Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Cape Cod and Maine Woods
Presented on: Thursday, March 14, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic America: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau
Presentation 11 of 13
Walden, Cape Cod, and Maine Woods: Interior Journeys
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, March 14, 1985
Transcript:
The date is March 14th 1985. This is the eleventh lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on the subject of Hermetic America. Tonight's lecture is entitled Walden, Cape Cod, Maine Woods interior journeys. And this of courses of Henry David Thoreau.
Well we come to the second lecture on Thoreau, Thoreau. It is impossible at this time though to adhere completely to the announced program for tonight. These are made up six or seven months in advance. And I listed that I would take the Maine woods, Cape Cod and Walden tonight. But we're working with the scale of inquiry that precludes that kind of blurring superficial outward. And so we will work our way through Thoreau to the point where he left to go to Walden Pond. I think you must realize and perhaps you do that walden is not very far from Concord. You can walk there in 15-20 minutes.
His universe was not geographically very large. But he was working with a peculiar quality of insight which we will see revealed tonight, I think. A quality of insight which incidentally has great affinities to the Gnostic outlook. That is he saw this world very much as a veil of appearance to be seen through. But that the seeing through of it was a qualitative penetration and required for that purpose a collecting of natural energies in the person. That the condensing of nature in the human person accumulates and accrews and produces an energizing, as we would say today. And at a certain point the poignancy of one's reality pierces through the veil and we see for real.
This was a very difficult procedure to describe externally. and at the time the appellation transcendentalist was given. Because there was a collection of individuals who all knew each other, who were attempting to do just this thing. And that is to say they were trying to communicate with each other on a regular basis. Meeting at each other's homes or a large lay. As it went on meeting at Emerson's home in Concord. Publishing for four years in the quarterly magazine the dial. Attempting to come to some understanding of how the individual human being achieves this transparency of being. It even went so far as to encourage several utopian community farms. one of them outside Boston. Ezra Ripley purchased some acreage and they called it Brook Farm. Later on Bronson Alcott and another friend would open up fruit lands. And these experiments began to actually proliferate in the 19th century. And in the United States there were several dozen attempts to found utopian communities. To permit people to come together to help and encourage each other. To collect their sense of nature and person. To the point that they would flame into being. To use a poetic phrase.
Indeed one of the most odd attempts in this regard was here in California, in the Sierra Nevada. In what is now Sequoia National Park, along the edge of Crescent meadow which John Muir called the gem of the Sequoias. A man who is very much the western Thoreau. A man named Hale Tharp went up to the Sequoias alone. He had been told by the yucca indians down in the San Joaquin that they indeed believed in heaven because they could go there. It was a long hike and quite steep but that the spirits of the good were reincarnated as trees which were eternal. And Tharp was the first Western individual to ever see the sequoia trees. And he lived for seventeen years in a fallen Sequoia log alongside Crescent meadow. And because of his
collected there. And for sometime in the 1880s this utopian community grew to several hundreds of persons who raised cattle in the meadows in Sequoia National Park and were becoming quite effective as pioneers in beginning actually to draw a lot of attention. So much so that the United States government confiscated the lands and created Sequoia National Park in 1890. And literally booted all these people out. Their example was so successful that it was becoming a threat, by word of mouth, to the established towns and orders. All those people incidentally moved down to Three Rivers California and founded a utopian community there. And the survivors of that still live there today.
So the transcendentalist movement was not so much a mass movement or a cult movement, it was a movement of individuals. And these individuals were seeking afine encouragement among themselves. And Emerson seemed to be the center because he was the most famous. He was almost the most intellectual person of his time. The most learned. The most literary. Ahhh quite capable. But the pilot light in all this was Henry David Thoreau. And one has to look for a long time to see this.
Thoreau disappears so completely in his work. He becomes a very mysterious phantom personnage. But oddly enough it is because of that phantasmal quality of the real man and the iridescent quality of his writings that when we carry our experience in a very particular way to his writings, Thoreau reappears. He reassembles himself. His persona reestablishes itself as real and as completely as ever it was in his physical life. He is the first individual to carry out the self ascertained assignment that American literature should be a great universal literature. That it should be different from any previous literature. That it should take the best of all the past worlds and engender some new forms, some new genres. And it was to this end that Thoreau becomes as great an individual as any who has ever written in any language. Because he founds a conscious nature journal literature. All those words have to get in there together.
