In Walden he called A Week a “basket of a delicate texture,” giving the clue to his method: baskets are woven warp and woof. Here, the structuring warp is the brothers’ two-week river journey, the narrative thread; onto it the artist has woven the woof of reading and reflection, crosswise strands giving strength and texture, making the journey not a vacation from thought, as Lowell wanted, but an occasion for thinking more deeply. River and book move forward together, fusing progress and accident, purpose and randomness. Existential conflict becomes the key to the book’s design: a rhythm of motion and rest, purpose and chance, the spark of a moment and the long shimmer of memory. What holds it all together is the dynamic bond of brother and brother, river and boat, the long flowing lapse of linear time and the free-floating self who lives both in time and out of it, flowing with the lapse of the river or stepping aside onto the solid ground of shore. As the pages turn, days pass and time deepens—as the brothers discover when their many days of upward voyaging are “unraveled” on their final day’s rapid passage downward and home.89
The poet inscribes this dance of dualism on the first page by announcing the river has two names: “Concord” and “Musketaquid, or Grass-ground.” Only one name is permanent: “It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks.”90 Through the Indian name runs the eternal river of grass and water, Thoreau’s axis of nature and poetry; through the English name runs the transient river of farms and canals, Thoreau’s axis of history and politics. At every place along the river, Thoreau plays off the two names to signal two sets of concerns: an eternal world of natural growth and harmonic rhythms, and a human world of historical change, where peace is precarious and harmonies soon end as the river of time sweeps the brothers’ world ever deeper into the past. A Week is a complicated, many-folded book because even as Thoreau was writing it, adding layer upon layer over ten years, it kept shifting. His research into colonial and Native American history complicated his sense of time. His updates on the landscape showed it disappearing as the factories grew, the dams rose, and the railroads lengthened; his insertions of current events, such as the Mexican War and his jailing for nonpayment of taxes, tangled a peaceful and idyllic past with a troubled and challenging future. Time shifted as Thoreau wrote the book; it shifts constantly as one reads it.
The boat is the vehicle—that sturdy homemade fisherman’s dory, the Musketaquid. Its very name flags the brothers’ wistful identification with the Indians, people who are, like them, out-of-doors and out-of-time. It’s an amphibious craft, Thoreau tells us with a wink, “a creature of two elements,” all fish below with wooden keel, all bird above with cotton sail, and painted two colors, green below for the land and blue above for the water and sky.91 In this amphibious craft, the two brothers—one present, one remote—navigate all the multiplying dualisms, weaving them together into a new and higher wisdom: real and ideal, surface and depth, holy and profane. Thoreau’s “week” announces his book as a seven-days’ creation story, a genesis of knowledge. So each weekday on the water gives back its own reflections, day by day, while the whole journey circles out and back—out to the misty mountain, the anticipated climax. But the older Thoreau who had also written “Ktaadn” can no longer bear to include his juvenile ascent with John. So time shifts even beyond the pages of this book: forces from outside its pages ripple inward and leave puzzling gaps and omissions. Every reader expects the narrative to climax on the top of Mount Washington. Instead, in its place, there is nothing but a single, Indian name—“AGIOCOCHOOK”—and a blank quarter-page. On this mythical terrain, Thoreau will honor not the heroic quest of Western tradition but the sacred silence evoked by the Algonquin name.92
As it turns out, the mountain climax happened two days earlier, in a digression about awakening alone on the summit of Mount Saddleback to a world sealed off by clouds. The seventh-day return sweeps us swiftly home, to a world that is familiar and yet not: as the keel of the boat “recognized” the Concord mud, “we leaped gladly on shore, drawing it up, and fastening it to the wild apple-tree, whose stem still bore the mark which its chain had worn in the chafing of the spring freshets.”93 That enchained wild apple tree points to the source of this book’s strangeness: Thoreau’s tree of knowledge, in his retelling of Genesis, turns out to be a tough, resilient domestic tree gone feral. And those apple trees, common everywhere in Thoreau’s home landscape, were, like so many other things he loved, swiftly disappearing. At the end of his life, Thoreau would give this title to his only autobiography: “Wild Apples.”
