The Journals of Henry David Thoreau: Part One
Presented on: Thursday, March 21, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic America: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau
Presentation 12 of 13
The Journals, Part One: New Man in the New World
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, March 21, 1985
Transcript:
The date is March 21st 1985. This is a twelfth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Hermetic America. Tonight's lecture is entitled the journals part one. new man in the new world. Of course these are Thoreau's journals.
In the new programs are not out but I xeroxed one of the pages so you can see what we're going to do. We're going to continue of course with the United States. We're not going to give up on this country. We are going to continue. We're going to inhabit it with intelligence and conscience. And as they used to say looking at the old car refurbished, people will whistle when we go by with it all refurbished.
I want to start with an entry in Thoreaus, Thoreaus journals from September 9th, 1851 2 a.m. in the morning. Because this is the man. This is the inheritor of the Franklin Jefferson country. You know Thoreau almost never mentioned them. He never talks about Franklin and Jefferson. None of the transcendentalist did. Emerson. It's almost as if they didn't exist. It's almost as if this was completely accepted. Of course we have a country. Of course we have these nice little townships. Of course we have this intellectual freedom. By the 1830s it's assumed by the American people that it's God's gift to them and no one ever had to fight for it. Much less really struggle to conceive the conditions under which it could manifest. So Franklin and Jefferson end up being like Himalayan peaks lost in the mists, lost in the background. But because of the Hermetic nature of their activity there was a resonance. There was a vibration in the air as it were. There was a cultural mileau that was extant, available. Like Tesla's electrical energy. It was in the air. It was available to be drawn upon.
And so we have Thoreau, who becomes a very peculiar human being. There's nobody like Thoreau before him in Western civilization. There just isn't anyone at all. To find someone like Thoreau you have to go back either to the American Indians or you have to go back to the old Chinese Dalas. Or further back and this is what Thoreau began to recognize. You have to go back to ancient India. Back to Upanihadic times where the wise in life left man's realm and went back to nature. They went back to nature not to go back to nature qua nature. Not to go back to the trees and the mountains and the streams. But to take themselves back there and open it up. It's like setting a butterfly free. And nature is transformed with that kind of an action. When man frees his spirit nature, nature transforms and becomes a cosmos. And it is different. It is different.
Here is a man. By 1851 Thoreau was quite far along. Had realized that his relationship, for instance with Emerson, the closest relationship of his life was already beginning to fray. By 1850 Emerson had completed all of his major writings. Yes English traits would be published just four years later and would make a tremendous impact. But Emerson the man had somehow crested had, somehow matured. had come in the late 1840s, early 1850s to the fullness of himself and had begun to withdraw in some primordial sense. And Thoreau sensitive to this resents the fact that a great man is shriveling. Resents the fact that homiletic competence is beginning to displace the lightning and thunder of a free spirit roaming at will in the wildness of the world. He senses that somehow Emerson had tamed those inner energies. But attained them in terms of the family. In terms of fame. In terms of the publishing realm. In terms of his readers who trusted him. In terms of his family background.
Thoreau becomes almost like a gnostic who is suspicious of the Demiurgic world. And says, "We cannot come to the terms that you have come to. We cannot agree to live in nature in terms of the provincial humanists which we have accepted. Because all of this is illusion. All of this is going to pass. And we need to address ourselves fresh. What are we in our spirit and our spirit self? Get out of line from the stores. Get out of line from the railroad stations. Get out of line from even the Lyceum programs. Get out of even the small Athens of America, Concord Massachusetts. Get out into the countryside." And so Thoreau is looking at this time trying to find, almost like some Zen master, a way to make the world transparent to himself.
Here's what he records 2:00 a.m. in the morning September 9th 1851. Melville is working on Moby Dick in the same state not very far away. "The moon not quite full. Going to Canatum(sp?) via road. There is a low vapor in the meadows beyond the depot, dense and white. Though scarcely higher than a man's head concealing the stems of the trees. I see that the Oaks which are so dark and distinctly outlined our illumined by the moon on the opposite side." Notice the contrasting in Thoreaus writing. Always a X of the unknown coming in to contrast. And what is generally known in a familiar way it becomes transposed. It is now known in an unfamiliar way.