The first indication that he was realizing what the genre had come to be was in 1843. A little essay written for The Dial. Emerson was editor that year. Emerson really didn't much care for the essay. And in fact with characteristic over humility Thoreau said it could have been shaken out in the wind perhaps a little more. But the essay is remarkable because it establishes for the first time the spiritual quality that Thoreau would embody. To the point reached by very few authors ever in history. The essay is called A Winter's Walk and it appeared in 1843 in The Dial. I have it here reprinted in the first edition of Excursions published in Boston 1866 by Ticknor and Fields. If you remember George Ticknor had been as a young man drawn to Thomas Jefferson. And Jefferson had told him that he was the best bookman that he had ever met. And that he should go into publishing and so forth. And Ticknor was the publisher of a great many fine American writers. Prescott, Parkman, Thoreau, quite a number.
Here are four short excerpts from A Winters Walk. and what is being delivered here to us, a hundred and forty two years later, is the experience of a universal consciousness gliding itself through a pristine naturalness. Now this is a very peculiar juncture. A universal consciousness and a pristine naturalist. That naturalness and that consciousness brought together at a juncture which is the moving point of the expression give us the coordinates of reality. It is a geometry of meaning that delivers the real. Which is why when we bring ourselves consciously to the recorded experience, it reads itself off naturally in our experience as if it were happening again. All over again. And a penumbra of intuition begins to accrue and develop. That this is an eternal occurrence.
That Thoreau has become transparent to the point that he does not exist as an individual single persona. But that he exists as an individual spirit who could be anyone who will commit themselves to journey with him. Who will become a time traveler with him. So that we move and we see through his mask if you will. I'm going to use Yates's term here. But the mask is...has transparent eyes and we become Thoreau. We reinstate this experience and our intuitive grasp begins to grow upon us. That as we move in this life if we were pure, not in the sense of refining ourselves getting rid of picayune elements that we don't want, but refining ourselves in the sense of integrating everything that we are to a point of unity. We would be like this. capable of delivering any moment in our lives to anyone else at any time with the clarity that Edmund Wilson once called the shock of recognition. Because what is recognizable here finally in intuition is that on some level of universal love we are all exchangeable with each other. That whatever is spiritual in any one of us is at home in every one of us.
So Thoreau for the first time is going to deliver this quality of literature. It's a halting beginning. But it will be after this that he begins his journals. And it's in the two million words of the journals that Thoreau recreates the whole eternal universe of Concord in the 1840s and 1850s 1860s that still exists. And demonstrates to us almost conclusively that with the right coordinates the real emerges anytime we wish to have it.
So here are 4 excerpts from A Winter Walk. "The warmth comes directly from the sun. And it's not radiated from the earth as in summer. And when we feel his beams on our back as we are treading some snowy dell, we are grateful. as for a special kindness and blessed the sun which has followed us into that by place. This subterranean fire has its altar in each man's breast. For in the coldest day and on the bleakest hill, the traveller cherishes a warm earth fire within the folds of his cloak. Then is kin...kindled on any hearth. A healthy man indeed is the complement of the seasons. And in winter summer is in his heart. there is the south thither, all birds and insects migrated and around the warm springs in his breast are gathered the robin and the lark. At length having reached the edge of the woods and shut out the gatting town, we enter within their covert as we go under the roof of a cottage and cross its threshold all sealing and banked up with snow. They are glad and warm still and as genial and cheery in winter as in summer. And we stand in the midst of the pines in the flickering and checkered light, which straggles but little way into their maze.
We wonder if the towns have ever heard their simple story. It seems to us that no traveller has ever explored them. And nonwithstanding the wonders which science is everywhere revealing every day. Who would not like to hear these annals?"
The second selection, "Now our path begins to ascend gradually to the top of this high hill from whose precipitous Southside we can look over the broad country, a forest and field and river to the distant snowy mountains. See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse. The standard raised over some rural homestead. there must be a warmer and more genial spot there below as where we detect the vapour from a spring forming a cloud among and above the trees. What fine relations are established between the traveler who discovers this airy column from some eminence in the forest, and him who sits there below. Up goes the smoke as silently and naturally as the vapor exhales from the leaves. And is busy disposing itself in wreaths as the housewife and the hearth below. It is a hieroglyphic of a man's life and suggests more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where it's fine column rises above the forest like an ensign some human life has planted itself. And such as the beginning of a Rome, the establishment of arts, foundation of Empires. Whether on the prairies of America or the steps of Asia."
And third, "No domain of nature is quite close to man at all times. And now we draw near to the Empire of the fishes. Our feet glide swiftly over unfathom depths. Where in summer our line tempted the trout and the perch. And where the stately pick roll lurked in the long corridors formed by the bull rushes. The deep impenetrable marsh where the heron waited and bittern squatted, is made pervious to our swift shoes. As if a thousand railroads had been made into it. with one impulse we are carried to the cabin of the muskrat. That earliest settler. And see him dart away under the transparent ice like a furred fish to his hole in the bank. And we glide rapidly over meadows where lately the mower wet his side. Through beds of frozen cranberries mixed with meadow grass. We scrape near to where the blackbird, the peewee and the kingfish hung their nests over the water. And the hornets builded from the maple in the swamp. How many gay warblers following the sun have radiated from this nest of silver birch and thistle down?