Reviewers found this meandering binary structure—or this “Musketaquidding” structure, as Thoreau joked—maddening. But Lowell’s disgust at being invited to a river party only to be preached at points to a more serious problem: Thoreau had broken all bounds of good taste by writing not merely poetry, but what he called “SCRIPTURE” for a modern age. It was one thing to edit “Ethnical Scriptures” for the Dial, but now Thoreau was playing with fire, putting the Christian New Testament on a level with other world religious writings: “It is necessary not to be Christian, to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ,” he ventured. “I would say to the readers of Scriptures, if they wish for a good book to read, read the Bhagvat-Geeta. . . . It deserves to be read with reverence even by Yankees, as a part of the sacred writings of a devout people.”94 Whoosh! In a stroke, Thoreau swept the modern world away for a new world infinitely deeper and wider. As a child trapped indoors during all those Sabbaths, bookless except for the one Book, he had stared out the window, scanning the clouds, hoping to see a hawk cutting open the sky. Now he sailed on its wings: “I know of no book that has so few readers. There is none so truly strange, and heretical, and unpopular. . . . ‘Seek first the kingdom of heaven.’—‘Lay not up for yourself treasures on earth.’” “Think of this, Yankees!,” he mocks. “Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meeting-house upon another.”95 The horrified George Ripley was right: this was revolting, a revolt.
Even had it sold well, A Week would never have found a wide audience. Thoreau had been instructed by the era’s most deeply radical thinkers: Orestes Brownson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass. He was experimenting wildly with form, dangerously in thought, assuming he was on solid ground—taking the next step, following the logic of his elders’ critiques of social convention and historical Christianity to offer a new moral framework strong enough to bear the weight of modern science, eloquent enough to assert that preacher and poet were one, and sharp enough to address the ethical challenges of slavery, industrialization, and wars of conquest. Aunt Maria had hoped no editor would print her nephew’s blasphemy, but self-publishing with Munroe meant Henry’s words went straight from his manuscript pages into print. Genius, to be heard, must not outrun its audience—but Thoreau had left his audience far behind. Yet his fundamental insight never wavered: “Your scheme must be the frame-work of the universe; all other schemes will soon be ruins.”96 He had gone to Walden to see through the matrix to the bedrock. He had gotten a glimpse of it on Katahdin and confirmed it under the skies of Walden Pond. He had spent ten years trying to find the best words to share all he’d found, only to fail.
Thoreau had written two good books and published one; the other he put away. His only choice was to start over.
CHAPTER SEVEN
From Concord to Cosmos: Thoreau’s Turn to Science (1849–1851)
The man of genius knows what he is aiming at; nobody else knows.
Henry David Thoreau, December 27, 1858
“The law which reveals”: Cape Cod
The summer of 1849 was so hot that the children were cooped up indoors and Emerson’s gardener had to pump water to keep his new pear trees alive. In the fields, the corn rolled and withered, and by the end of July the farmers were cutting
it down, salvaging what they could. Despite the heat, Thoreau was on the move. That September, when the acorns were still green but the poke stems were ripening purple, he inventoried all the places within a day’s walk: “the great meadows—The Baker Farm—Conantum—Beck-Stows swamp—the Great Fields,” Nagog Hill, “famous for huckleberries where I have seen hundreds of bushels at once—Nashoba—of Indian memory—from which you see Uncanunuc Mt well,” Strawberry Hill, Annursnuck, Ponkawtasset, Walden Pond, Sandy Pond, White Pond—which needed a better name, perhaps “God’s Drop.”1 It was an inventory of possibility. Transitions are hard to mark, but one can take this list as the moment when Thoreau began to reinvent himself as the writer of world fame.
