old garden limits and main streets. Garden weeds and grasses would soon disappear. Huckleberry and blueberry bushes, lambkill, hazel, sweet-fern, barberry, elder, also shad-bush, choke-berry, andromeda, and thorns, etc., would rapidly prevail in the deserted pastures. At the same time the wild cherries, birch, poplar, willows, checkerberry would reestablish themselves. Finally the pines, hemlock, spruce, larch, shrub oak, oaks, chestnut, beech, and walnuts would occupy the site of Concord once more. The apple and perhaps all exotic trees and shrubs and a great part of the indigenous ones named above would have disappeared, and the laurel and yew would to some extent be an underwood here, and perchance the red man once more

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thread his way through the mossy, swamp-like, primitive wood. (J TA, 14:262–63)

As if running a motion picture backwards, Thoreau shows what would happen in a depopulated Concord consisting of abandoned houses and gardens gone to seed.22 Initially, weeds would sprout in moist places such as the cellar holes that Thoreau had seen being reclaimed by the woods surrounding Walden Pond. Next, shrubs that thrive in the sun and that can rapidly colonize open land would proliferate—berries and sumac. Native ornamental trees such as maple and elm would begin moving outward from the roadsides and garden borders where they had originally been planted. Garden weeds, their heretofore open habitats having become overshadowed by larger plants, would gradually be eliminated. The grass in pastures would be replaced by shrubs that would flourish once they were no longer being overgrazed by livestock. Tree species with seeds light enough to be transported by the wind for great distances would move into the towns. These would in turn be succeeded and replaced by “nobler” tree species, first the softwoods, and then the hardwoods; pine woods would provide nurseries for seedling oaks. Imported species, such as the apple and most of the other fruits and decorative shrubs, might disappear, as well as some of the aboriginal species that failed to adapt quickly enough. Only tough native shrubs such as the laurel and yew might survive as understory in a massive forest that would finally resemble Inches’ Wood, writ large. Finally—and tellingly—the “red man” might reappear, “threading” his way through the fabric of a reconstituted organic world. “Wild” himself, he would live in a wilderness identical to New England as it had been before the trees were cut down: somewhat boggy and cool, because overhanging trees kept the forest floor damp. All in all, it is an astonishing vision, Darwinian in its competitiveness, yet also nostalgic and even gothic, in its inclusion of picturesque ruins reclaimed by flowers, berry bushes, and noble savages.23 22. Thoreau’s vision eerily foreshadows the general depopulation of rural New England following the expansion of manufacturing cities such as Boston and Lowell, as discussed in Foster’s book. 23. Thoreau perceived the creation of cultural landscapes as evidence of nature’s dynamism and vitality. Two days after he had imagined the landscape’s appearance were man to be removed from it, he penned a journal entry in which he says that when he died he would prefer to be buried in such a “wide-awake” and living earth:

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Despite Thoreau’s initial removal of man from this reconstituted, reimagined landscape, it would be a mistake to think that he was condemning his own species to extinction as a kind of revenge for what it had wrought upon the face of nature. On the contrary, he was more interested in looking for ways in which to reclaim the original ground of identity with nature that had permitted Native American races to develop the bronzed complexion allowing them to blend in with the oak, the central, even “totemic” wooden icon within Thoreau’s “re-membered” landscape. His visits to Inches’ Wood confirmed for Thoreau the idea that in ancient times, oaks, by their very prevalence, had determined the adaptive strategies of creatures living among them. Thus on November 17, 1860, he wrote of the white oak, “These tawny-white oaks are thus by their color and character the lions among trees, or rather, not to compare them with a foreign animal, they are the cougars or panthers—the American lions—among the trees, for nearly such is that of the cougar which walks beneath and amid or springs upon them. There is plainly this harmony between the color of our chief wild beast of the cat kind and our chief tree” (J TA, 14:250). Such consanguinity between oak, cat, and Indian bespoke a potential in man to learn the “tawny grammar,” the gramática parda that was at once both means of expression and epistemology, an instinctual “mother-wit.” At this point of relation, analogies border upon realities: Puritan typologies, moving from Edwards to Emerson, evolve into transcendentalist correspondences, which in turn evolve, in Thoreau, into a new strain of imaginative scientism. Thus, for How commonly you see pitch pines, white pines, and birches filling up a pasture, and, when they are a dozen or fifteen years old, shrub and other oaks beginning to show themselves, inclosing apple trees and walls and fences gradually and so changing the whole aspect of the region. These trees do not cover the whole surface equally at present, but are grouped very agreeably after natural laws which they obey. You remember, perhaps, that fifteen years ago there was not a single tree in this pasture,—not a germinating seed of one,—and now it is a pretty dense forest ten feet high. I confess that I love to be convinced of this inextinguishable vitality in Nature. I would rather that my body should be buried in a soil thus wide-awake than in a mere inert and dead earth. The cow-paths, the hollows where I slid in the winter, the rocks, are fast being enveloped and becoming rabbit-walks and hollows and rocks in the woods. (J TA, 14:268) Ironically, only one week after writing this, Thoreau contracted the cold that would eventually lead to his death.

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example, in that same November Thoreau speculates while measuring more white oaks that children who mature slowly will prove more durable and resilient in adulthood than those who mature too quickly: “We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected” (J TA, 14:217). Similarly, in December he compares the persistence demonstrated by hickory sprouts in their progress toward becoming trees, despite frost, fire, and animal depredations, to “the early career of genius” (J TA, 14:287), in that genius will inevitably manifest itself despite having to overcome any number of obstacles. In both of these tropes, or rather, these observations upon human nature, we may discern Thoreau’s effort to establish an affinity between human beings and the hardwoods that were fast disappearing from the landscape. If those tree species should be lost, a portion of the human character would be jeopardized, as well. Thus Concordians—and, by extension, all people— who inflicted great damage upon their lands were at risk of losing not just the “wild” qualities they shared with what they were destroying, but also their own inherited cultures. Thoreau was enabled to make his comparisons of human life to wildlife by the very comprehensiveness of his late conception of nature, a “memory” of the landscape so extensive that all forms of growth, whether of trees or of human cognition, became subsumed within it. Moreover, as his insight into nature broadened and deepened, he necessarily modified his conception of his own growth.24 During the early 1850s Thoreau, like the hickory whose persistence resembled the career of genius, had worked Walden through draft after draft until the book finally emerged in 1854. During the eight remaining years of his life, however, Thoreau’s apprehension of his own growth through his engagement with the natural world intensified even beyond the level he had achieved while living at Walden 24. Richardson discerns in the later writings an expansion of Thoreau’s concept of the growing self to include entire communities, both natural and social, rather than simply the individual: “Walden is about the growth and cultivation of the self; The Dispersion of Seeds is about the growth of communities and the rise of new generations” (introduction to Faith in a Seed, 4).