And the final short selection, "Far over the ice between the hemlock woods and snow-clad hills stands the pickerel gisher. His line set in some retired cove like a fin lender with his arms thrust into the pouches of his dreadnought with dull snowy fishy thoughts. Himself a finless fish separated a few inches from his race. Dumb erect and made to be enveloped in clouds and snows like the pines on shore. In these wild scenes men stand about in the scenery or move deliberately and heavily. Having sacrificed the sprite leanness and vivacity of towns to the dumb sobriety of nature. He does not make the scenery less wild more than the jays and muskrats. But stands there as a part of it as the natives are represented in the voyages of early navigators at Nootka Sound. And on the northwest coast with their furs about them. Before they were tempted to loquacity by a scrap of iron. He belongs to the natural family of man and has planted deeper in nature. And has more root than the inhabitants of towns. Go to him. Ask what luck and you will learn too that he is a worshipper of the unseen. Hear with what sincere deference and waving gesture in his tone he speaks of the lake pickroll, which he has never seen. His primitive and ideal race of pickerel. He is connected with the shore still, as by a fishline. And yet remembers the season when he took fish through the ice in the pond. While the peas were up in his garden at home. But now while we have loitered the clouds have gathered again and a few straggling snowflakes are beginning to descend. Faster and faster they fall. Shutting out the distant objects from sight. The snow falls on every wood and field and no crevice is forgotten. By the river on the pond on the hill in the valley. Quadrupeds are confined to the covets and the birds sit upon their perches this peaceful hour. But there is not so much sound as in fair weather. but silently and gradually every slope the gray walls and fences polished ice the sneer leaves which were not buried before all become concealed. And the tracks of men become lost."
So you get some notion, Thoreau was 25 years old at the time. The tremendous quality of insight and we must use the word here compassion for nature. Because compassion opens the heart energies. The anahata chakra must have compassion to convey its all. And the heart is a unity. And unlike the mind cannot portion out its commitments. But if it opens its doors must commit itself fully. For it is unity and not a multiplicity. The heart in its unified commitment does not ever discern polarities. It discerns complementarities. And its energies of affinity seek for union. For a communication which is an exchange of self which is the very essence of love. And it is this capacity to love nature to love the basis of life as oneself which became a problem for Thoreau between the ages of 22 and 25. Because what got in the way of understanding that, most naturally, was his need as a man to love a woman.
And so we turn to Thoreau. We're going to use Walter Harding's biography for a few minutes to try and understand three attempts that Thoreau had at finding affinity with the right woman. And of his inability to settle for less than eternity. And for his great capacity to transform and transmute the individual experience, in all of its multiplicity, to that more universal view.
Which in its unity precludes any loss or any need. And it is that quality of Thoreau that we wish to apprehend currently. Tracing this back. The first indication to Thoreau of possibility of affinity came when he was very very young. A child of five or six. And he was taken out to Walden Pond. He wrote in his journal, "One of the most ancient scenes stamped on the tablets of my memory. That sweet solitude my spirit seemed so early to require at once, gave the preference to this recess among the pines. Where almost sunshine and shadow were the only inhabitants that varied the scene over that tumultuous and varied City. As if it had found its proper nursery." This is remembering the scene from his childhood some 35 years later.
His qualities of affinity with people had been nourished in an educational context. If you recall last week he eventually made his way to Harvard and he became rather a very fine student at Harvard. And friends with a lot of individuals. and when he came back he received immediately a teaching job. And because he was free and easy with his class the students were left to be somewhat unruly. He was reprimanded in this freedom, this indulgence by one of the superiors in the school. And he was forced to spank several of the students. And at the end of the day Thoreau sick to a stomach from having had to beat the students quit. And never again taught in a regular manner. But Thoreau was a natural teacher. Because you see the the teaching is the first indication of this affinity of spirits. It's the first indication. The parent feels it for the child when we teach a child something. This tremendous kinship. A kinship that becomes apparent and conscious where before it was felt but was not designated as an essential quality of our character. Was not recognized in its more profound resonances as an essential quality of all character, of all reality.
