Henry David Thoreau

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Hermetic America: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau
Presentation 10 of 13

Henry David Thoreau: Jeffersonian Man in the New Age
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, March 7, 1985

Transcript:

Today is March the 7th 1985. This is the tenth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Hermetic America. Tonight's lecture is entitled Thoreau, the Jeffersonian man in the New Age.

I guess everyone knows the PRS library book sale is in the 17th of March on Saturday and Sunday. And Sunday afternoon at 1:30 there will be an auction and conducted by Roger Weir. I'm not for sale but some of the books probably are. They've got copies of Michael Mayers famous aria from 1656. Thomas Bonds The Fabio and Confessio of the Rosicrucian Fraternity 1652. The Hermetic Museum Waites great two volume set from 1893, the first English edition. Paracelsus collected works in two big huge volumes. And antic ellipses(?) limited to three hundred and fifty copies and two huge **(inaudible)** volumes. So they want you to know that there's a lot of material here. I think there's a five volume set of Javits(?) Plato and many other rare books of Mr. Hall. And I'll do the best I can to whittle money out of you at that time. I usually pay no attention that sort of thing but on those occasions where I'm justified I take revenge. I bring out my old country fair personality and work on you. Haha. With all the modern techniques. After all we've been on the Starship Enterprise for 22 years now, we've learned a lot about alien forms of life, including our own.

If it's too hot please tell us we can open the windows a little further. Some are not too hot.

I think I should call attention also to Dr. Heller's lecture series, are always of great interest. And as you know he's one of my closest friends. And I appreciate the quality of his work. And every year they celebrate Monsignor Day at his Gnostic Society. And that's in commemoration of the Cathos from the medieval times. And I think I have the the date. I think it's a Friday coming up after this one. I think it's next week. And you might enjoy that. It's always a big fest of all there's usually 60 or 70 people there. But Stefan outdoes himself on Monsignor Day. And it might be interesting to you.

It seems difficult in our time to tell where the quality is because there are so many hucksters afloat and preachers and gurus and everyone. But stefan is a legitimate, rare bird and rare jewel. He is the only living bishop in the unbroken gnostic tradition. And it goes back to Valentinus in classical times. So he is worth taking in especially on an occasion like that. I'm just regular country creature turned secular teacher.

When Jefferson died it was the greatest magical disappearance since Alexander the great. He ostensibly left no successors. He left no real doctrine. The only thing he left was a fruitful field for action. And the same thing happened in the United States that happened in Hellenistic times after Alexander's death. Everybody figured that they were as much entitled to be king as anyone else and so they all tried for power.

The first great power grab was Andrew Jackson. Who when he came into office in 1828 ussured in the era of the common
man as a great figure. And Jackson was in business for two terms. Actually three terms. His hand-picked successor Martin Van Buren, who was a little tiny man. Not quite as small as James Madison. About the size of Harry Truman. Only he had the political savvy of FDR. And Van Buren was a tremendous organizer. And he's the one that set the tone for political parties to do all of their backroom dealing before they got on to the convention floor. Unfortunately he was not an impressive man and so he lost the next election. All of his students had took over and the country was off and running.

From the time of Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln the United States had no great figure in control. The only thing that one can say is that it was planned that way. Jefferson and his friends when they had re-fashioned the United States had on purpose designed it, structured it, planned it and then unplanned it to be open. To really be an open society. And they left a field of potential in a matrix of possibilities, which were open to whoever would develop it. And consequently that era in human history gets a great surge from the American elam(?). In this country it was called, appropriately enough quite often, the era of good feelings. Or the age of reform. Everyone wanted to reform everyone else. Great plans were afoot.

One of the most telling characteristics of the era actually was initiated about the time that ended Jackson came in. It was a complete revamping of education. Education which had been stilted and stultified imported from European models had proved insufficient. And so the American Lyceum came into being. And characteristically the American Lyceum was not founded to be in any particular spot. There was no Athens. Although they called Boston the American Athens.

The early 19th century Jeffersonian Jacksonian American idea of Education was that everyone should have their own Lyceum. And so even though the first Lyceum started in Massachusetts, Wurster Massachusetts, within one year there were Lyceums springing up in adjacent towns. And after a couple of years by 1830 Lyceum's were springing up all over the United States. Augusta Maine. Concord Massachusetts. Any place where you could get several dozen people together or perhaps just one dozen. Began to organize their own style of education. It's been called mutual education. One of the great American scholars of the 40s and 50s Carl Bode wrote a book called The American Lyceum. Published by Oxford University Press in 1956. And he characterized the whole movement as the gospel of the Lyceum.

Your fellow townspeople would gather together with you. And whatever you knew about, you would talk about. And whatever they knew about, they would talk about. And everyone to take turns being audience and being teacher. And from time to time word would get out that somebody in the next city or somebody in the next county or Township had done a good job and they would be brought in. And it didn't take very long for the Lyceums to begin generating an exchange circuit.

