The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  When he moved out of his cabin and returned to Concord, he tried and repeatedly failed to find a publisher for A Week. No one was interested in a manuscript that was part nature description, and part memoir. In the end, one publisher agreed to print and distribute it at Thoreau’s own expense. It was a resounding commercial failure. No one wanted to buy the book and many of the reviews were scathing, with one, for example, accusing Thoreau of copying Emerson badly. Only a few admired it, declaring it a book that was ‘purely American’.

  The enterprise left Thoreau several hundred dollars in debt and with many unsold copies of A Week. He now owned a library of 900 books, he quipped, ‘over seven hundred of which I wrote myself’. The unsuccessful publication also provoked friction between Thoreau and Emerson. Thoreau felt let down by his old mentor who had praised A Week despite not liking it. ‘While my friend was my friend he flattered me, and I never heard the truth from him, but when he became my enemy he shot it to me on a poisoned arrow,’ Thoreau wrote in his journal. It probably didn’t help their friendship either that Thoreau had developed a crush on Emerson’s wife, Lydian.

  Today Thoreau is one of the most widely read and beloved American writers – during his lifetime, though, his friends and family worried about his lack of ambition. Emerson called him the ‘only man of leisure’ in Concord and one who was ‘insignificant here in town’, while Thoreau’s aunt believed that her nephew should be doing something better ‘than walking off every now and then’. Thoreau never cared much what others thought. Instead, he was struggling with his Walden manuscript, finding it hard to finish. ‘What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing?’ he wrote in his journal, concluding that ‘I must know a little more.’

  Thoreau was still trying to make sense of nature. He continued to march through the countryside, straight as a pine, as his friends said, and with long strides. He also began to work as a surveyor, which brought him a small income and allowed him to spend even more time outside. Counting his steps, Emerson said, Thoreau could measure distances more precisely than others could with the surveyor’s instruments of rod and chain. He collected specimens for the botanists and zoologists at Harvard University. He measured the depth of streams and ponds, took temperatures and pressed plants. In spring Thoreau recorded the arrival of birds and in winter he counted the frozen bubbles that were captured in the icy lid of the pond. Instead of ‘calling on some scholar’, he often hiked several miles through the woods for his ‘appointments’ with the plants. Thoreau was groping towards an understanding of what these pines and birds really meant.

  Thoreau, like Emerson, was searching for the unity of nature but in the end they would choose different avenues. Thoreau would follow Humboldt in his belief that the ‘whole’ could only be comprehended by understanding the connections, correlations and details. Emerson on the other hand believed that this unity could not be discovered through rational thought alone but also by intuition or through some kind of revelation from God. Like the Romantics in England such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the German Idealists such as Friedrich Schelling, Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists in America were reacting against scientific methods that were associated with deductive reasoning and empirical research. To examine nature like that, Emerson said, tended to ‘cloud the sight’. Instead, man had to find spiritual truth in nature. Scientists were only materialists whose ‘spirit is matter reduced to extreme thinness’, he wrote.

  The Transcendentalists had been inspired by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his explanation of man’s understanding of the world. Kant had talked of a class of ideas or knowledge, Emerson explained, ‘which did not come from experience’. With this Kant had turned against the empiricists such as the British philosopher John Locke, who in the late seventeenth century had said that all knowledge was based on the experience of the senses. Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists now insisted that man had the capacity ‘of knowing truth intuitively’. For them facts and nature’s appearance were like a curtain that needed to be drawn to discover the divine law behind it. Thoreau, however, was finding it increasingly difficult to weave his fascination with scientific facts into this worldview, because for him everything in nature had a meaning in itself. Here was a Transcendentalist who was searching for those grand ideas of unity by counting the petals of a bloom or the tree rings of a felled trunk.