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Pond. The change is marked by a subtle shift in his tropes. References to “corn growing in the night” dry up and disappear in his journal entries of this later period, perhaps because he no longer needed to think of himself as growing and maturing “outside” of the normal, diurnal course of time; alternatively, perhaps he felt he had lost the knack. In any event, by the time he reached middle age, Thoreau saw his own career as a thinker as bearing more of a resemblance to the hardwoods he was studying than to the seasonal, prolific corn plants he had grown by his house. His own slow growth, working itself out within the vast temporal context of natural time, seemed in retrospect to have been both necessary and more desirable than any early renown he might have achieved by becoming a successful author. He had been compelled to wait, but his recompense was a more intimate engagement with reality and with life. It is both tragic and peculiarly appropriate that Thoreau probably contracted the cold that would ultimately lead to his death while he was counting tree rings, and of a hickory tree, at that. On December 3, 1860, only one month after he had visited Inches’ Wood, Thoreau heard that a large hickory had recently been blown down in a storm, a true windfall that presented him with a rare opportunity to see how growth rings were disposed in a specimen of that species. Thoreau counted 112 rings in the stump, with the first 50 of these circumscribed within the small space of five and three-quarter inches (J TA, 14:290). Thus this particular tree had developed its great strength through slow and steady growth, a strategy of development that nevertheless could not protect it from November’s gales. Thoreau returned home with the early symptoms of what he described to his friend Daniel Ricketson as a “severe cold,” which worsened into “a kind of bronchitis, so that I have been confined to the house ever since.”25 During that winter spent chiefly indoors, while his bronchitis rendered him vulnerable to tuberculosis, Thoreau’s thoughts returned to Inches’ Wood. On January 3, 1861, he wrote in his journal that he was struck once again by the irony that the Wood did not appear on any map, despite being one of the more remarkable natural features of the landscape that maps purport to display. Essentially, reality itself had been left off the map, like some terra 25. Thoreau, Familiar Letters, 376.

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incognita yet to be explored. This cartographic oversight was what originally inspired Thoreau to advocate the preservation by towns and other civic bodies of any lands that exhibited distinctive natural characteristics: It would be worth the while if in each town there were a committee appointed to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment. If we have the largest boulder in the county, then it should not belong to an individual, nor be made into door-steps. As in many countries precious metals belong to the crown, so here more precious natural objects of rare beauty should belong to the public. Not only the channel but one or both banks of every river should be a public highway. The only use of a river is not to float on it. (J TA, 14:304–5)

In suggesting that towns establish public parks, Thoreau was proposing a new sort of cultural landscape, one that was admittedly no longer wild, but one that nonetheless maintained the precarious middle ground between settlement and continuously unfolding natural processes. The lands thus protected would represent not just pockets of unusual terrain, but also that portion of the human personality that still remembered and honored its attachment to the rest of nature. Thoreau’s increasing awareness of his own mortality during the winter of 1860–1861 evoked in him a sympathy not with the durable oak or hickory, but with the willow, whose wood is soft, pliant, and resilient. Furthermore, the willow was, of course, a prominent nineteenth-century emblem of lost love, death, and mourning, an association that did not escape Thoreau’s attention as his own health slowly declined. Nevertheless, in March 1861 he wrote: I do not know what they mean who call this the emblem of despairing love! “The willow, worn by forlorn paramour!” It is rather the emblem of love and sympathy with all nature. It may droop,—it is so lithe, supple, and pliant,—but it never weeps. The willow of Babylon blooms not the less hopefully with us, though its other half is not in the New World at all, and never has been. It droops, not to represent David’s tears, but rather to snatch the crown from Alexander’s head. . . . Ah, willow! willow! Would that I always possessed thy good spirits. (J TA, 14:328–29)

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Thoreau’s willow serves multiple symbolic purposes here. For one thing, it binds the Old World to the New, a historical connection predicated upon the natural fact that the willow’s roots will probe far into the earth in search of water, so that figuratively its roots extend virtually right through the globe, joining West to East. The willow’s utility as mythic symbol, validated by its appearance as far back in time as David’s psalms, is thus inextricably intertwined with its existence as fact of nature. In its significance to humankind, this connection supersedes in importance even Alexander’s greatness, “snatching” the crown from his head. But the joy that such a realization of his sympathy with nature should inspire in man cannot make Thoreau forget his own approaching dissolution, so that ultimately he is still forced to recall the willow’s conventional cultural significance as an indication of mourning: “Ah, willow! willow! Would that I always possessed thy good spirits!” Characteristically, however, Thoreau appends to this plaint the cool, factual observation that willow wood is so “tough and resilient” that in ancient days it was in demand for making bucklers, since the wood would close up again around sword and spear wounds. Thus even in the face of his own death, Thoreau was able to discern yet one more way in which nature, always malleable and sympathetic, lent itself to human use. The willow also makes an apt image for summarizing Thoreau’s redefinition of the cultural landscape. Rather than rejecting the immanence of human history within the landscape, Thoreau enlarges, as he had the “present moment” upon his walking stick, the temporal significance of the Concord countryside. Concord “contained” Thoreau, in that his personal history was deeply invested in its slow, shallow rivers, flooded meadows, and rocky outcrops. He was also more aware than perhaps anyone else living in Concord of the myriad ways in which human habitation had modified or distorted the landscape, producing unstable, hybridized features such as the farmer’s pasture studded with colonies of pine. But Thoreau’s great contribution was to see the landscape that no longer existed, or rather, the landscape that always exists, but which the limited temporal perception of humankind normally prevents it from seeing. In Inches’ Wood Thoreau achieved an insight into the rhythms and currents of deep time, and for a few hours he walked in a world that was more real than the one where Concord village lay. As transcendentalist, Thoreau was interested in learning how man was related to this elided land-

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scape, and more specifically how he himself had come to be a man planted there. He wished to know and feel the essence of his life as an event transpiring in a volume of time so large as to be synonymous with eternity. To bind himself to this deep time Thoreau was willing to send his roots right through the earth, right through history itself, in search of springs that never failed.

7 EXTEMPORANEOUS MAN, REPRESENTATIVE MAN The boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations. —Thoreau, Journal, May 31, 1853 Emerson and Thoreau discovered common ground on a number of temporally related issues. They listened to geologists’ arguments for a wider and deeper understanding of time, and in their metaphysics they tried to accommodate the emerging fact that man was a relative newcomer on an unimaginably ancient earth. Correspondingly, they agreed that man’s perception of time was apt to become distorted or skewed by a kind of temporal myopia, although they also recognized that such shortsightedness was probably unavoidable and insuperable. Thoreau and Emerson also predicated a need for temporal reform. Having decided that the majority of men had become asynchronous with the elapsing day either by yearning for an indefinite future or by regretting an unchangeable past, Emerson and Thoreau seconded Carlyle’s call for an “everlasting now,” a renewed emphasis upon the present moment that they believed could be realized by engaging more intensely with nature. They proposed that time itself was a purely human construct that found scant confirmation within the rest of the created world. They agreed that historical time was essentially fungible, any era being fundamentally equivalent to any other, and they recognized the importance and difficulty of learning to live in a universe of constant change. Yet over the course of years, their friendship itself was finally threatened by change. By the time Thoreau was becoming increasingly engrossed in scientific pursuits, an estrangement had sprung up that left both men disillusioned and disappointed in each other. Such a falling-out, while not unusual between friends, may have been inevitable for men who, idealists themselves, idealized each other