And all through the 1830s the United States had an explosion of intelligence. Everyone was interested in everything. And of course one of the carrots on the stick, one of the lures to this mutual education, was that in the welter of ideas that came up there were glimpses of ways to make money. There were glimpses of ways to get ahead on your fellow man. And you never knew but what the talk on Thursday night might be just the thing to give you an insight so that Monday morning you could be raking it in in a better fashion. This fever, education fever, grabbed the country in the 1830s. It was akin to the gold rush but instead of looking for gold in certain areas people looked for reform in education everywhere.

There have been a great number of studied done on the reform impulse. And ususally they're just a collection of short commentaries essays. No more than three or four pages long. And there dozens of such books giving us the picture that the United States had just become ripe and opened up with possibility. And as we talked about last time the opening of a few grand strokes, like the procuring of the Florida's, the opening of the Erie Canal so that the Great Lakes were now open and navigable, meant that the United States simply was free for whatever waterways were open. And we found communities that had been very small, like Detroit, suddenly becoming very accessible strategic points. Places that had very little history before themselves, like Chicago, overnight grew into giant monstrosities. And the press people coming from the east moving west left vacancies along the Atlantic seaboard. And so the great pull of European immigration began to happen.

And so we find that the United States between Jackson and Lincoln opens up to dreams of glory. One would receive little handbills of saying so much so many hundreds of thousands of acres of tillable land are available. And so and so is organizing a wagon train and all your friends are going to go and why are you going to stay at home. This tremendous eland(?) was developing. It's curious that the major figure of this whole time Henry David Thoreau. Who is the real inheritor of the Jeffersonian elam(?), largely stayed at home. He was in fact very much like a spiritual lightning rod.



I have an excerpt here from the Journal, 1851. This is from a little section called walking by night. Here's a little bit of American mysticism, 1851. "I hear the sound of Haywood's Brook falling into Fair Haven pond, inexpressively refreshing to my senses. It seems to flow through my very bones. I hear it with insatiable thirst. It alles some Sandy heat in me. It affects my circulations. Methinks my arteries have sympathy with it. What is it I hear but the pure water falls within me. In the circulation of my blood, the streams that fall into my heart. What mist do I ever see but such as hangover and rise from my blood. The sound of this gurgling water running thus by night as by day fall, and all my dashes fills my buckets, overflows my float boards, turns all the machinery of my nature makes me a flume. A sluice way to the springs of nature. Thus I am wash. thus I drink and quench my thirst. Where are the streams fall into the lake if they are only a few inches more elevated all walkers may hear."

We're just a few inches away from a universal revelation. The revelation was an American one. It was the first place that the common man was freed in a universal way. And from this opening came a most peculiar heralding vision that the United States might off..often have to return back to the world of its origins the correct vision of the purposes of man. That the United States might have to educate the rest of the world in what the purposes of life were. And this was the guiding star. Secret, invisible, not often explicitly made but this was the driving force behind the entire reform movement.

One of the figures that comes out of this milieu, Bronson Alcott. Everyone has heard of his daughter Louisa May Alcott and her little children's books. Well Bronson was an American genius. He lived for almost 90 years. He didn't die until Louisa May died in 1888 but he was born in the 1700s. He caught book fever when he was in his forties. He was just a preacher, an educator. And suddenly he got the vision that learning was open to anyone. It suddenly occurred to him that it was real. That the possibility was there. And Alcott, who had funds, took himself to Philadelphia and locked himself up for three years next to the American Philosophical Society there in the Philadelphia Public Library. And he read everything. Absolutely wide open. He read thousands of books. And he was astounded because he brought a matured mind to these books. A concerned mind. An educators mind. Not only to find out for himself but to find out how to give this to others. And again and again Bronson Alcott found that the world was full of a heritage that was never used. He suddenly became enthused about Plato and he had never thought about him before. He came to love Socrates wonderful way of taking you step by step. And he would say I love Jesus but I need Socrates too because he shows me how to think step by step and gain a wider appreciation. And Alcott was typical of the reform movement. it began with self reform, the attempt to restructure oneself and then carry that out into some working situation.

The best communication network of the time were the Lyceum schools. Now they weren't really schools they were more like meeting places this room this facility here is a late 20th century dribble of once...what once was a mighty torrent in this country. In fact the the Lyceum movements flourished until probably the 1840s. And in the mid 1840s a very interesting thing happened. There were so many individuals who became quite good at lecturing, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, that they simply were in demand wherever they went. But lesser lights were beginning to be ignored.

And so the making of superstars got rid of all of the community help. And instead of having mutual education you had random lecturing. You had people waiting for months to hear the expert come. To hear the great man come. I mean no one wanted to hear his neighbor any longer. And so slowly that activity moved from a community project to building up a superstar system. And by the time of the Civil War, when a lot of this activity was held in abeyance in reconstruction times the Lyceum movement came back and initiated the Chautauqua. The traveling lecture circuits. And especially there at Chautauqua in upstate New York. One could come in the summer and it was like the rock festivals of the 60s. It was a chance for thousands of people to get together. But we're talking about the beginnings of it now. We're talking about the first impulses for this reform movement. For this Lyceum movement.