And so teaching became for Thoreau a way to exercise this affinity. And eventually he purchased the right to use the title Concord Academy. And his brother John came in with them and the two Thoreau brothers stood up to Concord Academy in 1839. It took a while it took about six months for them to finally get enough students to make it pay for itself. They had to have 25 students. And for some time it was touch-and-go through the winter of 1840. But by spring they had plenty of students. In fact there was a waiting list. They taught them especially writing and reading mathematics. For languages you would have to pay a little more. I think the fee was six dollars a term for languages. Four dollars if you just wanted your child to get the basics.
While he taught, while he was maturing in this regard with the students. And the teacher always acquires a penetrating experience of love with students. Thoreau began the first of his excursions with friends. And the first excursion was with a friend Charles Stearns Wheeler, who would die at the age of 26 in Europe. What the most promising of all their Harvard graduates of his class. And wheeler wanted to build himself a little hut on the banks of one of the ponds south of Concord. And so Thoreau helped him set this up. and this was the first indication for him to remember from his childhood how much Walden had meant for him. That the...that nature had an affinity for himself. But that it's in the particular that the resonances of character, of personality, become manifest. We can in fact feel through work, through meditation, through religious experience, we can feel the universality of nature. But the character of nature occurs to us only in terms of our individual persona. Which is why we must become individuated. We must become who we are because as through that focus that threshold that the character of nature becomes manifest. And it was with Charles Stern wheeler that Thoreau began the process of recollecting his childhood his background in terms of what he was tending to become. And so this process of integration began to move in pace. It also manifested itself in the school.
Now both Thoreau brothers suffered from tubercular infections. John Thoreau never weighed much more than 117 pounds. So you can see the the frailty...the frr. And in fact when he died in 1842 he was not much more than...no in his late 30s. This was an indication to Henry at the time that he too had a short life. Because he suffered from the same occurrence. I think I might have mentioned that the incidence of tuberculosis in areas like Concord Massachusetts was rather high. About 30% of the population suffered from this at that time. The working with pencils, the grinding of the graphite, the using of it in the family pencil works, also complicated Thoreaus health. His brother actually would die of a complication due to this fragility of health. A little nick on one of his fingers and the infection from that would in just a few days suffuse his entire body and he contracted lockjaw. And there was nothing that could be done at that time. and he died I think it was on a January, January 6th.
And by January 22nd Henry Thoreau had all the symptoms that his brother had. There was a psychosomatic affinity. It was an indication of the tremendous empathetic quality of Thoreau's personality. That he contracted the disease psychosomatically. There was in fact no infection in his body but all the symptoms were there. And it was only through the power of inner vision that he was able to understand this. And when he did all the symptoms disappeared rather quickly.
This is very peculiar happenstance. For instance in our time in the 20th century there have been only two reported cases of a scourge that once swept over Europe. It was called in the Middle Ages the Saints Disease. It was the breaking out of boils all over one's body. And the only two individuals in modern times to ever contract it were Wilhelm Reich and Nikos Kazantzakis. And as soon as they left the places where they weren't supposed to be and got themselves to places where they were supposed to be all the symptoms disappeared. Literally overnight. And Thoreau had this quality of empathy that Reich and and Kazantzakis had. The ability to extend their physicality through their heart sympathies. This takes a tremendous maturity in metaphysical understanding to realize that they had been born with this condition. Had achieved the refinement and sophistication of this condition. So that they could commit their physicality to transparency. And that transparent projected through the sympathy of the unity of the heart to other people. And finally to the world as a whole.
This metaphysical capacity incidentally was underscored once in the First World War by Tayar de Chardin. There were two wounded French soldiers in a foxhole and they were being bombarded for days on end. And he was asked to say mass. And he had nothing to offer for the mass. And in a great vision de Chardin looking out of the foxhole decided that he would offer the entire world as a mass sacriment, as a communion between them. And the shelling stopped during the whole service. And the two men completely confident and De Chardin wondering just how strong man's faith really is when it is fully extended and committed. The world hears us and responds. Thoreau in fact in his poems has some of this quality. Some of this characteristic. He gives us a couple of mysteries here in his poems. And I'll give you two poems of this.
One is of The Dusky Spirit of the Wood. The dusky Spirit of the Wood. "Thou dusky spirit of the wood. Bird of an ancient brood.
Flitting thy lonely way. A meteor in the summer's day. From wood to wood, from hill to hill. Low over forest, field and rill.
What wouldst thou say? Why shouldst thou haunt the day?
What makes thy melancholy float? What bravery inspires thy throat. And bears thee up above the clouds. Over desponding human crowds. Which far below? Lay thy haunts low?"
