All of these things can uplift the spirit and relieve the blues or the blahs. Sometimes, though, we need more. A sunny day won't be enough. Shopping won't do it. Cleaning windows and desks will have little effect. At those times, the spiritual renewal we need is more profound. We may even need a life-altering experience.
Long, long ago, I entered college as a freshman. For the next year and a half, I proved myself to be a lousy student, a troublemaker, and a lost soul, and I was expelled from college in the spring of my sophomore year. Several years later, I returned to college, and this time I had an entirely different experience. Something had happened to me, obviously, and the thing that happened began in 1968.
1968 was one of the most traumatic years in the history of this country. It began with the shock of the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War. Just as we thought we'd turned the corner and were close to winning the war, the Vietcong mounted a massive offensive and attacked nearly every major city and military compound in South Vietnam. In the Mekong delta, they overran military bases. Up north in Hue, they occupied the Citadel. In Saigon, they stormed through the streets and into the US Embassy compound. We had grossly underestimated them. Back in the United States, even people who had been supporting the war began turning against it in large numbers. Colleges that had been simmering began to boil over and even explode as protests and violence shut some of them down. Back in Vietnam, the seige of Khe Sanh was continuing in earnest, with US Marines pinned down on a hill by relentless artillery fire--a situation hauntingly similar to the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, where the French had been defeated in 1954. [We didn't find out about it until later, but this was also the time of the My Lai massacre.] In the US, on April 4th, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, leading to riots in our cities. On June 4th, Robert Kennedy was murdered right after a successful campaign speech. During the summer, the political conventions seemed out of control. Nearly everything seemed out of control.
During this confusion, I was a soldier in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, so I missed out on all the excitement back home. During the Tet Offensive, I was stationed in Song Be, a remote outpost near the Cambodian border. It was a very discouraging time to be a soldier. It was discouraging to be in a war that everyone seemed to be turning against. It was a discouraging time to be a failure. It was discouraging to see and to have to face death.
Later on in 1968, after the Tet Offensive, after the King assassination, after the Kennedy assassination, after the Democratic and Republican conventions, I was stationed in Saigon. I was still going through the daily motions of my life, but I was miserable. It seemed to me that just about everything that could go wrong either already had gone wrong or was about to go wrong. I still had several months left to serve as a soldier. I had gone to Vietnam not because I believed in the war but because I had no concrete reason not to trust my government, which told me I had to go. By this time, though, in the last quarter of 1968, I had made a decision based on what I'd observed first-hand. I did not believe that we belonged in Vietnam. I knew I did not belong there.
One day I was sent as a crypto-courier to a small outpost outside Saigon. As I waited for a helicopter flight at the Ton Son Nhut airport, I wandered past a USO bookstand and saw a book called The Maine Woods. I was born in Maine! I picked it up and opened to a chapter called "Ktaadn." I'd climbed Mt. Katahdin twice--once when I was seven years old and again when I was seventeen.
I'd already seen enough to want to read the book, so I bought it. This was a book about my home. It was about my spiritual home. The Maine woods. Mt. Katahdin. Those were places of peace, not war, I thought. They were places of retreat, of holiday, of renewal. Before I read the book, they were holy places to me. I didn't know someone had written a book about the Maine woods. I looked to see who had written it--Henry David Thoreau. I'd heard of him, but I didn't know anything but his name.
The woods and the mountain were places that were pretty much without people and completely without society, as Thoreau called it. Civilization with all of its discontents was not present. As I read the book, I realized that Thoreau approached life in a way that was entirely different from my approach. I was somewhat startled by his words. He said, early on, that he had come to the woods to face "the true source of evil." What could that mean? To me, evil was where there were people, where there was conflict, where there was confusion--where there was war. But here was Thoreau, saying as he approached the woods, "Here, then, one could no longer accuse institutions and society, but must front the true source of evil" (PMW 16). This was news to me. I didn't want to agree with it. I wanted to blame institutions and society.
Reading further, I realized that Thoreau's mountain was very different from mine. He climbed the mountain in bad weather and didn't even make it to the summit. Both times I climbed the mountain had been on perfect summer days, and I'd made it to the top both times.
And the differences did not stop there. Although Thoreau described the mountain as a holy place for Native Americans, as it was for me, he said things about it that I did not understand wholly. It seemed more like Hell than Heaven. It was not a "home" of any sort. It was frightening, and it had something to do with the human body, but I wasn't sure what. I just didn't understand that part.