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so powerfully. Moreover, I suggest that some of the growing differences between them may have been exacerbated by divergent attitudes about time. Thus it is appropriate to conclude our discussion with an examination of how the two great transcendentalists interpreted each other as being exponents of the life lived above time, that is, as temporally reformed men. A phrase we might use to describe an individual who could live independently of time is extemporaneous man—someone who felt comfortable living in a protean world of unceasing change, experienced subjectively as growth. As Emerson conceived him, extemporaneous man would dwell in a sort of chronological utopia, fully engaged with the present and temporally self-reliant even to the extent of not requiring an inherited culture. Extemporaneous man may be viewed preliminarily from a wider cultural perspective as a personification of Romanticism’s revolutionary impulse, that is, as someone who internalized that era’s rapid pace of change. Yet extemporaneous man, as I conceive him, is also a product of the nineteenth century’s growing fascination with developmentalism, in which individual growth came to be seen as a necessary step in the ascension of entire species. An awareness of recent developments in the biological sciences pervades the figures Emerson uses in the following passage of “Compensation,” in which he may be thought of as describing extemporaneous man: Every soul is by . . . intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly builds a new house. In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant, and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming, as it were, a transparent fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, and not as in most men an indurated heterogenous fabric of many dates and of no settled character, in which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be no enlargement, and the man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead circumstance day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. (CW, 2:72)

Continually shedding the collective and personal past like a crab its carapace or a snake its skin, this man of today would be able, Emerson postulated, to live a sort of impromptu existence. Emerson’s figures

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conflate the biological, the biographical, and the geopolitical as they represent the old, “dead” self not only as a shell to be abandoned as an organism grows, but also as a “prison,” such as the one the prisoner of Chillon is condemned to, or that Florestan is released from in Fidelio. Change, growth, and revolution are embraced as constants, and this new sort of temporal hero accepts shifting daily circumstance as easily as he dons a new set of clothes. Emerson understood that an acceptance of Heraclitean change in one’s life and in the world generated an entire train of logical inferences. For example, if lines did not exist in a universe of flux, no time-bound tradition, ritual, or ceremony could long endure. Even sequential thinking and rhetorical modes of expression were rendered somewhat dubious, and Emerson was freed to invest nonlinear modes of thought and behavior such as inconsistency, paradoxicalness, revelation, intuition, and whimsy with a new intellectual respectability. Emerson endorses a life of change most enthusiastically, perhaps, in “Circles,” in which, as we have seen, he maintains that the only true sin is self-limitation, that is, a refusal to undergo change. Yet by the time he wrote “Experience,” Emerson had been forced to concede that change also has the power to disturb and frighten us. He eventually decided that man, rather than being completely free to live serendipitously, would do well simply to survive in a precarious universe, and that rather than straining to apprehend the designs of eternity he should content himself with the self-circumscribed limits of a safer “mid-world.” Instead of seeking to penetrate to first causes, he should learn to “skate” upon surfaces of phenomena and occupy himself with the present, “filling” time until no room remained for doubt, regret, or dread. Thus for Emerson, learning to live “in the strong present tense” finally became an unavoidable necessity, the natural consequence of all the rest of time having been rendered incomprehensible and impervious not only to action, but also to thought. As he wrote in “Experience,” God “delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future.” Nevertheless, Emerson also continued to be tantalized by the potential rewards of learning to live consciously and fully in a rich present: a closer identification with nature, a sense of one’s own appropriateness and significance in the larger scheme of things, the possibility of suffering the revelation that would admit the mind to the next “circle” of consciousness. Accordingly, Emerson schooled

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himself to perceive the distinctive character of each diurnal revolution, which he adopted as his fundamental temporal unit of the present. Each day, he decided, was obscurely connected to the entire sequence of days, the flow of time that he literalized as a passing pageant. Without knowing what that parade’s destination might be or why its participants marched, Emerson tried to achieve a kind of partial synchrony with time, particularly by means of his vocation as writer and thinker. But if he somehow failed to enter into the spirit of the moment, when the vatic voice faltered, he could not avoid feeling that he had also failed time itself. Emerson was not himself “extemporaneous man,” and he knew it. Persuaded of the desirability of putting on each new day like a fresh garment, he nevertheless felt that his allegiance to the past and wishes for the future too often made him oblivious to the intense present. Insecure about his own ability to live in an “everlasting now,” Emerson projected his temporal ambitions onto the younger Thoreau, acting out of an impulse that combined equal measures of parental solicitude, envy, and philosophic curiosity. Initially, Emerson welcomed as a stroke of luck the discovery of “extemporaneous” man living so close by him in Concord. Not long after first getting to know Thoreau, Emerson described him in his journal as epitome and exemplar of a life spent extempore: “[Thoreau] is a good substantial childe, not encumbered with himself. He has no troublesome memory, no wake, but lives extempore, and brings today a new proposition as radical and revolutionary as that of yesterday, but different” (JMN, 9:103). As Emerson originally interprets him, Thoreau belongs to a new generation that has evidently learned to live comfortably with change, having become acclimated to it by the recurrent political and scientific upheavals of the still-recent historical past. For them, “radicalism” has become so deeply ingrained that each day is like a new regime. Yet Emerson’s characterization of Thoreau as a “good substantial childe” also has a faintly patronizing ring, and indeed he portrays his future friend as a sort of infant prodigy or prodigious infant, a man suspended in a state of protracted youth. Thoreau’s temporal independence is therefore at least implicitly the result of inexperience: as a “childe,” he has, as yet, no past to regret or renounce. Thoreau’s authentic reaction to the present moment remains still unobstructed by what Emerson thought of as the figural corpse of memory, and consequently Thoreau leaves no “wake,” understood

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as meaning either the wake left by a boat, or as a funeral wake held over the dead second self. Ironically, Emerson would turn to this same entry in his journal some twenty years later to compose his eulogy for Thoreau. There he says of his friend and disciple, “He lived for the day, not cumbered and mortified by his memory. If he brought you yesterday a new proposition, he would bring you to-day another not less revolutionary” (CE, 10:462–63). “Himself” in the original journal entry is changed here to “memory,” an objectification of the old self that must be discarded in order to live in each new present day. “Mortified” gestures correspondingly to the shame concomitant to regretting, and to necrosis, as of a dead bodily limb that must be amputated to save the life of the present self. Moreover, in this public commendation of Thoreau’s virtues following his death, Emerson employs the hackneyed phrase “He lived for the day,” yet in such a way as to invest it with a new and paradoxical meaning. Although Thoreau had died at a comparatively young age, he had not lived as if the next day might be his last. On the contrary, in living extemporaneously, for the day, he had kept himself aloof of the twin snares of future and past, so that the familiar old saw is converted to a reification and vindication of Thoreau’s philosophy. Finally, in exchanging the first-person pronoun of his original journal entry for “you,” Emerson generalizes the benefits to be obtained from Thoreau’s temporal innovations. But in one last redaction of his original journal entry, Emerson appears to be questioning the general usefulness and efficaciousness of Thoreau’s methods. Five years after Thoreau had died, Emerson wrote, in “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” that Thoreau “required no Phalanx, no Government, no society, almost no memory. He lived extempore from hour to hour, like the birds and the angels; brought every day a new proposition, as revolutionary as that of yesterday, but different: the only man of leisure in his town; and his independence made all others look like slaves” (CE, 10:356–57). Here, the public and private dimensions of Thoreau’s extemporaneousness are made to seem ultimately incompatible. Emerson’s assertion that Thoreau needed no “Phalanx” is continuous with his discussion elsewhere in the same essay of Fourierist “phalanxes,” and his association of the term with Thoreau points to the public, utopian dimension of his friend’s habits. Yet by juxtaposing “society” with “memory,” Emerson also puts history as a whole on a par with personal