And the second one is about Atlantis. Thoreau was extremely wide read. Extremely perspicacious in his insight. He was not at all a naive nineteenth-century stereotyped individual. He read Greek perfectly. He was able to translate Aeschylus for himself. He made translations of The Seven Against Thebes and of The Prometheus Bound. He made translations of Pindar, which is extremely difficult in Greek. And of course he knew most of the modern languages, German and French etc.
The Atlantis. "The smothered streams of love which flow more bright than phlogiston, more low. Island us ever like the sea in it in an Atlantic mystery. Our fabled shores none ever reach. No Mariner has found our Beach. Scarcely our Mirage now is seen. And neighbouring waves with floating green. Yet still the oldest charts contain some dotted outline of our main. In ancient times, midsummer days unto the western islands gaze. To Tenerife and the Azores, have shown our faint in cloud-like shores. But think not yet ye desolate Isles. And on your coast with commercial smiles. And richer freights yield furnished far, than Africa or Malabar. Be fair be fertile evermore. Ye rumored but untrodden shore. Our princes and monarchs will contend, who first until your land shall send. And pawned the jewels of the crown to call your distant soil their own."
Atlantis is understood here as a the realm of the metaphysical. Not as a metaphor for the never-never-land but as a naturality within the soul. For the reality which does occur despite our efforts to blur it, to deny it. But its occurrence is not a time phenomenon. It is an eternal phenomena. It is a quality of presence.
And here we need to have perhaps just a little chart for ourselves. A little navigation in these inscrutable seeming waters. One sense moves from nature and in its first condensation moves to a ritual comportment we select from nature. And ritual is the first level where man participates on his own, somewhat, with nature. And from the contrast between nature and ritual comes the primordial urge for language. To say what one is doing. Not so much what it means. But to describe, to embellish. And this produces the realm of mythology. Mythology is an expression. An expression of the happenings, primorgily through songs, through hymns of what the ritual comportment is doing. And that selected from nature. And so we move from nature to ritual to mythologies.
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Patron(?). So we move from nature to ritual to mythologies. And those mythologies in their language form tend of their own nature to internalize meaning. To focus meaning within. And from this matures the symbolic sense, the symbolic vision. And so we move from nature to ritual to myth to symbol. But the movement from symbol back to nature is somewhat forbidden by natural occurrence. Because the tendency is not to let symbolism interiorized integration loose to nature again, but rather to bring it into play in the world.
And so the movement. And so the movement reestablishes itself in a countermove and we move back again through that pattern. Only this time the symbolic realm instead of interiorizing meaning expresses the meaning through symbols into the exterior world. And this is the realm of magic. This is how magic comes into being. And magic eventually deepens itself into an appreciation of form. And art is born from that. And magic moves to art. And the aesthetic sense of experience further refines itself to a quality which we described I think most applicably, Kierkegaard gave the description that the aesthetic tends to move naturally towards the ethical. And this gives rise to the religious, the religious sense. And religion is born from art like art is born from magic. And this religious sense deepens into knowledge. It deepens into what we would normally call today science.
But that's a colloquialism in terms of what it really means. It's a gnosis. It's an understanding. perhaps a better term would be that religion deepens into cosmology. That we come back to the nature. back to the natural. But with a sense that the whole pattern is meaningful. And from this return of coming back to nature, through all the comprehensive phases which we have gone through, deepening nature into cosmology. We for the first time have a view that in this pattern what has been made apparent is not only the pattern but that there is an opening into the pattern from without. That in between the nature and the symbol. in between magic and the cosmology. Is an area that has not been incorporated into the design but is rather an opening which permits the breathing of the whole design. And is this opening, this corridor of nothing in itself which we call the mystical. And the mystical brings into the center of the pattern equality of presence which we call the divine.
For Thoreau, he was one of those sophisticated individuals whose natural contact had evolved to the point of a cosmology. And he constantly was seeing the flow of the mystical into the pattern of life. Creating a quality of divine presence wherever he was. Which is why he adamantly refused to go into a church. He said my church is out in the open. My worship is with the fresh air, the sunshine. That this is the communine that I participate in. The whole world is holy. And ironically it would be irreligious to think that something cut off from it would be holy.
This of course is a tremendously advanced insight. In ancient Egypt the only Pharaoh to ever understand this was a woman. Her name was Hatshepsut. And all of the tombs of all the pharaohs are closed and darkened contained structures but Hatshepsut with all of its beautiful columns against the cliffside when one goes in is open to the sky. There are no interiors. There are just the formulaic descriptions that the openness is meaningful .
Well let's take a break there and have whatever we have over here. Well come back.