What I was sure of, though, was that I was hooked on this book. Not only did it make me feel closer to home, but it also was like nothing I'd ever read before. It was about trying to get straight answers to age-old problems. What is the source of evil? What's the relationship between the soul and the body? What does it mean to be outside society? What does it mean to be inside society? What are the woods? What is the mountain? Who are the Indians, and what can we learn from them? And it was written not as an abstract philosophical discussion but as excursions into the forest.
When I'd finished with the book, I was eager to read more, so I returned to the USO bookstand the first chance I got and found two other books by Thoreau: Cape Cod and a copy of Walden that included the essay "Civil Disobedience."
I don't remember much about Cape Cod from reading it that year. I wasn't ready for it, I guess, so while I was interested in it and read it all the way through, it didn't seem to me to have the power of The Maine Woods. Walden, though, while hard to understand, was a real treat. There were some parts that contained astonishing things, things that made me think that Thoreau was the first writer I'd ever encountered who told the truth.
And then I read "Civil Disobedience." In that little essay, I found every secret dangerous thought I'd ever thought. I couldn't believe what I was reading. I especially couldn't believe that these words had been published more than a hundred--almost 120 years--before I read them.
But in many ways, it seemed the opposite of The Maine Woods. In "Civil Disobedience," it seemed, society was evil. Government was oppressive. He describes going to jail for not paying a tax that was to be used to support a war and says that if a few people refused to cooperate in the bad things that the government does or supports--like war and slavery--the government would grind to a halt.
After reading all of Thoreau's works that were available in Vietnam, I knew two things: I loved this writer. I also was going to need some help in trying to understand him. I needed to talk about him with someone. I knew I'd have to return to college, and this time, I had a purpose--to learn all I could about Thoreau.
Something had happened to me. What was
it? I'd read a set of books that had changed the direction of my
life. But how did that work? What was it about reading The
Maine Woods and Walden that had made such a difference?
I want to be clear about this. I don't mean that on one side of reading
these books was all darkness and on the other side was all light.
It wasn't like that at all. All I knew at the time was that I was
thrilled to find a man whom I thought of as a kindred spirit, and I was
eager to learn more and more--as much as I could--about him and his writing.
Otherwise, I still felt pretty much like a lost soul. I was still
discouraged about the war. I was still uncertain about my future.
I wanted to return to college, but I was afraid that I would once again
be a failure. I had very little faith in myself.
Now, when I think back on that young man who
thirty years ago, at about this time of the year, picked up a copy of The
Maine Woods just because the title suggested that the book might be about
a place he loved, I realize that the power of telling the truth is something
that can reach someone who is 13,000 miles away and after a lapsed period
of time that's more than a hundred years. Truth can heal, even from
a distance.
I've found that my experience with Thoreau
is not unusual except that it began with The Maine Woods. Walden
is, of course, Thoreau's most famous book. Walden is the book
of Thoreau's that most people refer to if they talk about the impact of
Thoreau on their lives. I've seen many people cry when they talk
about what Walden means to them. There's something about Walden
that if it does not answer deep questions at least confronts them in a
way that is profoundly satisfying. I believe that all of Thoreau's
books will eventually be seen as great parts of our heritage first as Americans
and then just as people. Walden already is.
Why Walden? What is it about
this book that has appealed to people from all over the world? That
has caused it to be translated into nearly a hundred different languages?
That has prompted people to make pilgrimages to Walden Pond to see the
site where Thoreau lived its story for two years? Who was the man
who wrote it, and how did he know what some of us would need?
Thoreau was not your ordinary guy. While
he was at Walden pond, from 1845 to 1847, the Fitchburg railroad was being
built. It ran (and still runs) right past the pond. Walking
along the railroad tracks one day, Thoreau saw a phenomenon that helped
him answer a question he'd been wondering about for nearly ten years.
It was during a winter thaw, and the sun was beating down on a snowbank
in what Thoreau called "the deep cut," where the rail workers had cut through
a hill to maintain the grade for the tracks. The heat of the sun
caused mud and sand to flow right out through the snow and down the steep
slope. Every year for the rest of his life, Thoreau went to visit
this place in the winter during a thaw just to see the mud flow.
Thoreau did many other things that made his
Concord neighbors think of him as an eccentric. He spent much of
his time in the woods checking the blooming of flowers and the progress
of the year. He was observed sitting for a period of eight hours
one day staring into the bank of a brook. He was observing frogs.