  Thoreau had begun to observe nature like a scientist. He measured and recorded, and his interest in this kind of detail became increasingly more urgent. Then, in autumn 1849, two years after he had left his cabin and just as the full extent of the failure of A Week became obvious, Thoreau made a decision that would change his life and give birth to Walden as we know it today. Thoreau completely reoriented his life with a new daily routine that required serious study every morning and evening, punctuated by a long afternoon walk. It was the moment when he took his first steps away from being just a poet who was fascinated by nature towards becoming one of America’s most important nature writers. Maybe it was the painful experience of publishing A Week, or his break with Emerson. Or maybe Thoreau had found the confidence to focus on what he adored. Whatever the reasons, everything changed.

  This new regime marked the beginning of his scientific studies which included extensive daily journal writing. Every day, Thoreau would note what he had seen on his walks. These entries, which had previously been the odd fragment of observation but had mainly been draft passages for his essays and books, now became regular and chronological, documenting the seasons in Concord in all their intricacies. Instead of cutting up his journals to paste them into his literary manuscripts as he had done before, Thoreau left the new volumes intact. What had been random collections now became ‘Field Notes’.

  Armed with his hat as a ‘botany box’ in which he kept plant specimens fresh during the long walks, a heavy music book as his plant press, a spyglass and his walking stick as a measuring tape, Thoreau now explored nature in all its detail. During his walks, he wrote notes on small scraps of paper which he then expanded in the evenings for his longer journal entries. His botanical observations became so meticulous that scientists still use them to examine the impact of the changing climate – by comparing the first flowering dates of wildflowers or the ‘leafing out’ dates of trees from Thoreau’s journals with those of today.

  ‘I omit the unusual – the hurricane and earthquakes – and describe the common,’ Thoreau wrote in his journal, ‘this is the true theme of poetry.’ As he meandered, measured and surveyed, Thoreau was moving away from Emerson’s grand and spiritual ideas of nature and instead observed the detailed variety that unfolded on his walks. This was also the moment when Thoreau first immersed himself in Humboldt’s writings – at the same time as he was turning against the influence of Emerson. ‘I feel ripe for something,’ Thoreau wrote in his journal. ‘It is seed time with me – I have lain fallow long enough.’

  Thoreau read Humboldt’s most popular books: Cosmos, Views of Nature and Personal Narrative. Books on nature, Thoreau said, were ‘a sort of elixir’. As he read, he was always noting and scribbling. ‘His reading was done with a pen in his hand,’ one friend remarked. During these years, Humboldt’s name appeared regularly in Thoreau’s journals and notebooks, as well as in his published work. Thoreau noted ‘Humboldt says’ or ‘Humboldt has written’. One day, for example, when the sky had glowed in a particularly bright shade of blue, he felt the need to measure it precisely. ‘Where is my cyanometer?’ Thoreau called out. ‘Humboldt used it in his travels’ – referring to the instrument with which Humboldt had measured the blueness of the sky above Chimborazo. When Thoreau read in Personal Narrative that the roar of the rapids of the Orinoco was louder at night than by day, he noted the same phenomenon in his journal – only that the thunderous Orinoco was a gurgling brook in Concord. To Thoreau’s mind the hills that he had hiked in Peterborough in neighbouring New Hampshire were comparable to the Andes, while the Atlantic became a ‘large Wald
en Pond’. ‘Standing on the Concord cliffs,’ Thoreau wrote, he was ‘with Humboldt’.

  What Humboldt had observed across the globe, Thoreau did at home. Everything was interwoven. When the ice-cutters came to the pond in winter in order to prepare and transport the ice to distant destinations, Thoreau thought of those who would consume it far away in the sweltering heat in Charleston or even in Bombay and Calcutta. They will ‘drink at my well’, he wrote, and the pure Walden water would be ‘mingled with the sacred waters of the Ganges’. There was no need to go on an expedition to distant countries. Why not travel at home? Thoreau noted in his journal – it didn’t matter how far one journeyed ‘but how much alive you are’. Be an explorer of ‘your own streams and oceans’, he advised, a Columbus of thoughts, and not one of trade or imperial ambitions.