Thoreau had always walked; it was how a man without means got from here to there. But in the previous year, he realized, “my walks have extended themselves,” and after his morning work, almost every afternoon, he visited “some new hill or pond or wood many miles distant.” In another year, these long walks would no longer be a diversion from work; they would be the work itself, his major literary project. He was, for the first time, really free: free of Emerson’s expectations, free of the literary marketplace, free of all hopes for travel abroad. With roads to a conventional literary career closed, Thoreau veered off-road, learning to see familiar landscapes with a traveler’s eye—an “advancing eye,” wrote Emerson, that saw “rivers, & which way they run . . . that like the heavens journeys too & sojourns not.” Thoreau’s long years writing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers helped him craft that insider’s outside view of American history and society. Now he hungered for a wider view of the universe—not “that old Jewish scheme” taught on Sundays, but the true geography of “heaven’s topography.”2 Such blasphemy outraged his readers even as they admired his limpid nature descriptions. For Thoreau, though, preaching and river parties were not two things but one—not a vague religious pantheism, but a serious attempt to reach beyond the traps of unthinking social convention to true “geo-graphy,” earth-writing, inscribed not in the leaves of dusty books but in the strata of the planet itself.
“Obey the law which reveals and not the law revealed,” he wrote.3 He meant the laws outlined in such books of science as Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33), a foundational work and the first book of modern science he read, slipping it off Emerson’s shelves in 1840. The opening was irresistible: Lyell reached beyond Genesis to the Hindu “Great Year,” citing the Institutes of Menu to show how the world’s most ancient religions—Hindu, Egyptian, and Greek—all recognized, in the fossils buried in the earth, the cyclical creation and destruction of worlds across unimaginable time scales. Lyell’s vision of deep time showed that Earth’s strata were the leaves of a great book of creation, overturning orthodox biblical chronologies and allying the most ancient scriptures with the deepest insights of modern science. Anyone could see this: a simple telescope turned to the heavens revealed astronomical distances measured in millions of light-years and entire world systems in every stage of creation and collapse; geology revealed that those heavens are literally under one’s feet. For as Lyell demonstrated, the greatest of revolutions were caused by the smallest of changes, accumulating through eons to transform the planet: mountains uplifted inch by inch by earthquakes, worn away grain by grain by raindrops. Over and over Thoreau inscribed Lyell’s fundamental insight into his Journal: “We discover the causes of all past change in the present invariable order of the universe.” The present is the key to the past, and to the future as well; the pulse of the universe is beating still.4
Reading Lyell had changed how Thoreau understood the world. He extended Lyell’s insight to the human world as well: “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.”5 While one cannot, in a day, see mountains rising or wearing away, one can in a day see the creative processes at work; imagination does the rest. Thoreau longed to understand the workings of things, and, like Emerson, he believed this was poet’s work: “The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions.” But unlike Emerson, Thoreau calibrated those insights with the instruments of science and engineering. “How many new relations a foot-rule alone will reveal, and to how many things still this has not been applied! What wonderful discoveries have been, and may still be, made, with a plumb line, a level, a surveyor’s compass, a thermometer, or a barometer! Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.” This hymn to science shows Thoreau cashing out the discovery he had made surveying Walden Pond with plumb line and compass. Early in 1851 he repeated the experiment on White Pond, “God’s Drop,” and he entered the confirming data into Walden.6 As his eye searched out causes and processes, his hand grasped with equal ease pencil and foot rule, compass and thermometer, earth and world.
This didn’t mean giving up on Transcendentalism, but it did mean giving Transcendentalism a fresh spin. In Nature, Emerson announced that “nature is the symbol of spirit,” and natural facts are the materialization of preexisting “Ideas in the mind of God.” When Thoreau first read these words, they cracked the shell of Harvard open: every least object in nature signified a hidden life and a final cause. For years it was all he needed. But now, at the end of A Week, he turned on Emerson with an anguished plea: “May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?”7 On the high cold tablelands of Katahdin, Thoreau had cried out for “Contact! Contact!” He meant literally: body to body, savors and tastes, odors rank and sweet, rainwashed, sun-beaten, melted by the song of the wood thrush, absorbed into the muck of the meadows. After sketching his list of wild places that he could walk to any day of the week, Thoreau added his reason why: “How near to good is what is wild. There is the marrow of nature—there her divine liquors—that is the wine I love. . . . A town is saved not by any righteous men in it but by the woods & swamps that surround it.”8 At the far end of this, thought Emerson, was madness. Thoreau, with nothing more to lose, would defy Emerson and pursue his madness to the end of wisdom.