"This as I go up the back road. A few thin ineffectual clouds in the sky. I come out thus into the moonlit night where men are not. As if into a scenery anciently deserted by men. the life of men is like a dream. It is three thousand years since night has had possession. Go forth and hear the crickets chirp at midnight. hear if their dynasty is not an ancient one and well founded. I feel the antiquity of the night. She surely repossesses herself of her realms as if her dynasty were uninterrupted. Or she had underlaying the day, no sound but the steady creaking of crickets and the occasional crowing of cocks. I go by the farmers houses and barns standing there in the dim light under the trees. As if they lay at an immense distance or under a vail. The farmer and his oxen are all sleep now. Not even a watchdog awake. The human slumbers. There is less of man in this world. The fog in the low lands on the corner road is never still. It now advances and envelops me as I stand to write these words, then clears away and ever noiselessly step(?). It ever covers the meadows like a web. I hear the clock strike three. Now at the clay end bank the light of Orion's belt seems to show traces of the blue day through which it comes to us. the sky at least is lighter on that side than in the West even about the moon. Even by night the sky is blue and not black. For we see through the veil of night into the distant atmospheres of day."
Thoreau becomes very much a resonance of some ancient tradition that was eclipsed in Roman times. A tradition that Pindar would have felt at home in. A tradition where Orpheus still sang with his nine stringed lyre. It was the condition of the natural underlay of man before the death of pan. You know it was Plutarch who recorded the death of pan, about 130 ad. He recorded in The Moralia of thee..the discovery that Pan was dead. And the message shouted out to one of the capes of Brindisian. It was a great mysterious moan from the forest. A trustworthy stoic, staid old sea captain reported it at the Roman port and said that some old mystical Greek Oracle had told him to declare that Pan was dead to the woodland hills. And that was the response, a low moan.
Thoreau brings it back. It is all back. She has been there all this while. But she has never been there since for European man. He's been blinded by the glare of his own egotistical thrust. And only when the veils were beginning to lift a little bit were there penetrations through. A little bit of Russo rowing himself on his lake in Switzerland. A little bit of Novalis bucking into the mysteriousness of man. Occasionally we get the glimpse in Jefferson of the, the flaming intuition of the passing of an age. The ushering end of some new era. Thoreau brings this to be. And he writes that it must manifest with the individual. This is the important point. It cannot be there for some chamara(?) it has to be there for the person. There may be many persons but it is the man. Remember how he wrote after he lived on Staten Island for a few months trying to acclimate himself to the New York City environment. He said when will man learn that a million men will never replace one man. One human being. This was what was important to him in his work.
Thoreau had taken himself in 1845 by the suggestion of a very dear friend of his Ellery Channing, the son of William Ellery Channing. He had been written that he would never amount to very much in the world until he took himself out of the condition. Out of the society where he had labored in limbo and took himself out somewhere to devour himself. This is the way Ellery Channing put it in a letter. "My dear Thoreau, the handwriting of your letter is so miserable that I'm not sure I have made it out. if it..if I have it it seems that you are the same old sixpence used to be rather rusty but a genuine piece. I see nothing for you in this earth. But that field which I once christened briars. Go out upon that build yourself a hut and there begin the ground process of devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative. No other hope for you. Eat yourself up. You will eat no one else. Nor anything else. Concord is just as good place as any other. There are indeed more people in the streets of that village than in the streets of New York. This is a singularly muddy town. Muddy, solitary and silent."
And so the briars which was a plot of many acres forty, fifty acres along side the shores of Walden town, about two miles south of the then Concord city limits. It was a plot of ground that Emerson had bought. Ralph Waldo Emerson. They had spotted the harvesting of trees. they were cutting down all the trees alongside Walden Pond. And so to preserve some of the watershed in the terrain Emerson bought some acreages. And later on would buy more to try to protect the pond. And they called it the briars because it was left wild.