  Thoreau maintained as constant a dialogue with the books he read as he did with himself – always asking, prodding, niggling and questioning. When he saw a crimson cloud hanging deep over the horizon on a crisp cold winter day, he berated a part of himself that ‘You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all rays’, and then that this explanation was not good enough ‘for this red vision excites me, stirs my blood’. He was a scientist who wanted to understand the formation of clouds, but equally a poet enraptured by those billowing red mountains of the heavens.

  What kind of science was this, Thoreau asked, ‘which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination’? This was what Humboldt had written about in Cosmos. Nature, Humboldt explained, had to be described with scientific accuracy but without being ‘deprived thereby of the vivifying breath of imagination’. Knowledge did not ‘chill the feelings’ because the senses and the intellect were connected. More than any other, Thoreau followed Humboldt’s belief in the ‘deeply-seated bond’ that united knowledge and poetry. Humboldt allowed Thoreau to weave together science and imagination, the particular and the whole, the factual with the wonderful.

  Thoreau continued to search for this balance. Over the years, the struggle became less intense, but he remained worried. One evening, for example, when he had spent a day at a river, scribbling page after page of notes on botany and wildlife, he finished the entry with the sentence: ‘Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.’ But as he plunged into Humboldt’s writing, Thoreau slowly lost his fear. Cosmos taught him that the collection of individual observations created a portrait of nature as a whole, in which each detail was like a thread in the tapestry of the natural world. Just as Humboldt had found harmony in diversity, so too did Thoreau. Detail led to the unified whole or, as Thoreau put it, ‘a true account of the actual is the rarest poetry.’

  The most graphic proof of this change came when Thoreau stopped using one journal for ‘poetry’ and another for ‘facts’. He no longer knew which was which. It had all become one and the same, because ‘the most interesting & beautiful facts are so much the more poetry,’ as Thoreau said. The book that became the expression of this was Walden.

  When he had left his cabin at Walden Pond, in September 1847, Thoreau had returned with a first draft of Walden, and had then worked on several different versions. By mid-1849 he had put it aside and it took him three years to return to the manuscript – three years during which he became a serious naturalist, a meticulous record-keeper and an admirer of Humboldt’s books. In January 1852 Thoreau unpacked the manuscript once more and began to rewrite Walden completely.2

  Over the next few years he doubled the book’s original length, filling it with the scientific observations he had made. With that Walden became a completely different book from the one he had set out to write. He was ready, he said, ‘I feel myself uncommonly prepared for some literary work.’ In noting every detail of the patterns and changes of the seasons, Thoreau developed a deep perception of nature’s cycles and interrelationships. Once he had realized that butterflies, flowers and birds reappeared every spring, everything else made sense. ‘The year is a circle,’ he wrote in April 1852. He began to compile long seasonal lists of leafing out and flowering times. No one else, Thoreau insisted, had observed these intricate differences as he had. His journal would become ‘a book of the seasons’, he wrote, mentioning Humboldt in the same entry.

  In Walden’s early drafts Thoreau had concentrated on criticizing American culture and avarice, and what he saw as the increasing focus on money and urban life – using his life in the cabin as counterpart. Now, in the new version the passing of spring, summer, autumn and winter became his guiding light. ‘I enjoy the friendship of the seasons,’ he wrote in Walden. Thoreau began, as he said, to ‘look at Nature with new eyes’ – eyes that Humboldt had given him. He explored, collected, measured and connected just as Humboldt did. His methods and observations, Thoreau told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1853, were based on his admiration of Views of Nature, the book in which Humboldt had combined elegant prose and vivid descriptions with scientific analysis.

  All the great passages of Walden have their origin in Thoreau’s journals. Here Thoreau jumped from one subject to the next, breathlessly engaging with nature, with earth as ‘living poetry’, with frogs that ‘snore in the river’ and with the joy of birdsong in spring. His journal was ‘the record of my love’ and of his ‘ecstasy’ – both poetry and science. Even Thoreau himself questioned if anything he would ever write would be better than his journal, comparing his words to flowers, wondering if they would look better assembled in a vase (his metaphor for a book) or in the meadow where he had found them (his journal). By now he was so proud of his exact knowledge of Concord’s nature that he became upset if anybody else was able to identify a plant that he didn’t recognize. ‘Henry Thoreau could hardly suppress his indignation,’ Emerson wrote one day to his brother, not without glee, ‘that I should bring him a berry he had not seen.’