And it is the natural context within which Henry David Thoreau will discover himself. He needed to have a body. A social body. His own physical body was tubercular and not very healthy. He died young from tuberculosis. And he was only for his wonderful physical regimen that he lived as long as he did. He was born in July, July 12, 1817. And when he came in to this life he was a frail individual. His mother and father tried to make a interesting home for their children. He had two sisters and a brother, John and Helen and Sophie. Sophie would live to edit her brothers works after his death. John would die in 1842 just after they had gone on the Merrimack and Concord rivers. But Thoreau coming in needed to have a social body. He needed to have a set of relationalities to balance out the mystical element that came in with him.

I've mentioned several times that the view in India is that Thoreau was Upanishadic genius reincarnated as an American frontiersman. And that he and Whitman are the two Maha Yogi's of American civilization. In fact Thoreaus laconic humor sometimes leads us in a Mark Twain like tangent away from his penetrating quality of presence. When once asked at a meal what does she like best he replied the nearest. He had that kind of plain humor.

As he was growing as a little boy, the father who was an itinerant businessman trying his hand various villages around in the Concord area, finally coming back and settled on trying to make pencils. And pencils of course were difficult to manufacture in this country because the German pencils were ever so much better. It would be Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau who had finally analyzed the German lens. And see that even though their graphite was no better than ours that the matrix that held the graphite was finer. And that they baked the graphite. And Thoreau would perfect the American pencil through various experiments. And when he did the Thoreau pencils were in much demand. The Thoreau's were a little reluctant to get a patent on this. And so they tried to keep the the growing rooms of pencil production secret from their neighbors. So the technique would not be too well known.

But Thoreau as a youngster, growing up, was always a daydreamer. He was one of those kids who was always looking to see where he stepped. And not looking so much so that he would step three of something as two cents and realize what he was doing. He had that kind of equality even as a little boy. He was ridiculed somewhat by playmates and friends. But Henry had a tremendous intelligence about him. And so he was picked by the family to go to higher school. And his academic background was quite unusual. In Concord a number of parents had gotten together and realized that public education wasn't all that it should be. And then this Lyceum movement was going on. But what about the children. So they organized the Concord Academy. And in the Concord Academy selected children were given the best education that they could have. Languages, mathematics, reading.

So when Thoreau was picked to go to Harvard he was quite well prepared. Except in his attitude. Henry was very laconic about organizations. He didn't much care to cooperate. And when he took the entrance exams for Harvard he barely got in. The president of Harvard at that time was Josiah Quincy. And he took throw aside he said you have come within an inch of not getting in here. You have failed Greek. You have failed Latin. And you failed mathematics. We know that you know these subjects so we're going to be watching your attitude. Well Thoreau did rather well. Out of the whole Harvard class I think there were 250 students in Harvard and about 50 or 60 in his class. He finally worked his way up to be rated 6th out of 50 or 60. so he did very well.

But he was weak physically. His physical frame was completely inadequate to his incarnation. And so when he brought himself home from Harvard, after a year and a half, he was quite ill. And had to spend some time lounging around the house getting himself back into shape. It was at this time that Harvard came up with a policy that promising young students who were poor could stay out for a period of 13 weeks. What we would call a quarter now. And they could go to work and earn money to help themselves through. The tuition for Harvard in the 1830's was 179 dollars a year. Which is a lot of money at that time. And Thoreau would win academic prizes of $25 usually every year which would defer about 15%. But he was having physical problems and also economic problems.

And so he was taken on by very curious American genius named Orestes Brownson to teach for him for period. Now Bronson is almost unknown. The only book that was ever done and Brownson was done by Arthur M Schlesinger jr. about 50 years ago. And Brownson was a a very weird fellow. He had very definite feelings that there should be answers in this world. In fact he would start out as a Presbyterian minister in his life. He would move to Unitarianism and he would end up as a bonafide Roman Catholic. He had that he had the kind of a career that TS Eliot had. There must be answers and therefore if you find them they must be the answers. Brownson, when Thoreau met him, was still the searching phase. He was still thinking that there needs to be radical reform but there also needs to be solutions and answers. And that a man ought to get a hold of his own destiny. And so here young Thoreau, impressionable, 18 years old, went to work teaching for Brownson.

This is what Schlesinger has to say about Brownson. This is in, in the 1830s. "Brownson also developed his talent for nosing out anything savory of wig isn't(?). He pointed mournfully to the happy future for corporations in the vested rights doctrine. And opposed the establishment of a State Board of Education as the entering wedge of centralization." Does this sound familiar? "Even when in the fashion of the day he criticized America's literary dependence on England. His complaints turned into savage attacks on conservatism. One of Brownson's great points was that there should be an American literature. A domestic Native American literature. That a people are healthy and wholesome on the basis of the literary imagination. Which is after all the shaping spirit of the vision. If you don't have a state religion. If you don't have a state politics. If you have a wide open society there has to be a shaping force. And Brownson thought in wide open America it should be its literature. We should have a great literature. And to produce a great literature we need to have great independent minds. Independent talents. Who forgo all of the classical models. Who forego all of the European models. Where will they get their inspiration? Why Bronson said from the american land of course. The land will tell us what we need to know."