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history, and Thoreau’s freedom from both is implicitly equated with a kind of anarchy. Thoreau’s incessant “revolution” results in the establishment of a new kind of state whose sole citizen is at liberty to lead a life that hardly seems human anymore, but rather resembles that of birds or angels, that is, beings who inhabit the rarefied and nonhistoric domains of the sky or of heaven. Thus this belated tribute to Thoreau may have both patent and latent rhetorical objectives. While Emerson ostensibly uses the example of Thoreau’s life to predicate, in typically transcendentalist fashion, that society as a whole can be reformed only if individuals are willing to reform themselves first, he uses his tropes simultaneously and contradictorily to remove Thoreau from the realm of ordinary human experience. No longer a “childe,” Thoreau remains nevertheless allied with nonadults, that is, with birds or angels—creatures whose feet are literally not in contact with the ground. Moreover, Thoreau’s putative independence has an incongruously imperious quality: A “man of leisure,” his indolence makes every other man look like a “slave.” Initially, Emerson had admired Thoreau’s eclecticism and rootlessness. In “Self-Reliance,” for example, Emerson praises an unnamed rural youth “from New Hampshire or Vermont” who “tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet.” Similarly, a 1839 journal entry praises “my brave Henry Thoreau who is content to live now, & feels no shame in not studying any profession, for he does not postpone his life but lives already,—pours out contempt on these crybabies of routine and Boston.” Emerson interprets Thoreau as being “the man of today” who approaches the future fluidly and responsively, changing his mind and modes of living in sympathy with the unceasing change plainly visible in nature, or like a “transparent fluid membrane” he could put on or slough off like an old skin or an outgrown suit of clothes. Over time, however, Emerson became progressively more disenchanted with Thoreau’s indefiniteness about his plans, and he decried in his journal what he came to interpret as a lack of ambition. He had hoped that Thoreau would become the “great man” of Concord, if not of all Massachusetts, but rather than capitalizing upon opportunities to broaden the scope of his literary reputation, Thoreau seemed often more concerned with pursuing the myriad naturalistic projects he set

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for himself, which continually threatened to proliferate almost organically themselves, that is, uncontrollably or obsessively. Consequently, in his eulogy for Thoreau, Emerson mourns not just the man, but also for what he sees as wasted potential: “Wanting [ambition], instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days, but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!—” Like a bereaved parent whose aspirations for his child had never been fulfilled, Emerson laments that, saving ambition, Thoreau had had all the necessary qualifications to leave behind his utopia for one and become prominent in local, or even national, affairs. In a trope that seems almost ludicrously inappropriate, Emerson expresses a wish that Thoreau, like an imperialistic superpower, had pounded empires rather than just the beans he raised at Walden Pond. Thus Emerson, after Thoreau’s death, ultimately criticizes his former disciple for the very same qualities for which he had once lavished praise upon him, and the depth of Emerson’s disillusionment suggests the degree to which he had once idealized Thoreau as “extemporaneous man.” Over time Emerson became dissatisfied with another quality in Thoreau that he had once found appealing and impressive—Thoreau’s detailed knowledge of nature. At an early stage in their friendship Emerson idealized what he saw as Thoreau’s distinctive rapport with nature, exemplified by what seemed an uncanny ability to predict which plants would bloom on any given day. Emerson attributed such feats to Thoreau’s apparent temporal synchrony with nature, a harmony that Emerson romanticized as an example of transcendental correspondences in action. This theme surfaces in “Woodnotes I,” written in 1838. Several details clearly indicate that Emerson had Thoreau specifically in mind when he wrote the poem. For example, the unnamed protagonist travels to “unploughed Maine,” as Thoreau had done in 1846, the year before “Woodnotes I” was published. In the poem’s second section, the hero becomes the poem’s narrator as he describes the forester’s technique of finding his way through dense vegetation by following watercourses, as Thoreau had once described to Emerson. At the time of this poem’s composition Emerson had nothing but praise for his philosopher/poet/naturalist hero’s versatility, which is implicit even within the poem’s title, if we read it as referring simultaneously to notes sounded by the poet as he wanders, and to the field notes thrust into his pockets. Yet the naturalistic component of

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the hero’s character remains subordinated to his artistic temperament. He is more a bard in the mold of Emerson’s Merlin, and his woodlore is presented to the reader as mystical knowledge rather than as the fruit of empirical observation. For example, the hero’s acute awareness of temporal cycles in nature is figured as occult, almost druidic, knowledge, and his mastery of the present moment is extended to include a knack for predicting the future, too: And such I knew, a forest seer, A minstrel of the natural year, Foreteller of the vernal ides, Wise harbinger of spheres and tides, A lover true, who knew by heart Each joy the mountain dales impart; It seemed that Nature could not raise A plant in any secret place, In quaking bog, on snowy hill, Beneath the grass that shades the rill, Under the snow, between the rocks, In damp fields known to bird and fox. But he would come in the very hour It opened in its virgin bower, As if a sunbeam showed the place, And tell its long-descended race. ............................ Many haps fall in the field Seldom seen by wishful eyes, But all her shows did Nature yield, To please and win this pilgrim wise. He saw the partridge drum in the woods; He heard the woodcock’s evening hymn; He found the tawny thrushes’ broods; And the shy hawk did wait for him; What others did at distance hear, And guessed within the thicket’s gloom, Was shown to this philosopher, And at his bidding seemed to come. (CE, 9:44–45, ll. 30–45, 50–61)

Thoreau, who was ever on the alert for spring’s first signs, is probably the man being represented here as a “foreteller of vernal ides,” a label that partakes of Emerson’s overall strategy of portraying his hero as a kind of soothsayer, a “forest seer” and “harbinger.” The entire phrase

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“Wise harbinger of spheres and tides” suggests to mind a figure whose knowledge resembles that of a Faust rather than of a more mundane reader of tidal charts and astronomical tables. Moreover, Emerson’s woodland poet can, like the heroes of legend, divine the location of hidden treasures, presented here in the form of rare botanical specimens. Yet this aptitude for discovery derives from the hero’s almost supernatural sense of time. He knows the ephemera of each passing day, and this knowledge gives him access to nature’s innermost secrets, such as the “virgin bower” in which a plant first blooms. Emerson depicts his friend’s expertise in phenology (defined in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary as “a branch of science dealing with the relations between climate and periodic biological phenomena”) as a variety of magic, poetically interpreting even the shaft of sunlight that stimulates the plant to flower as a kind of heaven-sent indicator of the plant’s location. Moreover, although observations of natural phenomena such as blooming flowers are, in reality, the fruit of long hours spent in observation, the flower in this poem seems to appear spontaneously before the hero’s eyes, like a sprite invoked with a charm. Correspondingly, although the hero’s specific knowledge of natural phenomena is superior to the vague suppositions of others who do not pursue nature so ardently as he does, his insights are nevertheless given to him, rather than won; thus the “shy hawk” waits for him, rather than he for it. Figured as a coquette, nature disrobes and displays “all her shows” to him. Finally, the knowledge itself that he gains through prolonged observation is painted as being more cabalistic than naturalistic. The shaft of sunlight falling upon the flower allows a conventional naturalist to determine its species by counting its stamens, but the language in which this classificatory activity is couched (i.e., “tell its long-descended race”) suggests instead the magical power to evoke speech from nonhuman correspondents. The hero’s acute sense of time in “Woodnotes I” manifests itself as well in a heightened consciousness of the true length of nature’s chronologic cycles. Mastery of this larger temporal perspective permits the hero not only to live extemporaneously, free of regrets about the past or anxieties about the future, but also fearlessly, in the face of evident mortality. In Maine, where the hero “trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon / The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone,” he