I think one, one aspect to let reoccur to our intelligence again and again with Thoreau was that he was a radical character. Radical meaning to cut obliquely across all the coordinating lines that define and produce a transept a cross-section of possibility. Many of these individuals. Many of the transcendentalist. Many of the people around Thoreau, where persons have great character and genius. At one point Nathaniel Hawthorne moved to Concord. And Thoreau and Emerson and Hawthorne and half a dozen other talented individuals were all in this little tiny village together.
Thoreau sold his wonderful little rowboat that he made to Hawthorne. And characteristic of Thoreau he had named it the Musket Acquid, which was the Indian name of the Concord River. Thoreau really went back to the Indians. He reaclimated his intelligence to the nature of Concord and its vicinity. To the Indian presence. But the difficulty was is that all of the Indian persons had been killed by then, were gone. And so only some diviner like Thoreau could come into contact with them.
In one of the notebooks of one of his students which survived, on a characteristic outing the rogue took them along the Concord along the musket aquid. And he stopped at a certain site and asked the students what is there about this site that recommends itself? And they spent a long time looking around and discussing and a saying the situation and they came up with all kinds of interesting advantages. That they there were fish in the stream pooling in this area. There were berries. There were rock ledges that permitted somewhat a sense of shelter. And Thoreau pleased with his student said this is true and took a shovel and went over to the sand I started putting it into the sand, sandy loam of the riverbank. And from moment to moment and minute to minute it would clank and he would dig down. And finally they'd had unearthed a circle of stones that were reddened by fire and broken by it. He said this was a site that the Indians used to occupy almost continuously. We have come to understand why by our own experience. And then characteristically again Thoreau would bury the rocks again and restore the stream back to itself. Restore the bank back. These were secrets to be shown to students.
But the achievement of the information was not something to be frozen and then categorized and filed away. But it was the evanescent quality of the actuality that was encouraged to be seen by the students as real. We have understood something important about where we live. There have been others before us, conscious like we are who have lived here. Who have lived here so well that they have left it in a state that we interpret as wilderness. It is totally civilized by the spirit of comprehensive human beings. We are entering into their massive city. The forest, the primeval forests of North America, he said is the city that's the city of man. This is where mature man lived in his millions with such comprehensiveness than seemed undisturbed.
There's a scene in Cooper's Pathfinder, near the beginning of it, where the white man who has learned to be an Indian. Pathfinder, Hawkeye, leather stocking climbs a tall tree and he looks out above the canopy of the forest, a few feet above the canopy, and he sees it like an ocean of life spreading unbroken in every direction. And his heart exalts at this. That he is alive in this ocean of life with the comprehension that his Indian brothers have taught him. Thoreau has this kind of a quality to him. He has this ability to make us afine, not only with the American Indians but with the Greeks, with the ancient Indian Indians, with the Chinese, with all mankind. He has this quality.
His great friend and the first biographer William Ellery Channing did this biography. This is the first one of Thoreau, printed in 1873. That's the first edition of it. Here's Channing's description of the man. "In height he was about the average. In his build spare with limbs that were rather longer than usual. Or of which he made a longer use. His face once seen could not be forgotten. The features were quite marked. The nose aquiline or very Roman like one of the portraits of Caesar. More like a beak as it was said. Large overhanging brows above the deepest set blue eyes that could be seen in certain lights and another's gray. Eyes expressive of all shades of feeling. But never weak nor nearsighted. The forehead not unusually broad or high. Full of concentrated energy and purpose. The mouth with prominent lips pursed up with meaning and thought when silent. And giving out when open a stream of the most varied and unusual and instructive sayings. His hair was a dark brown exceedingly abundant, fine, soft. And for several years he wore a comely beard. His whole figure had an active earnestness as if he had no movement to waste. The clenched hand betokened purpose. In walking he made a short cut if he could. And when sitting in the shade or by the wall side seen merely the clearer to look forward into the next piece of activity. Even in the boat he had a weary transitory air. His eyes on the outlook, perhaps there might be ducks or the blondin turtle or an otter, sparrow. Constantly looking obliquely in order not to be baffled by appearance. Constantly accruing the million angles of bleakness to produce a radar like insight into the whole. Into the unity of it all."
In his quest for this in his poetry we occasionally find insights that are great service to us. It is said by literary critics that Thoreau is not a great poet and so he's not studied. But one does not come to a cosmic man with pettiness on one's mind, what has to come in like way. And so we have to commit an openness. Here's a poem entitled, I Make Ye An Offer, and it's a poem written to God.
"I make ye an offer, ye god. Here the scoffer. The scheme will not hurt you. If you will find goodness I will find virtue. Though I am your creature and child of your nature. I have pride still unbended and blood undescended. Some free independence and my own descendants. I cannot toil blindly, though ye behave kindly. And I swear by the rude I'll be slave to no God. If he will deal plainly, I will strive mainly. If he will discover great plans to your lover and give him a sphere somewhat larger than here."