As Yogi Berra says, "You can observe a lot just by watching." Another
day, he went fishing with a friend and while making a chowder with the
catch, set fire to a large portion of the Concord woods. According
to his neighbors, this man was not one of them. We, of course, tend
to think of Thoreau in somewhat different terms. We think of him
as a writer, as a lover and protector of nature, and even as a political
and spiritual leader. People are even starting to see him as a scientist.
But to his neighbors, he was strange, and maybe even dangerous.
What was he seeing when he watched the mud
and sand flowing over the snow at the deep railroad cut? Why would
this phenomenon attract him so?
Whenever the idea of renewal or spiritual
rebirth comes up, there is the implied, if not stated, preceding aspect
of the old, the dead, the lost attached to it. If there has been
no loss, nothing old, no death, what need is there for re-newal or re-birth?
The word "re-ligion" apparently has a similar root. If speculation
on its origin is correct, it means, literally, to re-bind the ties, or
just a "rebinding." If nothing had been lost, we'd call it "Ligion,"
but that isn't even a word.
For Thoreau, rebirth and spiritual renewal
were symbolized in one word: Spring.
To understand what spring meant for Thoreau
and how it applies to the theme of renewal, we should look at what has
been lost. What has died. What has grown old. Walden
is usually read as a very positive look at life--an optimistic account
that is also inspirational. And it is that. But to get the
full power of the strength of that optimism, I think we have to look at
the evidence of the negativities of life that Thoreau struggled with to
reach that optimism. To do that in any kind of depth would take much
more time than we have here this afternoon, so I'm going to narrow the
focus to a few of the images of loss that we find in Walden and
in Thoreau's life.
The first is a kind of riddle that we find
early on in the first chapter of the book: "I long ago lost a hound, a
bay horse, and a turtle-dove. . . ." Many pages have been written
about this passage, but no one has solved the riddle convincingly that
I know of. When asked about it, Thoreau himself said, rather gruffly,
that everyone has losses. He clearly did not want to identify it
more specifically.
The greatest loss Thoreau suffered in his
early life came when his older brother, John, died after a very short bout
with lockjaw. Apparently John cut his finger while shaving and somehow
exposed the cut to the tetanus bacillus. He died ten or eleven days
later--a horribly painful death. Henry was holding him in his arms
when he died. Then, an even more startling thing happened:
Thoreau himself came down with lockjaw shortly after the funeral and the
doctor examined him and told the family that he couldn't explain it, but
Henry would die just as John had. But Thoreau's lockjaw, it turned
out, was what he later called "sympathetic." Earlier in this century
we would have called it "hysterical." Now, we'd say it was a psychosomatic
illness, where the mind causes a sickness of the body. It was real,
though, and stopped his writing completely for a period of several months
during which, he says in his journal, he was confined to his room.
Interestingly, Thoreau's Concord neighbor
and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had suffered from a similar affliction
when he was a student at Harvard Divinity School. He temporarily
lost his eyesight. Completely. There's a good deal of controversy
over what actually happened to Emerson, but strong evidence suggests that
it, too, was hysterical or psychosomatic. Some months later, he recovered
his eyesight and went on to be known as the philosopher of the eyeball,
thanks to this passage from Nature: "Standing on the bare ground,--my head
bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism
vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing.
I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through
me; I am part or particle of God."
With this passage, Emerson demonstrates that
he has turned a serious illness into a great strength. But we would
never know this from what he tells us in his published writing.
Thoreau's writing is more earthy, and we see
in it more of the struggle that Emerson does not reveal.
The following is an image of loss in Walden
that sneaks up on the reader:
In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature . . . Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves . . . .(PW 169-171)First, he's saying, It's easy to get lost: "for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost." Furthermore, when we are lost, what we have lost is the world, and it is not until we have reached that state of lostness--having lost everything--that we begin to find ourselves.
This is a statement of triumph over the most extreme form of despair--being utterly lost.
So how did Emerson triumph over his blindness to become a transparent eyeball that sees all? How did Thoreau leave his chamber of confinement to become one of the greatest of our outdoor writers? How was their loss of faith restored? How did these two, as much as any of our writers, come to represent their age for us--come to be leaders of the American Renaissance? Finally, how do they articulate solutions to our own problems?