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hears the sound heralding the end of one of nature’s cycles, the death of a tree, which serves as a reminder that each life has its terminus: He heard, when in the grove, at intervals, With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls,— One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree, Declares the close of its green century. Low lies the plant to whose creation went Sweet influence from every element; Whose living towers the years conspired to build, Whose giddy top the morning loved to gild. ..................................... So long he roved at will the boundless shade. The timid it concerns to ask their way, And fear what foe in caves and swamps can stray, To make no step until the event is known, And ills to come as evils past bemoan. Not so the wise; no coward watch he keeps To spy what danger on his pathway creeps; Go where he will, the wise man is at home. (ll. 72–79, 85–92)

Here Emerson associates a resistance to mortality with a knowledge of one’s proper place in nature’s larger scheme. In fact, if we approach the poem explicitly as a commentary upon Thoreau, the entire piece may be read as praise and analysis of what Frederick Garber calls his “at-homeness” in the world. The hero is always capable of finding his way in the woods, sustains himself by eating berries, and, because he understands what he sees, feels no fear of the unknown. In contradistinction to the emphasis generated by language Emerson deploys in the poem, these woods are not represented as the site of danger and supernatural forces that they are in traditional tales such as the Grimms’ stories. Despite Emerson’s romanticizing tone, these are real trees, and Thoreau knows how to thread his way among them. Furthermore, Thoreau’s distinctive ability to locate himself within the world has its temporal analog in his consciousness of the immediate moment, a chronological “here” situated between what Emerson calls elsewhere in the poem “Coming and past eternities.” Emerson appears to acknowledge implicitly that it is Thoreau’s informed awareness of time’s true extent, emblematized by the longevity of the pine tree, that liberates him to live above time, in the present moment. Thoreau finds his way “through” time by treating the instant as being unique, so that he lives as unencumbered by past or future as the true walker

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or “saunterer” does, by refusing to be over-mindful of his starting point or his destination. The hero’s “fearlessness” extends beyond the fringes of the wood through which he walks to the border of life itself, where death is finally equated with having arrived at the limit of one’s epistemology. The hero says, When the forest shall mislead me, When the night and morning lie, When sea and land refuse to feed me, ’Twill be time enough to die. (ll. 139–42)

Death is represented in these lines more as a failure of knowledge than as cessation of life, or rather as a new incongruity between the speaker’s knowledge and the world through which he moves. When his knowledge finally fails him he will no longer be “at home” in the world; figuratively speaking, epistemological exhaustion is associated not only with death, but also with being dispossessed of both parent and residence. Even as Emerson’s respect for Thoreau’s woodlore grew, however, he began wondering what this impressive body of information might be good for. Emerson’s continuing effort to discern a proper place for his friend among the recognized, “legitimate” professions reflects his own ambivalence about the goals of Thoreau’s temporal speculations and persistent scientism. This attitude is reflected indirectly, again, by the metamorphosis Emerson’s language underwent between the inception of their friendship and its aftermath. In his eulogizing essay, he recurs to his friend’s expertise in botany, but rather than representing him poetically as a woodland poet-philosopher, Emerson calls him “the attorney of the indigenous plants” (CE, 10:468; emphasis mine). As he walked, Emerson says, “[H]e drew out of his breast-pocket his diary, and read the names of all the plants that should bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as a banker when his notes fall due.” Emerson’s deployment of such staid and respectable professions to characterize Thoreau’s natural pursuits must be intentionally ironic, for it incongruously compares his unconventionality to their banality, and yet Emerson’s comparisons also preserve a vestige of his frustrated hopes for his friend, as well as perhaps a desire to have seen Thoreau become more conventional and socially acceptable. Emerson’s recurrent use of the professions to characterize his friend—engineering, the

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law, banking—may also point indirectly to an urge to commodify, somehow, Thoreau’s knowledge of nature. Emerson evidently wished for the extemporaneous man who “teams it, farms it, peddles” to settle upon a profession and to cease undergoing one revolutionary change after another. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that his preliminary romanticizing of Thoreau’s self-sufficiency and temporal iconoclasm would eventually sour. And yet his eulogy also touches upon those qualities in Thoreau that he thought bespoke an authentically original approach to time, qualities that Emerson knew he himself lacked. For example, as a fellow writer, Emerson appreciated Thoreau’s facility for capturing the passing moment in vivid language—that is, of speaking extemporaneously. Emerson comments upon this talent in his 1839 journal entry, using metaphors that intermix admiration with vexation. He says that his conversations with Thoreau “consisted of a continual coining of the present moment into a sentence and offering it to me. I compared it to a boy who from the universal snow lying on the earth gathers up a little in his hand, rolls it into a ball, and flings it at me” (JMN, 9:101–2). Yet even Emerson’s admiration is qualified by a note of condescension. Thoreau’s rhetorical gift to Emerson is transformed into a missile, as if Thoreau’s generosity with his metaphors has an aggressive, or perhaps competitive, edge, and Emerson’s imagery continues to dwell upon Thoreau’s perceived immaturity. Although Emerson initially admired Thoreau’s self-reliance in being willing to change his mind according to the dictates of the moment rather than cling to opinions for the sake of being thought consistent, as he got to know Thoreau better, he came to deplore what he saw as a stubborn contrariness. This “habit of antagonism,” as Emerson called it, was also in large measure responsible, he suggests in his eulogy, for Thoreau’s too-frequent recourse in his writings to paradox. One other temporally determined feature of Thoreau’s character that Emerson never did cease admiring was his facility for making serendipitous discoveries. “[T]hose pieces of luck which happen only to good players,” Emerson notes in his eulogy, “happened to him,” and he cites two examples. He says that Thoreau seemed able to find Indian artifacts almost at will, as when, during a conversation with someone wishing to know where arrowheads could be found around Concord, Thoreau replied “Everywhere,” and picked one up instantly from the road. Emerson’s other anecdote concerns a fall Thoreau took while

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hiking up Tuckerman’s Ravine. Thoreau sprained his ankle painfully, but in the act of getting up, he happened to notice growing nearby a specimen of Arnica molis, an herb indigenous to high altitudes. Here Emerson’s allusion to Thoreau’s luck is twofold: arnica was not only a botanical rarity, but tincture of arnica, as Emerson’s readers would have known, was also thought to be a sovereign remedy for sprained joints. By framing these stories as testimonials to Thoreau’s “luckiness,” Emerson manages to suggest that his young friend seemed guided at times by a sort of mysterious providence engendered by his profound sympathy with nature. Yet unlike Emerson, we might take a somewhat more jaded view of Thoreau’s serendipitousness by attributing it rather to his aptitude for grasping the facts of any given situation. Many of the abilities others imputed to him Thoreau himself understood as outgrowths of his desire to apprehend facts. What Emerson saw as a genius for making lucky finds, Thoreau interpreted as looking or surveying (in all the several senses of that word) in an especially heightened and expectant frame of mind. He wrote in his journal, on September 2, 1856: It commonly chances that I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I [am] in a thrilled and expectant mood, perhaps wading in some remote swamp where I have just found something novel and feel more than usually remote from the town. Or some rare plant which for some reason has occupied a strangely prominent place in my thoughts for some time will present itself. My expectation ripens to discovery. I am prepared for strange things.