So in 1845 in the spring Emerson caring for the younger Thoreau. always puzzled by Thoreau. He was a ambivalent package of dynamite. Emerson expected that he would become the man of Concord. He expected that in fact Thoreau would probably be the genius of his whole lot. And yet of all the people in Concord he was the one that did the least. So he said take the opportunity go out to the land. And so Thoreau went out then he built himself a 10 foot by 15 foot Hut. He built himself. He felled the trees. The pines are very much like arrows. very easy to strip them of their branches. And he made six inch square beams leaving on the top side the roundness of the bark of the tree. It makes a beam stronger. And for the walls, he finished only two sides of it so that the rough sides will take the chinking better. And he set this up, built the frames as was the tradition
when it came time to raise the frames we'll had a raising party up there.
And Emerson, Alcott, Hawthorne living in Concord at that time, Thoreau. The whole crowd of them went out there in one afternoon raised these frames and laid on the ceiling. And it wasn't until November that Thoreau got around to putting the chinking in.
He loved to rough it. He had a table, which he made. He had a cot, which he made. He had three chairs. And I think he had some bookcases that he made out of driftwood.
Thoreau was extremely talented with hands. Whether it was carpentry or machinery or anything. Thoreau was a genius. He seems to be the arch foe of industrialism and yet he is a mechanical genius of the first order. He is the man who figured out the matrix for making a superior graphite which they used in the family pencil books. And they found out that his graphite was so fine it was a refined product. That it was used when electro typing first came in. And the Thoreau family began to make six to ten thousand dollars per year in the 1840s from selling bulk graphite to printing outfits. And pretty soon it became known across the country and the Thoreau family were encouraged to open up branch offices all over the country. The Midwest. New York, even in Germany. Thoreau had figured out the process. Had figured out how to do this and make it happen. He was that kind of a talented genius.
And he applied himself and making the Walden cabin. And when he got it fashioned it seemed to constellate for the first time the image of the man in the eyes of everyone else. He had been a ne'er-do-well. And all of a sudden in the space of a couple of months because he had built his hut out in the sticks Thoreau was the wise man. People started to go out there to visit him. They couldn't keep away from him. Hawthorne would be brooding over some of his work, unable to talk to anyone else he would go out to Walden and sit there. Sometimes in solitude. Thoreau was great at leaving you alone. Or sometimes in that kind of deadly accuracy Thoreau would bring out fragment by fragment, spark by spark, the real energy in the issue. Whole the droves of schoolchildren would come out to learn about nature. It was found out that Thoreau could talk to animals.
He would have a whole group of schoolchildren sitting in the Walden cabin. On the cots, on the chairs and on the floor and he would leave the front door open, just a little 10 by 15 room. And he would go outside the door and he would start humming deep in his throat, in his chest making strange vibratory sounds. And pretty soon the little woodchucks would come out. The crows would come and land on his shoulder. All the little woodland animals, just like in Snow White, all gather around him and he would talk to them in these vibratory tones. clicking and humming and so forth and then feed them. And the little children all inside realized here's the magician of the woods.
And he would come in then and he would tell the children stories of the Indians. The human beings who used to live here. who used to all do this. Everyone knew how to talk to the animals. Everyone knew how to talk to the trees. The wilderness was a home for the whole people. So he would take them out and they would look for Indian artifacts.
You know once an expert ethnologist visited Emerson's house and he was introduced to Thoreau and within several hours Thoreau had reduced him to silence because the man didn't know anything about the Indians. He knew what you could find in books but he didn't know the life blood. He didn't know that energized wave of reality which the American Indian express by his life. But Thoreau was afine to that all the time.