And so here was a wonderful Thoreau, young and impressionable, teenager working with a man like this. And they used to have conversations far into the night. Brownson said that there probably should be some great social crisis to bring people awake. That the trouble with Americans is that everything was to free and to good. That the whole matter must come up in some crisis. And he said that out of this crisis will be the birth of American literature. But he also was saying this to Thoreau at a time when the United States began to experience one of its first real economic crisis, the panic of 1837. And in the analysis of that problem they found that the prime cause of this Depression had been the grotesque over expansion of credit by promoters and speculators working through a loose and deffective banking system. Does that sound familiar?

And so this wild manipulation of credit had induced everyone to work on speculation. In that instead of developing public lands. instead of going to the land so actually developed it. That the lands were sold and then sold again and sold again and they were paper for profits. And this pyramid of paper profits was all based on the use of the national vision that the government would support any openness whatsoever. That the government was there to serve the people. And what the people wanted now was some assurance that if worse things came to worse the United States would pick up the tab somehow. And of course it was impossible.

It was at this time that Thoreau would graduate from Harvard. And the first place that had a position actually sought out Thoreau and he was given a teaching job. But the difficulty with the teaching job, it paid $500 a year, which was a lot of money at that time. But Thoreaus way of handling teachers...uuh students was to open up his capacities and try to take the students mystically into his vibration as we would say today. And so he would try very gently to let the classroom and the students do what they wanted. A kind of the 1950's version of Dewey's progressivism. Not that that was Dewey's progressivism but it was what they thought in the 1950s it should be. And Thoreau was taken aside by the principal of the school and told that he should thrash the students when they got out of hand. And Thoreau was stunned by this order. He went in, he thrashed two or three students. He was sick at heart and he handed in his resignation. Well it's hard to get a teaching job when you do that. And Thoreau actually never again was really offered a bonafide teaching position.

He went back into the family business. But interesting enough he also contacted the gentleman who had spoke quite highly of him several times to the president of Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Who had moved into Concord. His...while Emerson's grandfather had lived there in Concord. But Emerson moved back into Concord in the middle 1830s and set up a shop there. he bought. He married for the second time beautiful woman named Lydian. And he bought a wonderful old house there.
Which I think is still there, is the public library there. And right next to the Lexington Road. And because of Emerson's growing fame interesting individual started to visit Concord. And Emerson would introduce Thoreau to all of these individuals.

The impetus for this meeting had actually taken place at a conference. There had been a rather large educational conference. And many of the people who were in attendance there decided that they didn't want to hear the kinds of speakers who were offering their opinions. And so they took themselves to a hotel room. And they, I can't find a list right now, but the individuals who were there in that hotel room were Bronson Alcott and Emerson and Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, William Ellery Channing. The whole group that would become the transcendentalists. And they decided that they needed to have a vehicle of communication for the larger community. That they were able to talk to each other. That they were able to talk in lyceum programs. But they needed a vehicle that would amplify their voice to a larger audience. One even transatlantic. And so they founded a periodical called the Dial. And the dial was a magazine, quarterly founded in 1840.

And the first editor was the fascinating woman Margaret Fuller. She was one of the most romantic figures in early American history. She was a woman's right suffragette long before her time. Her way rather like George Sand on the continent, her way was simply by showing what a woman could do to change man's view of what woman was capable of. When Margaret Fuller first went to visit Emerson in his house. She went to stay for two weeks and stayed for three. The first impression Emerson had was this nasal voice busybody who came in and started charming everybody. And he retreated right away to his study. But then sitting there and getting over his sulc, if we can call it that. He started to listen to her conversation he was astounded at how well-read she was. How insightful she was. And pretty soon he realized that everybody in the house was sitting there listening to her. So he went out and sat out too.

Margaret Fuller was one of these captivating types of individuals who was just full of fire and insight. And she would be darned if she was going to be stopped just simply because she was feminine. And she often said I have a man's ambition but I also have a woman's heart.

And she was taken in a small boat by Thoreau one time out on Walden Pond. This is before his more ascetic days. And in the moonlight they had a beautiful talk. But then Thoreau got to thinking about the fact that no she's seven years older and she is awfully energetic. And I just don't know what I'm going to do. And so it never worked out. But and Margaret fuller would not get married until she went to Europe and fell in with the Italian revolutionaries. Mazzini and so forth. And she married an Italian count.