Thus, when he fell at Tuckerman’s Ravine, he noticed the arnica plant growing nearby chiefly because he had already expected to find it there. Similarly, Thoreau looked for arrowheads and other Indian relics in places he thought tribal bands were more likely to have visited, such as the tops of hills, which were favored by bands of hunters as campsites, and sandy bottomlands, which were comparatively easy to cultivate. Consequently, Thoreau’s “serendipity” was something of an illusion. Moreover, his “knack” for finding artifacts arose out of a propensity for interpreting his surroundings in four dimensions, rather than in just the usual three. As he walked, Thoreau thought not only about what he was seeing, but also about what he wasn’t seeing, that is, events that had elapsed within the landscape during historic, or even prehistoric, time.

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To appreciate Thoreau’s distinctive treatment of time as a framework for fact, we might do well to consider how he himself used the word extemporaneous. Emerson, in applying that term to him, used it in its conventional sense, that is, as meaning unrehearsed, unpremeditated. But Thoreau, always more of a classicist and an etymologist than Emerson, employed the word with characteristic irony, accuracy, and originality. We will recall his translation and revision of Persius’s satire, in which the Roman poet criticized those who improvised their lives rather than planning and aiming their efforts, like arrows, at premeditated goals. Thoreau protests that indeed a man would be wise to live a life “ex tempore,” if that expression were taken to mean “out of time” rather than simply “from time.” For the sake of clarity, I repeat Thoreau’s observation in the “Thursday” chapter of A Week: The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity which includes all time. The cunning mind travels further back than Zoroaster each instant, and comes quite down to the present with its revelation. The utmost thrift and industry of thinking give no man any stock in life; his credit with the inner world is no better, his capital no larger. He must try his fortune again today as yesterday. All questions rely on the present for their solution. Time measures nothing but itself.

Characteristically, Thoreau treated time as a consolidation, rather than as a concatenation, of events. Instead of improvising on the spot, he aspired to lead a life that was essentially pantemporal, bringing all times to bear upon the instant moment. By doing so he could enlarge the present, “improving” it until, by integrating it with his experience, he had “notched it upon his stick” and had constructed a “realometer,” and not simply a chronometer. To enhance his sense of the present, Thoreau consciously disciplined himself to think in larger temporal terms. In this effort he enjoyed a preliminary advantage in possessing already the quality of patience, for as an amateur naturalist, he had learned to tolerate long periods spent quietly waiting in order to observe bird or beast in wood or swamp. On a more purely philosophical level, however, his sauntering, leisurely style of observation was also particularly well-suited to embarking upon the various temporal studies he pursued toward the close of his life. As Emerson said insightfully in his eulogy, “The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity.” For his work in such areas as

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forest succession, the dispersal of seeds, or the susceptibility of imported tree species such as the apple to become “wild,” as if they were native to this continent, a profound sense of time and its effects was indispensable. Nevertheless, at about the time Thoreau began contemplating creating a vast “kalendar” describing the entire natural year in Concord, so that the phenomena of any given day could be connected to grander, longer cycles, his quarrel with Emerson abruptly intensified. Between May 15 and May 20, 1853, Thoreau began making a detailed list of the order in which local trees and shrubs leafed out in the spring. In effect, he had embarked upon creating another “antichronometer” or “realometer” that would reflect the progress of any one particular spring, rather than, like a conventional calendar, demarcating the season mechanically and abstractly with the same ninety-odd days, year after year. During that same week, however, he also described an encounter with Emerson during which he says that he had “Talked, or tried to talk, with R. W. E. Lost my time—nay almost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind—told me what I knew—and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to oppose him.” For his part, Emerson wrote in his own journal during the following month, “H. does not feel himself except in opposition. He wants a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, requires a little sense of victory, a roll of the drums, to call his powers into full exercise.” Thus the two friends, whether in imaginary or real opposition to each other, began drawing further and further apart. Even before this disruption of their relations occurred, Emerson had begun complaining in his journal about what he perceived as Thoreau’s lack of ambition. And yet Emerson does not or will not reconcile his admiration for the Thoreau he had once idealized as a “pilgrim wise” who could discern which flowers would bloom on any given day with the Thoreau who devoted himself to studying natural facts. Moreover, Emerson’s criticism of Thoreau’s putative lack of ambition may reflect the frustration of his own desires to represent his friend publicly as extemporaneous man, a type of what Emerson called “representative man,” that is, a spokesman, hero, or exemplar of a particular age or idea. But Thoreau would not cooperate, would not consent to be used as a symbol. Caught up within a new world of information, observable phenomena, and cause-and-effect relationships, he continued pursu-

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ing knowledge for its own sake. Still, as he worked, he also continually reminded himself that any natural fact could one day bloom into a truth. Accordingly, during the summer of 1853, after he had begun compiling the dates upon which various plants leafed out, Thoreau observed the solstice in his journal, both scientifically and ceremonially. “These are the longest days in the year,” he wrote on June 22, at the end of an extended passage that would ultimately find its way into “Walking.” On that afternoon, he writes, he had suddenly heard, while coming over the crest of a hill, a wood thrush singing. “This is the only bird,” Thoreau says, “whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy and imagination.” In particular, he notices that hearing the wood thrush’s song alters his perception of time: It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion, makes me lord of creation, is chief musician of my court. This minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event in the village can be contemporary. How can they be contemporary when only the latter is temporary at all? How can the infinite and eternal be contemporary with the finite and temporal? . . . I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me. (JTA, 2:601)

On one of the two occasions of the year when the sun seems to stand still in the sky, hearing the wood thrush’s song ushers Thoreau into a state of temporal suspension during which everything humanly created seems merely temporary and illusory. The village of Concord itself exists against a backdrop of the “infinite and eternal” that nevertheless manifests itself only on rare occasions, as when the thrush sings. A recognition that these two superimposed “layers” of time coexist prompts Thoreau to wish for a nature he cannot put his foot through, a solid bottom of temporal reality where he can dwell, rather than visit only intermittently. Thus a fundamental connection is established between Thoreau’s sense of the “wild” and his sense of time. The message implicit within Thoreau’s distinctive blend of fact and mysticism is that although we may tell ourselves we are perceiving the “wild” when we visit remote forests, or even when we penetrate to the depths of our own unconscious, it is only when we

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can truly gauge the depth, splendor, and persistence of time that we will truly be seeing, for the first time, the “wild.” With the “fertile unknown” of natural mysteries yet to be unraveled set firmly beneath his feet, Thoreau hoped to be drawn ever more deeply into a realization of where he lived, and what he was. In seeking that time beyond time, Thoreau thus finally epitomizes not extemporaneous man, but transcendental man, who knows that what he sees is not the sum of what is.