This...this opening, opening out, let's open all of the doors not only a perception but of conception, of awareness. Let's be wide open.
This poem is entitled, Ponkawtasset, Since We Took Our Way. Ponkawtasset the Indian name in that region. "On Ponkawtasset, since, we took our way, down this still stream we took our meadowy way. A poet wise has settled, whose fine ray
doth often shine on Concord's twilight day." This is Emerson. "Like those first stars, whose silver beams on high, shining more brightly as the day goes by. Most travellers cannot at first descry, but eyes that wont to range the evening sky. And know celestial lights, do plainly see. For gladly hill them, numbering two or three. For lore that's deep must be deeply studied. As from deep wells men read star-poetry. These stars are never paled, though out of sight. But like the sun they shine forever bright. Aye, they are suns. Though earth must in its flight, put out its eyes that it may see their light. Who would neglect the least celestial sound. Or faintest light that falls on earthly ground. If he could know it one day would be found.
That star in Cygnus whither we are bound.
And pale our sun with heavenly radiance round?"
The intuition that will..there will come times when man will find himself in nature writ so large that our Sun will seem like a pale star in the background. Not anything more nor less. How fleeting will be all the intentions that are founded upon the precocious preciousness in relationship with just this one Sun. When man is freed in the universe where all the Suns are like stars against a cosmic background, what then will man be to himself? What realisation must he have?
And as we started out today we understood that one of the most difficult transitions and Thoreaus life in his being was his relationship with women. When he was 22 it occurred to him probably for the first time in his life that he was a man. He was mature. He might hope to marry. And in fact for a while he even proposed and was turned down. Found solace in the companionship and company of an older woman who loved to talk to him. And Thoreau needed the conversation. She was the sister-in-law of Emerson. And then he fell in love with another young woman. But it was not to be.
There was a section of Thoreau's journal that was lost for a great long while. And was found again by, and published by Perry Miller here. There's a section here from January 4th, 1841 and Thoreau was 23 years old. And it gives us an insight into his relationalities with women at this time. He writes, "I know a woman who is as true to me and as incessant with her mild rebuke as the blue sky. When I stand under her coat and instantly all pretension drops off. and I am swept by her influence as by the wind and rain to remove all taint. I am fortunate that I can pass and repass before her as a mirror each day. And prove my strength in her glances. She is far truer to me than to herself her eyes are like the windows of nature through which I catch glimpses of the native land of the soul. And from them comes a light which is not of the Sun. The light shines for this inner and lower world but through them gleams a milder and steadier light than his. His rays are in eclipse when they shine on me. Methinks in these souler rays there is no refraction of the light." Solar spelled souler.
These qualities of Thoreau's penetration of vision, constantly in his regard with the women come to the floor. And his first romance with Ellen Sewell. Which was shared incidentally by his brother John who proposed to her and he was finally turned down. She realized that it was Henry that she really cared for. But Henry was, was difficult. He was difficult to be a person with. He was difficult to be physical with because his expectations were increasingly transparent, transcendental. He wrote to her. He said, "It really probably won't do because you have had to ask me questions. And if it were real love no questions would be needed. That my capacities are on this refined level." And so he committed poems to his journals before her refusal of him, recording her refusal. Saying that I am clearly becoming someone for whom anything less than Universal love will become impossible. Thoreau becomes really a monk, a hermit, of that highest nature.
When his friend Thomas Jumonville(?) sent him the 44 volumes of the great books of India. And he read the apanachads he felt the kindred spirits. He could pronounce ohm adequately in Concord with no discrepancy.
This quality of his, when finally made clear, he wrote these kinds of poems to record his transition. "I could then say with the poet sweet falls the summer air over her frame who sails with me. Her way, like that, is beautifully free. Her nature far more rare. It is her constant heart of virgin purity." What he was appreciating, it occurred to him finally it was not so much her although she was the flame that caused the occurrence to become present to him. But it was the resonances from her that hovered as it were in the summer air. That he realized that he could be attentive to. And that those resonances extended themselves out and finally joined that great nature which was naturally occurring. And that he and she were but an integral part of the choreography of the whole. And that it was the whole that was the quote object of his love. And later he writes, "I am a parcel of vain strivings tied by a chance bond together. Dangling this way and that. Their links were made so loose and wide methinks for some milder weather."
And Thoreau begins to disappear as a personality. For some who insist upon an egotistical base, this would be very precarious, loss of soul. But for Thoreau he was making a transition. His identification was no longer in that complex called the ego. But in that larger sense of self which it extends itself non-definitionally into nature. And nature blending itself magnificently as an expression of an all, of a sense of unity. And form Thoreau, more and more, it occurred to him that he was losing the capacity to participate in the fractionated world.