She was the editor of The Dial for the first two years of The Dials publication, 1840 to1842. And then Emerson would be the editor for the next two years. And The Dial became the amplified voice of this group who were called transcendentalists. The transcendentalists by virtue of the fact that they rejected the John Locke expressed opinion that man at birth is a clean slate. A tabula rasa, a blank tablet. Which was a development from Descartes. From the Cartesian personal view. From the mechanistic amplification of the early enlightenment. They rejected this and went back rather to those solutions that Kant and Hegel had offered. That man in fact has transcendental capacities that come in with him at birth. And that these capacities are what flow through his life. What are the invisible streams beneath the appearances that we see.

Emerson often when he would go on walks with Thoreau, slow walks around Concord, would remark how refreshing it was to walk with somebody who sees the invisible energies of life. Just like you do. Not being baffled by the seeming static mists of form but being able to detect this wonderful gentle current of comprehension that informs the motion of all living things. including the clouds, the stars and the planet itself.

So The Dial became an amplification a voice for this transcendental outlook. And Thoreau in this group was very often seen as the junior to Emerson. Emerson was about 14 years older than Thoreau. But by the time Thoreau came to Emerson he was quite fully formed. He was 20, 21 years old. But Thoreau was a whole different quality of person from Emerson. Emerson was the learned man. Thoreau was the insightful man. Emerson was the mad. Thoreau is more like a classic Asian sage. He has that quality of kingliness on his manner before the world and sageliness in his regard for the universality of his presence.

Thoreau more than any of the other figures of the time sensed the cosmic in the individual. Not only in the individual phenomenon occurrents but that somehow the cosmic in oneself was the integrating purpose of it all. That the appreciation of a snowstorm was not just the blind recording of a meteorological phenomenon but was the active conscious participation of the guiding spirit of the world in its basic root processes. And for Thoreau this was what was essential.
It is curious to see that Emerson and Thoreau almost never refer to Jefferson. They almost never go back to Franklin. Franklin and Jefferson might have just as well been ancient Egyptian figures. And yet the very qualities that we have seen that Franklin worked so hard to engender. The qualities of mind in a person. Those qualities with which Jefferson tried so valiantly to disperse into workable of forms of activity. Into workable matrixes of possibility. Were all there for these individuals. And yet this generation taking advantage of the invisible possibilities made for them so tryingly over the hundred years that Franklin and Jefferson worked on them, had no conscious regard for this. They seemed to assume that they were born to the purple. and therefore royally(?) moved their presence gracefully in this cosmic awareness.

Thoreau almost never was able to regard human beings as phenomenally objective. They were always for him somewhat variations of an energy vibration. And so it was very curious that when Thoreau finally did fall in love, he was unable to see his love as a woman. As a person. She was rather a questionmark. A questionable quality that needed to display itself in a certain esoteric way. And if that didn't happen there would be no meeting. Her name was Sewall, Ellen S-e-w-a-l-l. came from an old patrician New England family. And by New England family I mean outspoken people, men and women. And they lived it not too far away from Concord. In fact one of her aunt's roomed with the Thoreaus. And so there was a natural liaison. In fact her younger brother, who was 11 years old, was sent to be tutored by Thoreau. And Thoreau was amazed by the qualites of this young boy. And then he was astounded by his older sister.

You can turn your cassette now. And we will commence playing again on the other side after a brief pause.

END OF SIDE 1

And he was astounded at the qualities of his grown-up sister. She was 17 when she was brought into his kin in Concord. And he fell madly in love with Ellen Sewall. But for Thoreau what he brought to that experience was not a manly pride of purpose. Not a personality which is ready to work with or try to work with another human being. He brought a force of personality that was wispy as the wind itself. An expectation that was constellation wide. And he expected that if she were the true one for him that she would know it without his having to say it. And he records in his journal, "She couldn't possibly be the one because she has asked questions. If she were the one she should have known without needing to ask the questions."

But nevertheless Thoreau, somewhat goaded on by his brother, who also fell in love with her, who also courted her who also proposed to her, and was turned down. the father's criticism of poor Jon Thoreau was that he was a transcendentalist. He hadn't even met Henry yet. He finally sent a letter to Ellen Sewell asking her to marry him and knowing that she would turn him down. He had already recorded the poems in his journal of the rejection. But it wasn't a rejection of a person to a person. It was that he must superintenuate himself ever closer to universal patterns. And not be deterred by the appearances of human form no matter how graceful. How enticing they might be. And so when her rejection came with the request for him to burn the letter. As she had burned his letter. She wrote to the aunt who knew them both and said it is over. It was a short letter.

Later in her 70s her children asking her did the famous Henry David Thoreau actually propose to you mother. She said yes it was a very fine letter. He was an excellent man.