And so Walden became a very curious situation. It was from some hours on certain days solitude to other hours in the next day it was the site of great family picnics. Everybody coming out and camping on the front forest lawn. It was about 200 feet up from the pond. And Thoreau would be the focus of the whole town. And he was finally identified. Somebody who had been nebulous before was suddenly seen to represent what Emerson said we should put him on the payroll. The town needs a professional naturalist. Someone who conducts us Hermes like back to the natural order. Who brings the message of the gods, mother nature. People had criticized Thoreau, they say you talk about mother nature as she was your mother-in-law. As if she's someone. And he would say she is, of course she is. Of course we are related to her. She is conscious. We are in every respect her children. This would bother people until Walden was built. And the Walden cabin catapulted Thoreau in the mind of those who knew him at the time as someone who was successful.
What he used Walden for, for himself, was a chance to bring together the disparate experiences of about ten years and put them into books. He wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers there. And he wrote the first draft of Walden. All within the space of about a year and a half. A year and three quarters. It was a shaping process. The making of the cabin hut was the making of the man. And from the making of the man coming into manifestation as a being identifable he was able to project that out and create books which were in the shape of the man. It's almost like a ploutonion emanation. Until the man was there the books couldn't be there. Because the books were a new literary genre. They were not works of literature from the mind. They were projections of a pattern of wholeness from the man.
And so Thoreau works are neither fiction or nonfiction. And they're not an amalgam of fiction and nonfiction. They are presentations rather than representations. Nothing is fictionalized. And because nothing is fictionalized there is no contrasting non-fiction. All that is possible is presented. It is a literature of the possible is presented completely. And there the man rings clear in terms of his motion. In terms of his mobility within nature. Well you can step back and say isn't that a nature spirit. Yes if you pronounce both words equally. Then that's what man was for Thoreau.
And for a year and a half or a year and three quarters walden was the site of many a fine conversation. And because he seemed to be identified the tax people brought him in and they said we want to tax you what do you own. He said I don't own anything. Don't you own this cabin? No I don't own this cabin. I built it with the help of friends but I don't own it. Do you own the land? No I don't you own the land. What about your family business? I don't own that. Well what do you own? He said I think I own a rowboat I made. So they looked it up in the books and they said well we can't really get you. It isn't really a viable vehicle for the tax rules. Get out. They couldn't tax it.
Well this bothered Thoreau. He began to think about the fact that they were taxing him. What were they doing with his money anyway? And he realized that it was the government that was taking the money. Well what was the government doing with it? Well they were building structures. What kind of structures? Political structures. Well that got under Thoreaus skin because it was those political structures that he resented. The firmer they became the more trees were cut down. The more people were anesthetized by falsity and traditions.
And then Thoreau remembered that there was an issue that was bright in his family and that was slavery. The Thoreau family, all of them, were early members of the abolitionist society. Something founded incidentally by Benjamin Franklin near the end of his life and continued by Jefferson. But by the 1830s it had become a real issue almost like a party. William Lloyd Garrison was the great spokesman for it. And Nathaniel Rogers also a great spokesman for it. But Thoreaus family were organizers. They were active militant anti-slavery people. That is to say they harbored slaves fleeing in their homes, fed them, gave them money and helped them to get to Canada. It was the Underground Railroad. And Thoreaus hut at Walden became one of those centers.
And it hit him would he begin thinking about the taxation, that they were using this money eventually to squelch and suppress his fellow man. And so he went to the sheriff of the town and he said I'm not going to pay any taxes. And the sheriff said well you haven't ever paid any taxes that's nothing new. He said no I want you to understand I refuse to recognize your authority to tax me. And he made his point so vociferusly that the man said, well Henry we're gonna have to put you in the pokey. And so they stuck Thoreau in jail for a night. Some cloaked figure came and delivered the money to the sheriff as soon as word leaked out that he was in jail. The sheriff said I think I'll leave them, leave him there for the night.
Now the jail in Concord was a huge building. It was the jail for the whole countryside. It was three stories high, some 65 feet long. Had about 18 cells that were almost as large as half this room here, 26 feet by 8 and a half feet. Usually two people in a Cell. And as soon as Thoreau got in that jail environment he began to do his militant work. He started interviewing all the prisoners. What are you in here for? What are conditions like? And he found out that his cellmate had been there for three months. He'd fallen asleep in a barn and his pipe had ignited the barn and had burnt down. And they weren't sure whether what to do with him. Anyway he had been there for three months.