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Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. 1859. Reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1958. Eldredge, Niles, and Stephen Jay Gould. “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism.” In Models in Paleobiology, ed. T. J. M. Schopf. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper, 1972. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Robert E. Spiller, et al. 5 vols. to date. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1971–. . The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Centenary edition, 12 vols. Ed. Edward W. Emerson. 1883. Reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Press, 1903–1904. . The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Concord edition, 12 vols. Ed. Edward W. Emerson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904. . The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 2 vols. New York: William H. Wise, 1929. . The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 3 vols. Ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959–1972. . The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 16 vols. Ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth, et al. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982. . Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 10 vols. Ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909–1914. Foster, David R. Thoreau’s Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Fraser, J. T. Time: The Familiar Stranger. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Garber, Frederick. Thoreau’s Fable of Inscribing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Gordon, John D. “A Thoreau Handbill.” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 59 (1955): 254. Gould, Stephen Jay. Ever since Darwin. New York: Norton, 1979. . The Panda’s Thumb. New York: Norton, 1980. . Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. 1987. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

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Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography. 1965. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1982. Harding, Walter, ed. Walden: An Annotated Edition. 1949. Reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. Harding, Walter, and Michael Meyer. The New Thoreau Handbook. New York: New York University Press, 1980. Hopkins, Vivian. Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson’s Aesthetic Theory. 1951. New York: Russell & Russell, 1965. Hutton, James. Theory of the Earth. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 1788. 1:209–305. Irwin, John T. American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Johnson, Linck C. Thoreau’s Complex Weave: The Writing of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1986. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology. Ed. James Secord. London: Penguin, 1997. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. 1964. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. McLean, Albert F. “Thoreau’s True Meridian: Natural Fact and Metaphor.” American Quarterly 20, no. 3: 567–79. McPhee, John. Annals of the Former World. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Meyer, Karl E. The Pleasures of Archaeology. New York: Atheneum, 1971. Michaels, Walter Benn. “Walden’s False Bottoms.” Glyph 1, 1977. Reprinted in Critical Essays on Thoreau’s “Walden,” ed. Joel Myerson. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988: 131–47. Milder, Robert. Reimagining Thoreau. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. 1956. New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1964. Myerson, Joel, ed. The Transcendentalists: A Review of Research and Criticism. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1984.

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INDEX Agassiz, Louis: and concept of ice ages, 28; and Emerson and Thoreau, 28–34 passim, 187; mentioned, 2, 7, 28, 30 Alcott, A. Bronson, 32–34 passim Allen, Gay Wilson, 117 Amrine, Frederick, 183, 184 Anacreon, 71, 72 Belzoni, Giovanni, 94–95, 112 Bhagavad Gita, 62–64, 73, 169. See also Thoreau, and Hinduism Buell, Lawrence, 48, 191 Burkholder, Robert, 31 Burnet, Thomas, 14, 15 Byron, Lord (George Gordon): “Cain,” 180–81 Carlyle, Thomas: and “everlasting now,” 1, 93, 96, 235 Catastrophes, 27–28; in Emerson’s “Experience,” 36, 43 Catastrophism (as opposed to uniformitarian geology), 18 Champollion, Jean François, 47, 76, 95–96 Channing, Ellery, 113, 222 Clapper, Ronald, 145 Clemens, Samuel (Mark Twain), 71 Cohen, I. Bernard, 41 Concord, landscape of, 168, 209, 212–14, 233 Conway, Moncure Daniel: on RWE as protoevolutionist, 30–33, 41; mentioned, 29 Cultural landscape: defined, 204–5; history as a component of, 207; natural history as a component of, 210; redefined by Thoreau, 233; mentioned, 228 Cuvier, Georges, 7, 18, 35 Darwin, Charles: The Origin of Species,

1, 27, 31, 37, 39, 42, 202; influenced by Lyell, 37–38; ideas about time, 39–40, 210 Darwin, Erasmus, 30 “Deep time,” 16 Developmentalism: Lamarckian vs. Hegelian, 28; mentioned, 25, 30, 34–35, 40, 203. See also Emerson, and concept of developmentalism Dickinson, Emily, 179 Emerson, Lidian Jackson (wife of RWE), 103–4 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: on growth of the self and self-culture, 2, 98–99, 181; and preservation of Christian teleology, 4, 27, 177; concept of “law,” 10, 11, 23–24, 40, 43–44, 173, 187; and orthodox Christianity, 10, 31, 105; and concept of developmentalism, 25–26, 30, 57, 187, 189, 198–99; as protoevolutionist, 31–33; and idea of change, 35, 98–101 passim, 109, 112, 125, 190, 237; and idea of catastrophe, 36, 43; and individualism, 41, 45; reaction to Darwinian theory, 41, 187; sees day as fundamental temporal unit, 93; attitude toward ancient Egyptians, 94–95; reaffirms importance of “everlasting now,” 97; considers inspiration as form of labor, 110–14 passim, 129–30; present at father’s funeral procession, 116–17; on subjectivity and subjective time, 121–24, 129, 178; on living extemporaneously, 124–25, 236, 238; on the undependability of memory, 126–27; on validity of intellectual work, 128–29; on the relationship of thought to matter, 175–75, 178; calls for a “natural history” of man, 179; admiration for Goethe, 182, 185;

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260 and idea of representativeness, 186; ascribes developmental role to poets, 198–99. See also Emerson, Ralph Waldo, works of —Emersonian metamorphosis: defined, 174; as antidote to duration, 175; as superseding Christian eschatology, 177; and existence of “monad,” 182, 186, 189; as “law,” 187; as natural process, 191, 193; as expressed in poetic language and metaphor, 191, 193, 196–200; compared to “melody,” 198, 200 —Relations with Thoreau: on temporally related issues, 235; disaffection with HDT, 235, 240–41, 245; and HDT as “extemporaneous man,” 238–40; romanticizes HDT’s scientific expertise, 241–45; admires HDT’s temporally related skills, 246–47; and HDT as “representative man,” 249 —And science: scientific background of, 7–9, 20–22, 105, 107–8, 122; knowledge of astronomy, 8–10, 100; knowledge of geology, 34–36; and heredity, 43, 189; contrasts scientific knowledge to historic past, 96–97; resists materialist theories of species descent, 188–90 —Temporal images of: rose, 2, 92, 96, 103–4; procession, 93, 94, 114–20; circles (and sphericity), 94, 101–4, 107–9, passim; lines and linearity, 94, 104–5, 107–8, 127, 130; moon, 100; corpse, 100, 112, 238–39 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, works of: “Self-Reliance,” 2, 71, 94, 97–103 passim, 120, 130; “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” 9, 239; Nature, 19–27 passim, 34, 123, 177–78, 188; “Fate,” 28, 34, 43–44; “Concord Hymn,” 52–53; “The Conservative,” 64; “Circles,” 94, 104, 109–13, 125, 130; “Uriel,” 94, 105–9; “The Naturalist,” 94–95; “The American Scholar,” 101; “Days,” 114–15, 118–20; “Experience” (poem), 115–19; “Experience” (essay), 120–29, 237; “The Over-Soul,” 174, 179–81; “The Sphinx,” 174, 191–93,