Well we need to take a break here. And then we'll come back and we'll have...I've got some slides and some other material for you.
I think we need to have a little, if you'll forgive it, about five minutes of metaphysics just to illuminate a condition that was rising in the United States. When you have polarities, the polarities relate by tension. And the tension is always multiple. produces multiplicity. Pairs of opposites produce multiplicity and tremendous tension, dynamic. Yet those polarities are brought together into unity the multiplicity collapses into unity. So that with a with, a Tai Chi one sees this as a unity. The yin and the yang are in complementary unity. They function together as a unity. If they are taken apart then they function not as complementarities but as polarities and they generate multiplicity. This multiplicity itself then is a ground for the arising of forms. Those forms are all illusioned insofar as they are not products of unity but there are products of multiplicity. They occur because there are these tensions and possibilities that would be undefirentiate in unity but now is prolific.

The United States after Jefferson was one of the few times in human history where the problems of the polarities rose in a people so that proper description....(audio break) for six lines in a book called The Fabulous Forties: A Presentation of Private Life in the United States 1840 to1850. "The decade of the 40s in America was a brilliant three-ring circus filled with marvelous sideshows and prodigious natural curiosities. Glittering with mirrors and chandeliers. Thunderous with brass bands and fireworks. Choked with the dust of glorious caravans." And as if to root this world of charisma into time-honored models the frontispiece of this book shows the American family at home. The mother, the father, the three children. One child has a little doll. They're all well-dressed. They're all sitting in a well furnished house which they own. They have a place in the world. They have position. The American Dream. Man's house is his castle. His family is his kingdom. And all of this was coming true not for some few elite but for hundreds of thousands of individuals. And the promise was that everyone would be able to have this. So that the great archetypal movements of polarities came up bubbling to the surface of the United States in the 1840s. This is the period of Thoreau's maturity.
Moby-dick which was mooted and written in those 1840s, has an interesting description by Ishmael. He writes, this is in The Carpetbag in Moby Dick, "As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at the same New Bedford thence to embark on their voyage. It may well be related that I for one had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail and no other than a Nantucket craft. Because there was a fine boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old Island. Which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling around the world. And though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her. Yet Nantucket was her original. The tire of this carthage. The place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those Aboriginal whalemen, the Redman, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the leviathan. And where but from Nantucket too did that first adventurous little sloop put forth partly laden with imported cobblestones so goes the story. To throw at the whales in order to discover when they were nei enough to risk a harpoon from the boat spread."

Wrapped up in this is the tremendous realization that by 1850 American genius and energy had taken command of the high seas. Britannia did not rule the ways. But it wasn't the whole country that went into this, it was some little town named New Bedford. Half the population of whaling people were from New Bedford Massachusetts. It was a tremendous realization that the American energy when placed into concentration, into a certain drive, we would call it today a social yoga, worked miracles. And this feeling was coming up all through the country. And it was in this context that Thoreau grew into manhood and matured.

But for him the place to put the concentration, the energy, was in man's relationship with nature. Because he sensed that there was not a polarity between himself and nature but rather a unity. And so he sought valiantly ways to collapse the illusion into the reality. And so he consciously went about keeping a journal. And the journal is where Thoreau still lives. There is more Thoreau in the journal than there ever was walking around on his two feet. He didn't reduce himself to print. He transubstantiated himself into insight and the print but gives indications so the insight may occur to the reader. And he lives every time a conscientious reader goes through the journals and reconstructs that man. It was esoteric in the extreme. It was a metaphysical adventure that almost outstripped the capacity for people of that time to understand. Emerson was one of the few. He always thought of Thoreau as being distinctly a different cut. Not like himself at all.

And towards the end of Thoreaus life, he met someone who did understand him completely. And they walked around New York together and his friend said, the only thing wrong with you is that you you haven't looked at man, you've looked at nature. You have unified yourself with nature but you haven't unified yourself with man. His walking companion was Walt Whitman. Who would do what Thoreau had done in the journals. But instead of being a surveyor of snow storms he would be a surveyor of all the variations of humanity. And he would love them all indiscriminately because they were not being seen analytically. They were being experienced as a cosmic unity. It was like some Bodhisattva or Maha yogi coming to bless life by carrying comprehension to whatever walk of life happened to be manifesting. For Whitman it was man who was beloved in all of his forms. Nothing shamed him. Nothing ridiculed him. All of life should be blessed by the comprehension of the same unifying vision. But for Thoreau it was nature. It was the wilderness that had become a home. And this was the difference.

The key for us and we'll see in the slides. In 1694 when that group of forty German Rosicrucians went to Philadelphia under their master Kelpius and founded a monastery on the back banks of the Wissahickon River, which is now Fairmount Park in the city of Philadelphia. They put up on the hill their circular meditation halls with the cross in the circle on the top to catch the rosy dawn light. And they would get up and do a walking meditation around the circular hall before dawn so as to bring their energy to focus with the sun's early rays, coming up. Esoteric. But the leader of that community in order to ground that power. Or perhaps we should use the term found that power, in reality and not in illusion, did what a yogi always will do for his disciples. Make sure that the meditation is continuous. And Kelpius dug a cave in the banks of the Wissahickon and stoned in the entrance. And we have a slide of that. And he made sure that his meditation was continuous, was unbroken. This is the time-honored tradition. One doesn't meditate for five hours a day or for ten hours a day. One meditates for twenty-four hours a day, every day. It is the continuousness of it which is efficacious. Not for oneself, one can do nothing at that rate. But to guarantee that the amplification coming from one's participation fructifies the students.