Renewal comes after stagnation or desperation. Boredom, the fragility of life, the fact of death--these are all things that renewal helps us deal with. In Emerson's case, as he presents it in Nature, his seminal work, the answer comes from an understanding of where we are--our relationship to nature and to spirit. What we find in Nature and in many of the other essays of Emerson in the 1830s and 1840s is a description of moments of what he was later to call "metamorphosis." By metamorphosis, he means a glimpse of or participation in the spirit or mind of the universe. Sometimes he called it God. Sometimes he called it Mind. Sometimes he called it Spirit. Sometimes he called it Universal Being. He never called it The Force, and it did not have dark and light sides. An Emersonian metamorphosis is a brief and transient glimpse of divinity, a moment when it seems that you understand who you are and where you are. You are a part of God, he says.
When Emerson tries to explain this more directly, he's hard to follow. His primary images are stars and air. In his essay "Self-Reliance," we get another angle on it when he describes genius: "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all other [people],--that is genius." In other words, everyone is a potential genius, because genius is not something that is measured by IQ tests, as is a common notion for us, or by how much of a whiz you are in mathematics (as, say, in Good Will Hunting). No. Genius is a recognition that your deepest truths are truths for everyone. The more private we are, the more universal we are. I know. It's still not easy to understand. That's why we need Thoreau.
In Thoreau's case, as he presents it in Walden,
the identification extends not merely to persons but to the earth itself.
"Spring" is the climax of Walden. When I say that "Spring"
is the climax, I'm treating Walden as a story, which I think it is.
It's a story of a journey to a breathtaking revelation. "Spring"
is an apocalypse in the original meaning of that word: unveiling
or revelation. Walden is a book that can help us grasp what
Emerson means by "metamorphosis."
Before we look carefully at specific paragraphs
in "Spring," let me remind you of the poetic associations for the word.
Of course, the obvious meaning here is the season--spring. But as
we examine Thoreau's prose, we'll see that "spring" means source, means
origin, means life itself. Above all, it means renewal. It
is rebirth--the rebirth of nature, the rebirth of the world. It is
cognate with the word "fountain," or "fountainhead," the source of inspiration,
the source of spirit. By using concrete, down-to-earth imagery, Thoreau
helps us see the mind of the creator, of God, and he does it in the case
I'm going to examine most closely by describing flowing mud and sand.
Here is Thoreau beginning his description
of the sandbank:
Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village. . . . The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, . . . some lichens, or you are reminded of coral, of leopards' paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation . . . . (PW 305)Let me stop reading Thoreau's passage here for a moment to get a perspective. Here is a man looking at flowing sand and mud, caused by the action of the sun on the bank of the railroad cut, and he sees plants, the guts of animals, excrement, brains, leopards' paws, and birds' feet. What kind of person is this? (Sometimes when I go over this passage in class, a student will raise her hand and ask, "Did this guy use drugs?")
Click here to see a larger rendition of this photo by Herbert Gleason.
How many of you have seen frost on window panes on the morning after a very cold night?
What did you see?
What Thoreau saw was this:
I observe that upon the edge of the melting frost on the windows, Jack [Frost] is playing singular freaks,--now bundling together his needle-shaped leaves so as to resemble fields waving with grain, or shocks of wheat rising here and there from the stubble. On one side the vegetation of the torrid zone is presented you,--high-towering palms, and wide-spread banyans, such as we see in pictures of Oriental scenery; on the other are arctic pines, stiff-frozen, with branches downcast, like the arms of tender men in frosty weather." (J, I, 16-17)This passage was written on December 12, 1837, 17 years before Walden was published, and nine years before he observed the sand foliage of the railroad cut. Even earlier, on November 28, 1837, he had observed a similar phenomenon, that of what he called "snow foliage." He wondered at that point, when he was twenty years old and had recently graduated from Harvard College--he wondered whether or not the same laws applied to these phenomena that apply to the growth of plants.
So what I make of all of this is that the difference between Thoreau and most of the rest of us is that when Thoreau looked at something and saw a resemblance to something else, he trusted in that observation and took it from there. He was following Emerson's advice. He believed in his own thoughts.
The sandbank foliage is for Thoreau the first intimation of spring. In other words, spring itself is the beginning of life, the waking up of nature, and at the sandbank we see the gestation of the idea. At the site of the sandbank, Thoreau can see inside the earth to anticipate the birth of the year because the earth has been cut at this point to make way for the railroad. What he sees are the beginning stages of labor, and he concludes, "No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it" (PW 306). The earth, he's saying, is a great mother laboring with a particular idea which, if it is the earliest prototype of the leaf, does not stop there: "The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit" (PW 306-307).