· · ·
In October 1849, Thoreau followed his new path to the shore of the wild ocean. After two summers with no excursions, he was ready for a good long walk, and a glance at the map of Massachusetts told him where to go: Cape Cod. Just look at it! There must be a good thirty miles of uninterrupted beach along Cape Cod’s outermost shore. Early on the morning of October 9, he and Ellery Channing boarded the train to Boston, planning to ferry across the bay to Provincetown and walk south, or “up,” the Cape toward its connection with the mainland. But when they got to the harbor, they found the ocean roiling with a violent storm that kept the ship in port. And posted in the streets were fresh handbills: “Death! 145 lives lost at Cohasset!” Three days before, the brig St. John, sailing from Galway, Ireland, had foundered in the high winds and heavy seas, breaking up on the treacherous rocks just south of Boston. Of 120 souls on board, only 23 were rescued. Bodies were washing ashore as far south as Scituate. The St. John was a “famine ship,” packed with desperate Irish refugees fleeing mass starvation. Thoreau and Channing hopped the cars to Cohasset, squeezing in among hundreds of Irish heading down for the funeral.
Chance and contingency: who was conducting that funeral but the Reverend Joseph Osgood, the man Ellen Sewall—Thoreau’s one romance—had married. Thoreau and Channing stopped at the parsonage to visit with Ellen and Joseph, and Joseph walked with them to the nearby beach, where the three men fell in step with the crowd, the Irish seeking lost relatives and the curious seeking a souvenir, all streaming over the sand past the fresh-dug open grave, “a large hole, like a cellar,” while farm wagons rumbled up from the beach hauling rough boar
d coffins stacked three each. The fence was lined for a mile or more with carriages. The friends stepped through to the beach beyond, walking slowly, pausing to study bodies still uncovered or fragments of wrecked ship, watching families watch the waves or peer into one coffin after another, hoping, dreading, to find a sister, a cousin, a brother.
Thoreau was appalled. The scene was grotesque beyond all reason or calculation. Yet no one else seemed disturbed; he witnessed no signs of grief. He did see “many marble feet and matted heads . . . and one livid, swollen and mangled body of a drowned girl—who probably had intended to go out to service in some American family,” a family like his own, which included two live-in Irish servants, one who had arrived on a famine ship like this one. A practiced journalist trained in the virtues of restraint, Thoreau conveyed his shock and rage through facts on the ground—“a woman’s scarf, a gown, a straw bonnet” blowing on the beach; waves that cracked the ship’s iron braces “like an egg-shell on the rocks”; ship’s timbers so rotten he could thrust his umbrella almost through; men pulling seaweed away from the corpses, more interested in the weed than the bodies. “Drown who might, they did not forget that this weed was a valuable manure. This shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of society.”9
Cape Cod opens with this surreal scene. Thoreau might have skipped it altogether—it had nothing to do with “Cape Cod” proper. Instead, he opened his book with it. Contact? Nature’s blithe willingness to toss and mangle so many human bodies haunted everything that followed. The uncanny wildness he had encountered on Katahdin followed him to Cohasset, triggering again his brooding unease at the body’s precarity before wild nature. Late in 1857, when he was revising Cape Cod, he wrote Blake: “You must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter, and so to your own body, for it is at home there, though you are not.” Here was the paradox: without matter, soul is without life; but to be a soul, embodied, means that only through a mortal body can soul “contact” the world. This experience should be the source of your writing, he told Blake: return to it again and again, until your essay contains all that is important, nothing that is not. This can be done only afterward, at home—for what do we do when we actually reach the mountaintop? We sit down and eat our lunches. “It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do?”10 It would take Thoreau the rest of his life to “go over” this particular mountain, to put on paper what it said and what it did. For a decade he kept returning to Cape Cod. It would be published only after his death.
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