And Thoreau becomes that kind of a figure, somewhat consciously in his mind, for the entire country. Thoreau sought to give a reality route to the entire United States by the continuity of his being able to engender and maintain the unity of experience with nature. And in a very real way he was the guaranteer that this three-ring circus that was becoming a continental show had some spiritual undertone to it. When seen in that light the differential between Emerson and Thoreau becomes enormous. The one was a man of letters. The other was a stage of reality.

So we have some slides and I hope that you can see in so these images the people we didn't have been mentioning. Then we've got three more lectures on Thoreau and we'll just keep developing him. This First one I think is the... yeah this is.... catch that light there by the door there. Just flick it over.

This is taken from a volume written by a man named Sache S-A-C-H-S-E. Julius Sachse, who in the 1890s realized that all of this fragile material of the early United States and in the 1600s in Philadelphia was going to be lost. And so he did a number of books trying to reconstruct what happened. Who were these people. What were they doing. Why were they here. Where did they come from. And his book on German Pietists and Rosicrucians in Philadelphia. And this is the frontispiece and this is the cave in here. UP above it, not sure if you can see it, is part of the **(inaudible)** there.

That was in 1694 and now in 1840 with Thoreau there's an amplification. There's a development of that idea. One doesn't dig a cave in a hillside. One doesn't even make a cave anymore. One opens up into the forest. One comes out of the cave and goes into the forest. So that the landscape becomes the arena rather than a retreat. This is the polar opposite. Instead of going in small one comes out large. And the reason for that is that Thoreau is working on the largest form of El Grande(?). The, as we would say now, the landscape of the real.

This is the house that he was born in. This is a sketch. This road was called Virginia Road and it was on what was the outskirts of Concord then. It's only about mile center to the center of town.

This is what he looked like as a young man, probably in his days just graduating from Harvard. I think you can see in the...in the eyes the balance. The last picture that we will have. Try to remember these eyes. The last picture we will have of Thoreau, dying of tuberculosis knowing it in 1861. His eyes will really no longer be looking out but simply be a registering feeling tone. A Fall. But here is someone still there, still looking out.

This is Thoreau about the time that he proposed to Ellen Sewall. This is a...a sketch made of him. You can already see the introspective qualities beginning to...shall we say take over. Probably better not to say take over so much. But the awareness of purpose beginning to suffuse his personality. Remembering as we would say, more esoterically, remembering what he was doing or what he was there for.

This is Emerson about the same time and notice the difference. The mobility of lips, the set lips. This is a man who can laugh. This is a man who will speak out. This is a man who will train himself to speak with grace and equanimity. Who will practice classical rhetoric and so forth. A fine man but a different quality of person. Thoreau is is being, Emerson is a man.

This is Concord about the time that Thoreau will pass on. about 1860 just at the beginning of the Civil War. Part of the reform movement of course was the abolitionist party, the anti-slavery movement. And that was a very popular in the Northeast.

This is William Ellery Channing HR(?) administer and a great friend of Emerson and Thoreau. You can see in Ellery Channing the..the romantic influence. We covered the Romantic movement is preceded and is all over Europe. The ironic hero. You can see some of that here.

This is Emersons second wife Lydia. The beauty here is the beauty of introspection. But it's tempered by a conservative life. This is a woman who will care for her children. Cared for her husband. Cared for the...the way in which the family is living.

This is Theodore Parker. He was one of the great anti-slavery leaders. One of the great minds behind the whole reform movement. Who felt that there was a special insight quality of man that needed to be woken up. That unless that insight quality of a human being was awakened they would not understand what reform was for. They would not understand that slavery was an evil. That we were caught in habituated likenesses of illusion and only by having this transcendental insight awakened in us would we be able to at last hear this clarion call. That these are the good people. These are the good fights. These are the movements that are necessary. So Parker was one of those.

Oddly enough one of the reasons that our educational system suffers so much today, 40/50 percent dropout rates. Is that all of the genius of the United States has been shunted to a sentence in our history books and we never hear about them. We never know that we're standing on the shoulders of many giants.

This is Margaret Boyden(?). She was said to be not particularly physically beautiful except when she was animated. And she was then gorgeous. Her expressive eyes. Her concern for what she was saying. Her concerned to hear what you were saying. Her wonderful ability to bring many people into the same conversation. These are qualities that made her charming and beautiful.

This is Thomas Chumley spelled Chomandaley but pronounced the Brits way of Chumley. He came from England. he was in India for a while and places for exotic, Indonesia and so forth. He came to visit Emerson and after spending a couple of weeks there he realized that Thoreau was the man for him. And when he got back to England he had sent over to Thoreau 44 volumes of the Indian classics. The Vedas, the Upanishads, the Buddhist literature, the parametias and so forth. And these were like gems for Thoreau. In fact when Thoreau and Whitman were hoofing in around New York City Thoreau said do you know the Vedas and Walt said no tell me about them. These are conversations one wishes had been quicker.