If the earth is the mother, the sun is the father of this transcendent vegetable force:
What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank,--for the sun acts on one side first,--and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me,--had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about (PW 306).The most interesting aspects of this passage begin when Thoreau compares the earth's body to animal bodies. His conclusion about all of this is that "There is nothing inorganic" (PW 308). The earth is not only alive ("not a fossil earth, but a living earth"), but compared with its "great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic" (PW 309). The only animal life Thoreau particularly describes in this passage is human life. No one who has seen a time-lapse film or videotape either of a developing human embryo or of a person's face aging will fail to be affected by those parts of this sandbank passage in which Thoreau extrapolates physical human development from flowing mud (note as I read this how he intermingles the scene he is observing with comments and speculations on the human body):
You here see perchance how blood vessels are formed. If you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture . . . the most fluid portion . . . separates from the latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. . . . What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. . . . Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen . . . on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip . . . laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. (PW 307-308)DNA and RNA notwithstanding, and The Origin of Species not excepted, the piecing together of this passage from observations of a sandbank and ice crystals is one of the astounding perceptions to come to us from the nineteenth century.
What Thoreau does in this passage, which had been in the works for 17 years when Walden was published in 1854, is the best example of the working of his mind as we find it operating here and in all of his other writing. He starts with a direct observation of a fact and then he develops that fact into a truth. All the time he spent in the woods, by brooks, in fields, on walks begins to make some sense. There are answers in nature, even at the tiniest level of observation, that can help us determine who we are and where we are.
In observing the sand flowing over the snow, Thoreau found the idea of all life, including human beings, coming out of the bowels of the earth.
But there is nothing special about human beings here. The place given to human beings in the order of things in this passage does not justify human pride, for compared to the earth, "towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils" (PW 307), and earth's "throes will heave our exuviae from their graves" (309). We are merely parasites on "this molten earth," and "not only it, but the institutions upon it, are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter" (309). It's hard to believe that there is not something about this passage that has provoked considerable controversy. The "divinity" informing Thoreau's nature is pure expressive force with absolutely no regard for humanity.
In fact, the more closely you look at Thoreau's
writing, the more you begin to notice the sheer horror presented in it.
It all begins to look like what I first noticed about his account of Mt.
Katahdin--it's more like Hell than Heaven.
Yes, there are triumphant passages in Walden,
the most famous of which is a resurrection: "Walden was dead and
is alive again" (PW 311). But there are many more questionable
passages, and even some of those that sound wonderful fall apart on examination
as if prepared that way for the careful reader.
There are dozens of observed facts that present
nature as uncaring, unfeeling, inhuman, and brutish. There's a war
between red and black ants, for example, that Thoreau describes in detail
and tells us that it affects him just as much as if he'd witnessed human
combatants killing and dismembering one another. A snowstorm becomes
an occasion for pondering how easy it would be to exterminate all human
life from the planet if there were to be just a bit more snow--just a bit
more cold. In discussing reading the newspaper, he says a man "reads
it over his coffee and rolls, that [another] man has had his eyes gouged
out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he
lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the
rudiment of an eye himself" (PW 93-94).
Most discussions of the inspirational qualities
of Walden ignore these passages that are pervasive in the book.
They are not anomalies of Walden, either, for they are everywhere
in Thoreau's writing. Cape Cod, a book whose value I could
not see when I first read it, is perhaps the hardest look of all at human
culture and its place on the earth. It has been described as "Thoreau's
sunniest, happiest book," (WH 361) implying that it is even more
pleasant than Walden, but this is surely a misreading that ignores
the fact that the book begins with the wreck of a ship loaded with immigrants,
many of whom die in the stormy sea trying to make it to the new world.
Thoreau was there to see the bodies washing up on the rocky shore.
The narrative continues throughout Cape Cod to describe the scenes
of past shipwrecks, of dead bodies buried beneath the pure sand of the
cape, and the tenuous position of the inhabitants of the cape, which is
merely a fragile arm of moving sand extending into the wilderness of an
ocean whose constantly pounding waves will eventually make it disappear
along with its human cargo.
There's almost a rage in and behind Thoreau's
writing that is impossible to ignore once you've begun to see it.