And Emerson ever his friend at this period. Ever his attentive companion. Who had taken Thoreau into his own home for two years. To give him a place to be. To give him a companion. To provide what Emerson and his family manly wisdom thought he needed an anchor to root himself in this world. And Emerson extending not only the cordiality of his family in his home to Thoreau but his whole circle of friends. And then realizing that even this was not going to do made a contact with his brother William on Staten Island to take Thoreau in. He encouraged Thoreau to move there. Go and take a job with his brother on Staten Island. And Thoreau did. He went. And he lasted for about seven months. And during all that time he realized again and again as he would go into New York City, that this was not possible.
And he would write in his journal finally. He would say when women learn that a million people will never replace one man. That reality must resonate in someone. And that for that resonance to be integrated that one person must give it all back complete. That in that mysterious sovereignity of the true self the universe then achieves its personality. Whenever someone is able to commit himself back to the all, untainted untextured by any fractionality. No polarities. No polarized energies. No magnetized figures or images. But a mind, a spirit pure like one of those early stoic flames that rise instantly to the realm of the fixed stars. For they are at home there.
He asked William Emerson if he could go home for Thanksgiving he went back to Concord and he realized that he would never ever leave it again. Except to take certain trips. That concord had become for him his altar. His sacrifice of self. And Thoreau from 1844, when he came back, that winter. He came back in November of 1844, realized increasingly that this would have to suffice for him. And it was in the spring of the following year, 1845 that he took himself consciously to Walden Pond. He wanted to go to Sandy pond. The owners of land her own sandy pond wouldn't allow it. So he went to Walden Pond to build a hut for himself. To build a hermitage for himself. To build some place where he could, like those old sages of antiquity, hold forth with all of nature unimpaired by any illusions of self whatsoever.
And so the New England yogi took himself in the spring of 1845. But took himself in a peculiarly American Way. He took a notebook to record it for others. He took a conscious expressive form along with himself into the universe. He had picked up the mystical Jeffersonian energy, that wherever one man goes he is but a pioneer, really, for others who may go that way. That think what he might he blazes a trail for all ages. That once any one man really has attained some capacity, it then falls as part of the universal heritage of all men. If they will but claim that heritage for themselves. Thoreau is distinguishable by this self-conscious mode. And Walden becomes the record of this journey from the apparent to the real. Having written Walden. Having brought that experiment in self democracy to a certain fruition. It occurred increasingly to Thoreau that his whole life was that Hut. And he never again would have to take himself to some physical place. That the whole life that he had was the experiment. Was the location. Wherever he happened to be. And it was then that there became conscious in him the ideal of the journal becoming a record of the spirit of this person, this personage.
The apt title that Miller gave to the found journal Consciousness in Concord. Give you a couple of excerpts from this and you can see quality comes up here. "We are apt to imagine that the...that this hubbub of philosophy, literature and religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums and parlors vibrates through the universe. And is as Catholic a sound as the creaking of the Earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly he will forget it all between sunset and dawn. It is the three inch swing of some pendulum in a cupboard which the great pulse of nature vibrates clearly and through each instinct. When we lift our lids and open our ears it disappears with smoke and rattle like the cars on the railroad."
He became increasingly attentive to the unseen rather than the seen. To the invisible rather than the visible. And the journal seeks to define in that old ancient circle ambulatory religious way. That the face of God may not be seen but the accurate record of our ambulation around his place will disclose to us a sense of the presence through the mystical insight made available. Because we can see that we have with integrity describe the form. And that what remains outside the form was an opening that was always there, only we did not see it. Its invisibility became apparent to us as an anti form only because we have completed the forming, the patterning of a life. And so Thoreau in his qualitative transformation began from the mid 1840s to record as completely as possible the reality of the human life. And as we said before it would run eventually to some two million words.
We'll look at those journals for the next two weeks. And try to bring out of them the sense of the unseen. It's not quite as one would initially intuit. The unseen that is not something that one has to grasp for through projected intuitiveness with someone of the quality of Thoreau. It begins to occur to us because the parallelness of natural happenstance mount up to what Yung calls synchronicity. An eighth causal connective principle. And we sense then so-called occult phenomena that are noticed to be quite real. Though they were never seen and cannot be seen. And thus we make the transition, finally, to realize that appearance is necessary for we can exhaust appearance by correct form. What we cannot exhaust is that ineffable quality that reality has, with no form in particular.
So we'll see that in the next two weeks here. Thanks for coming.
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