This is Bronson Alcott. Old and here 90 years of age. He would become very famous with the Concord Lyceum and with the educational techniques. He would organize a school in Boston. They got like several rooms out of the Masonic Temple in Boston Massachusetts. And he experimented with children's education. This is why his daughter wrote children's books. And in Little Women the portrait of her father is the figure of father in Little Women.

Many of the novels of this time have a didactic pertinance. Margaret Fuller is a a character in Hawthorne's Blithedale romance. Blithedale is a utopian community, Brook farm which was a community a communitarian experience at that time. Do you see that the movement was Unitarian inside and communitarian outside. They were trying to organize the multiplicity in terms of the insight of the unity. These were complementary modes that were going on at the same time. So Alcott is one of those figures.

It was incidentally not well-received by the general public. Education is never received by the general public. Real education teaches children to be free and they become quite outspoken. And one has to improve one's life because one has intelligent convincers around all the time. It's very easy when you anesthetize them to television. You just turn on the tube and they will watch. But if you educate them like Alcott was doing, they become very lively. They want to know what do you think about this and that and the other thing. What are you doing? What are you doing to help your fellow man? Well you can see that this becomes really unpopular with people that don't care and don't want to do this. This is why they've been shunted out of our history.

This is Mrs. Emerson with one of their children. It's almost a Madonna portrait. That kind of a quality of caring where the child person is extended out to oneself. This is one of the transcendentalists prime discoveries was that there is a possibility to actually love your fellow man. Not as an intellectual platitude but as a physiological psycho somatic definiteness. That one could extend love. And not just to another person but one could generate a field of lovingness, loving-kindness. And that if many human beings were doing this together this would bring in the flows of energy in their natural wave forms. And communities would benefit from this. These are the kinds of thoughts that are familiar to every day intelligence to these people for years on end.

This is a stereotyped view of Walden of the cattle. And next week we're going to go into that full experiment. and see it with with these sage like perspectives that Thoreau actually had.

This is a sketch that Louisa May Alcott did of the actual cabin. The cabin is up here and here's the path coming down. At the foot of the path is a boat. And in the boat is Thoreau who's not rowing anywhere. In unity there is nowhere to go. Wherever you are that's it. Whatever is there to see that is it. One harkens back to Russo's tremendous insight, stopping rowing his boat early in the morning. Is it Lake Geneva, Lake Dusan(?) and he felt the absolute stillness of nature. And that he was the focal point of the stillness by fact of his very existence. That man's very existence is a loud clear clarion call in the universe for the real to manifest. And this gave a dignity to men which was primordial. No one gave you this dignity. You do not have to work for this dignity. You do not have to earn it, other than developing yourself to your fullness. Other than making sure that that fullness was not compromised by phony living, phoniness. That this was the basis for the enlightened individual then to declare that he has social relations with others only on the base of his conscious willing delegation of that fact. And the social contract was the only viable basis. For Thoreau, he was working on an amplification of that idea. Larger than that. Developing it tremendously beyond its capacities originally.

This is Thoreau in 1856 and this is about the last time that we see Thoreau healthy. The tubercular condition that he had inherited was exacerbated by the fine graphite dust of a pencil making. The living outside for years and years on end had finally taken its toll. And of course at that time they had no idea that at certain stages tuberculosis was infectious. The incident of tuberculosis in cities like Concord was rather very high. And this is the last time that we see Thoreau sound. Because the next shot shows him just a few months before he dies. And I think you can see here in the glassy eyed-ness, the rather harshness, the hardness. It's almost if one not looking to see but simply keeping one's eyes open as one experiences.

And when we get to Thoreaus journals and we try to evoke the man himself through this wonderful magical of mystical realization, we'll see that towards the end Thoreau had actually largely transubstantiated himself.

The legacy that he left, even though it was not consciously seen to be his and even though it is not exclusively his, was felt by the millions in this country. The tremendous freedom with which Americans moved, not only themselves, but their whole families across them a continent to an unknown portion of the land. It is amazing to see in what short duration that the wilderness ceased to be a source of terrifying nightmares for the early colonialist and became the visionary paradise the land of promise for the early Americans. The difference between the colonial mind and the American mind is largely summed up in that transformation. The ability to feel at home in a wilderness. As Falkner would say in The Bear and Go Down Moses that Americans have to learn that it is part of their heritage to set down the guns, sent down the compasses, set down the binoculars, and walked freely through the forest. That their own sense of unity will give them a relatedness. And even the old bear of the forest will come and pay his homage to another youngster who is matured. And learned that he need not fear the many mansions of the home which he has come to live in. And which he occupies by self-evident **(inaudible)**

Well they'll see more of Thoreau next week and I hope some of you can make it. Thanks for coming.

34:30 - lecture is done here.

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