  Thoreau’s new approach didn’t mean that his doubts disappeared completely. He continued to question himself. ‘I am dissipated by so many observations,’ he wrote in 1853. He feared that his knowledge was becoming too ‘detailed & scientific’ and that he might have exchanged sweeping prospects as wide as the heavens for the narrow views of the microscope. ‘With all your science can you tell how it is,’ he asked despairingly, ‘that light comes into the soul’ but he still finished this journal entry with detailed descriptions of blossoms, birdsongs, butterflies and the ripening of berries.

  Instead of composing poems, he investigated nature – and these observations became his raw material for Walden. ‘Nature will be my language full of poetry,’ he said. In his journal, the tumbling crystal-clear water of a brook was ‘the pure blood of nature’ and then a few lines down, he queries the dialogue between himself and nature but concludes that ‘this close habit of observation – in Humboldt–Darwin & others. Is it to be kept up long – this science.’ Thoreau plaited science and poetry into one thick strand.

  To make sense of it all, Thoreau searched for a unifying perspective. When he climbed a mountain, he saw the lichen on the rocks at his feet but also the trees far in the distance. Like Humboldt on Chimborazo, he perceived them in relation to each other and ‘thus reduced to a single picture’ – repeating the idea of the Naturgemälde. Or during a winter storm, one cold January morning, as the snowflakes swirled around him, Thoreau watched the delicate crystalline structures and compared them to the perfectly symmetrical petals of flowers. The same law, he said, that shaped the earth also shaped the snowflakes, pronouncing with emphasis, ‘Order. Kosmos.’

  Humboldt had plucked the word Kosmos from ancient Greek where it meant order and beauty – but one that was created through the human eye. With this Humboldt brought together the external physical world with the internal world of the mind. Humboldt’s Cosmos was about the relationship between humankind and nature, and Thoreau placed himself firmly into this cosmos. At Walden Pond, he wrote, ‘I have a little world all to myself’ – his own sun, stars and moon. ‘Why should I feel lonely?’ he asked. ‘Is not our planet in the
Milky Way?’ He was no more lonely than a flower or bumblebee in a meadow because like them he was part of nature. ‘Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?’ he asked in Walden.

  One of Walden’s most famous passages encapsulates just how much Thoreau had changed since he had read Humboldt. For years, every spring, Thoreau had observed the thawing of the sandy railway embankments near Walden Pond. As the sun warmed the frozen ground and melted the ice, purple streams of sand would be released and seep out, lacing the embankment with the shapes of leaves: a sandy foliage that preceded the leafing out of the trees and the shrubs in spring.

  In his original manuscript, written in the cabin at the pond, Thoreau had described this ‘blooming’ of the sand in an aside of less than 100 words. Now it stretched to more than 1,500 words and became one of the central passages in Walden. The sands, he wrote, displayed ‘the anticipation of the vegetable leaf’. It was the ‘prototype’, he said, just like Goethe’s urform. A phenomenon that had just been ‘unaccountably interesting and beautiful’ in the original manuscript now came to illustrate no less than what Thoreau called ‘the principle of all the operations of Nature’.

  These few pages illustrate how Thoreau had matured. When he described the phenomenon on the last day of December 1851, just as he was reading Humboldt, it became a metaphor for the cosmos. The sun that warmed the banks was like the thoughts that warmed his blood, he said. Earth was not dead but ‘lives & grows’. And then, as he observed it again in spring 1854, just as he was finishing the final draft of Walden, he wrote in his journal that earth was ‘living poetry … not a fossil earth – but a living specimen’, words that he included almost verbatim in his final version of Walden. ‘Earth is all alive,’ he wrote, and nature ‘in full blast’. This was Humboldt’s nature, thumping with life. The coming of spring, Thoreau concluded, was ‘like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos’. It was life, nature and poetry all at the same time.