Index 197; “The Poet,” 174, 196–98; “A Natural History of Intellect,” 179–80; Representative Men, 182; “Merlin,” 199–200; “Compensation,” 236; “Woodnotes I,” 242–45 Emerson, William (father of RWE), 116–17, 119 Foster, David, 205, 212–13, 222 Fraser, J. T., 13 Galileo, 8, 108, 126 Garber, Frederick, 53, 70, 73 Geology: uniformitarian, 7, 17; early development of, 12; compared to astronomy, 38 Gilpin, William, 219 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen, 183; “Bei Betrachtung von Schillers Schädel,” 184–85; mentioned, 3, 30, 174, 182–89 passim Gould, Stephen Jay, 8, 14, 15, 18, 42 Gower, John, 58 Harding, Walter, 131, 132, 164 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 29, 180 Henry, Alexander, 71 Heraclitus, 190, 199 Herrick, Robert, 97 Herschel, John, 8 Hopkins, Vivian, 26 Hume, David, 180 Hutton, James, 7, 13–17 passim, 35, 38 Irwin, John T., 48 Jackson, Charles Thomas (brother-in-law of RWE), 22 Johnson, Linck C., 46–47, 81 Kant, Immanuel, 175, 180 Kepler, Johannes, 100 Kuhn, Thomas S., 34 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 3, 35, 40, 174, 189–90 Laws of Menu, 62–64, 73. See also Thoreau, and Hinduism Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 182

Index Lyell, Charles: Principles of Geology, 7, 12, 14, 19; originates concept of uniformitarian geology, 17; and Lamarck, 30, 41, 187; and Darwin, 41–42, 44; mentioned, 3, 7, 29, 30, 37–39 passim, 43 Marx, Leo, 132, 206 McPhee, John: and “deep time,” 16 Memnon, statue of, 78, 82, 95 Michaels, Walter Benn, 149 Milder, Robert, 47, 50 Miller, Perry, 11 Milton, John: “Lycidas,” 47; Paradise Lost, 85; mentioned, 85, 105, 107 Müller, Max, 65 Myerson, Joel, 31 Nabhan, Gary Paul, 211 Newton, Isaac, 38 Niepce, Nicéphore, 163, 167 Ovid: The Metamorphoses, 190, 193–96 passim; mentioned, 108, 174 Paul, Sherman, 102, 105 Persius (Aulus Persius Flaccus), 83, 248 Plato, 102, 174–75, 198; Timaeus, 175–76. See also Socrates Plotinus, 25 Plutarch, 102, 199 Porte, Joel, 132 Pythagoras, 182, 190, 195–96 Richardson, Robert D., 114, 134, 159, 169, 174 Ripley, Ezra, 119 Schama, Simon, 205–8, 215–16 Secord, James, 12, 19, 38, 41 Shanley, J. Lyndon, 135, 144, 148, 169 Shea, Daniel, 174, 193 Snow, C. P., 201 Socrates, 175–76, 179, 186. See also Plato Thoreau, Henry David: interest in “inscriptions,” 47, 53, 73–75 passim, 84, 87, 217; attitudes toward ancient Egyptians, 47–48, 51, 60, 68–70,

261 77–83 passim, 88, 217; religious heterodoxy of, 54, 57; and ancient Greeks, 55–56, 69–71 passim, 75–76; attitude toward orthodox Christianity, 55–58, 72, 159–60; and Hinduism, 59, 62–66, 74, 169–71; and temporal reform, 61, 66; contrasts occidental and oriental ideas about time, 63–64; compares myth to history, 65; disrupts reader’s sense of temporality, 66–67, 81, 85–86, 136, 140–41, 146, 154–56, 161; integration of natural history with human history, 71; and art of measuring, 79–80, 82, 131; works as surveyor, 80, 133, 140–44, 162, 164–65, 171, 208; on living extemporaneously, 83–84, 248; on agriculture and keeping livestock, 88, 163–64; and moment as fundamental temporal unit, 93; on growth of the self and self-culture, 131, 156–58, 169, 172, 181–82, 229–31; sense of moment’s uniqueness, 134–35; emphasizes economic understanding of time, 137–39; emphasizes localism, 139; enigmatic reference to losing “a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove,” 142–43; as trespasser, 142–43, 167; fondness for swamps, 162–66; critical of private land ownership, 166–67; comments upon RWE’s “The Sphinx,” 191; interest in machinery and mechanical processes, 204; attempts to learn “language” of nature and of forests, 211–12, 229; as forester, 213–14; criticizes Concordians’ forest management, 215, 217–18; inclusion of people in wild landscape, 218, 225; encounters Inches’ Wood, 220–27, 229; death of, 231–34 passim; on public parks, 232; redefines cultural landscape, 233; knack for making discoveries, 247–48, observes solstice, 250. See also Thoreau, Henry David, works of —Relations with Emerson: agreement on temporally related issues, 235; disaffection with RWE, 235, 249 —And science: and Louis Agassiz, 28, 87, 135; influenced by Lyell, 48, 54,

262 60, 72, 202; attitude toward science and scientists, 55; and geology, 56, 59, 72–74 passim, 86; and Darwin, 87, 135, 202–3; quantitative studies of trees, 201–2; concurs with evolutionary theory, 203; prefers developmental theories to miracles, 203; and theory of forest succession, 219–20, 222; anticipates theory of climax forest formation, 221; and ecology, 225; reconstructs New England landscape, 227–28 —Temporal images of: water, 93, 131, 149–50; corn growing in the night, 132, 150–51, 156–59, 164, 181, 231; “nick of time,” 132, 159, 168, 171–72; “wild” trinity, 132, 160; “gospel of the present moment,” 161–62. See also “Thoreauvian interval” Thoreau, Henry David, works of: —A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: as memorial, 47, 50, 62, 68, 80–82, 88–89; compared to Walden, 49–50; perceived as being incoherent, 49–50; critiques conventional notions of temporality, 50; cyclic structure of, 50, 52; compression of time in, 50, 90–91; HDT stakes American claim to antiquity in, 74–75; failure to sell, 135 —“Criticism of Aulus Persius Flaccus,” 83–84, 156 —“The Dispersion of Seeds,” 211, 214

Index —Walden: 50–51, 58, 204; compared to A Week, 49, 131; compression of time in, 90, 145; concentrates upon moment, 131; and systems of measurement, 131; HDT’s editing of, 135–36, 148–50, 152–54; parable of artist of Kouroo, 169–72 —“Walking”: 132, 136–37; and HDT’s ambivalence about surveying, 164–67. See also Thoreau, works as surveyor Thoreau, John (brother of HDT), 47, 50, 53, 68, 89 “Thoreauvian interval”: defined, 132; mentioned, 154, 159, 160, 167–68, 172, 206, 227 Temporal reform, 1, 48, 235 “Time’s arrow”: defined, 14. See also Gould, Stephen Jay “Time’s cycle”: defined, 14. See also Gould, Stephen Jay Toulmin, Stephen, and Jane Goodfield, 13, 14, 32 Uniformitarian geology. See Lyell, Charles Ussher, Archbishop James, 6 Van Cromphout, Gustaaf, 184, 186 Warburton, G. D., 78 Whitman, Walt, 35 Wordsworth, William, 56 Zeno, 139–40