Sometimes, though, in talking to people about
Thoreau, I wonder if it's just me. Am I the only one who sees the
lurking face of horror beneath the serene surface of Walden and
the other books and lectures? I have to return to the words themselves
for reassurance. Yes. All the horror of life is there, just
as it is there in most great literature, including Emily Dickinson's poems,
which have been compared by Camille Paglia to the works of the Marquis
de Sade, just as it is there in Shakespeare's tragedies, just as it is
there in Dante's Divine Comedy, just as it is there in The Iliad
and The Odyssey of Homer.
In fact, I would submit, were it not there,
Thoreau would be just another liar who could not possibly have helped me
in my desperate situation in Viet Nam. The very last thing you need
when you are in a life or death situation, when you are absolutely without
hope, when you are perhaps ready to commit suicide and end all suffering,
is for someone to try to tell you that life is merely great, that the horrors
you have seen with your own eyes either do not exist or are not important.
No. It is precisely this power of telling
the truth that is the secret to the inspirational, spirit-reviving power
of Walden. "I . . . require of every writer," Thoreau says
at the beginning of the book, "a simple and sincere account of his own
life." That's a much harder requirement than it may at first appear
to be. Thoreau required it of himself. That, I believe, is
the secret of his attraction for us. In and behind the pages of Walden,
I see a terrified man who has somehow found the strength to face the horror
and to live with it.
Thoreau died at the age of 44, in 1862.
He'd suffered from tuberculosis all of his adult life. His sister
Helen died at an even younger age of TB. His brother John, as I've
noted above, had died in 1842, twenty years before Henry. The first
sentence of Emerson's oration at Thoreau's funeral reads as follows: "Henry
David Thoreau was the last male descendant of a French ancestor who came
to this country from the Isle of Guernsey." None of Thoreau's siblings
ever married, and their mother outlived all her children. In the
chapter called "Former Inhabitants," Thoreau wonders aloud, after looking
at an empty cellar hole for a house that had been home for a whole family
years earlier, "What makes families run out?" He was acutely aware
of his own predicament.
"Be it life or death," he says at another
point, "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." This was written by a man who heard
the rattle in his throat nearly every day, yet he was going to continue
to do his business, which was to write the truth as he saw it. It
was necessary: "A ticket to Heaven," he wrote in 1852 with a nod
to Dante, "must include tickets to Limbo, Purgatory, and Hell" (J,
III, 215).
Whenever I hear Beethoven's 9th Symphony,
I wonder how such a magnificent piece of work could have been produced
by a man who could not hear. First, I am in awe at the accomplishment--both
the technical and the intuitive knowledge of music required to produce
such a powerful instrument of conveying joy--and then I realize that it
is a gift to us. The "Song of Joy" is something Beethoven never was
to hear physically in the way that we do, with our eyes closed, bathed
in the majesty of its blend of choral and orchestral music. Finally,
I am reminded of Thoreau, whose works comprise the deathbed statement of
an entire family. "The elegy itself," he once wrote to a friend,
"is some victorious melody or joy escaping from the wreck" (Correspondence
75).
I was inspired by Thoreau long before I learned
all of what I've presented here today. Long before I knew anything
at all about him except for some of his writings, he saved my life.
The more I learn about him, by reading more carefully, by living long enough
to develop the base of something approaching wisdom, the more I am in awe.
What he seems to be saying, in a way that
is not threatening, is that unless you've faced all of the serious problems
of life, the horrors you weren't warned about, you can never truly appreciate
the miracle of the gift that you received when you were born. Life
is not what you were told it is. It is something far more precious
than telling can convey. When you have almost lost it, or are in
constant danger of losing it, you are in a position to realize that and
get on with your life.
Life was much more of a struggle for this
man than it has been for me. He was strong enough to face the facts
of existence with an unblinking eye, and in spite of the suffering, the
conflict--in spite of the horror that he saw, felt, and wrote about, he
still concluded and was able to write in such a way as to help us also
to conclude that after all this, the spirit that informs life is miraculous,
right down to the mud from which it springs.
References:
Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1966. (WH)
Thoreau, Henry David. Cape Cod. Ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer.
Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1988.
__________. The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau.
Ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1958.
(Correspondence)
__________. The Maine Woods. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley.
Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1972. (PMW)
__________. Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
(PW)
__________. The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau. Ed.
Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen.
Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1906.