And so Thoreau got a history of the whole jail from him.
And he started formulating in his mind the idea that the government cannot incarcerate individuals on the basis of illusionary laws. And the more he thought about this the more he thought that it is the right of the individual as a spiritual being to deny them the reality. To deny them the confirmation of the reality of their illusion.
And so he began to write. and he worked up a nice little article on this. It was entitled various..variously but generally is known as The Essay On Civil Disobedience. And it first appeared incidentally in a magazine. Or rather part of it appeared in the magazine. Because of the dynamite nature of some of his observations they didn't quite uh print all of it. He had a problem with several of his essays. And most of these problem essays were collected together about four years after Thoreaus death. This is the first edition of it. It's called A Yankee In Canada and Other Essays: Anti-Slavery in Reform Papers, that's what it's called. And it was published in 1866. It was finally able to be published after the civil war was over. But Thoreau had written it in 1846.
Now this was a very touchy time. The United States had declared war on Mexico. Oh yes we went into Mexico. What's the marine song from the halls of Montezuma. They were there. So this militancy of the United States was feeding everybody. Texas had just come into the Union a la Sam Houston's bravery. And Americans were getting a little huffy about the British designs on the Oregon Territory. And they were getting a little feisty about everything. They didn't want to hear about somebody who wasn't going to pay his taxes. Especially on a philosophic basis. Oh he says in here, he writes, "I heartily accept the motto that government is best which governs least." He doesn't give the attribution. I think Jefferson carved that over his bathroom mirror. Thoreau writes, "And I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out it finally amounts to this, which I also believe that government is best which governs not at all." Well that's just for openers.
And the essay on civil disobedience which wasn't heard in the 19th century. It was so radical that it was not heard. The first people that began to hear this, people like H salt in England, who then influenced people like Mahatma Gandhi. But it wasn't really digested even by Gandhi. The first person to really understand what Thoreau was writing was Martin Luther King Jr. And he used to pass around, the Southern Christian Leadership used to pass around, little Xeroxes of portions of The Essay On Civil Disobedience. Especially for those who are learning to take the clubs, which is very hard to do. It's hard to stand there and take punishment. And you have to understand that there's a moral issue at stake. And that one's non-response is spiritualizing the process. Making sacred the process. And Thoreaus writing here becomes exceedingly powerful when understood in that regard.
Also collected with the essay on civil disobedience incidentally here was his wonderful little essay Paradise To Be Regained. To be regained. He writes, "Fellow men I promised to show the means of creating a paradise within ten years. Where everything desirable for human life may be had by ever in super abundance. Without labor and without pay. Now this begins to sound very much like the French utopianist Charles Fourier and so forth and Simone Trudeau. This is the kind of language that cracked Europe open in 1848.
It's interesting that Thoreau writes these essays in the United States and about the time that these ideas are also being acted out in Europe. Especially in France. And the revolutionary year of 1848 ties in very very closely and very neatly with a lot of Thoreau's writings. In fact one has to read very carefully and you run across the name of most of the French utopian writers. Fourier said that there need to be human communities consciously selected aside. That there were so many types of human beings and you need two people of each type. I think the the issue finally came down to South East pantisocracy, which is writings. The idea that we need to have experimental communities of a complete clear pure cross-section of humanity to see what man looks like together. What mankind looks like. And that for this you need the integrity of individuals. All of this began to work at this time in the 1840s. And Thoreau is about the only individual in this country who seems to speak up to this. There are also essays like Herald Of Freedom.
And for Thoreau the middle of 1840s becomes a time of consolidation. The writing of A Week on the Concord On Merrimack Rivers. The writing of Walden. The building of the cabin. The identifying of himself as a spiritual naturalist whose messages to reawaken those affinities with the cosmos which man has somehow lost. And it's curious to notice the surreal displacement here. Because he's writing this only twenty years after Jefferson has died, but there's almost no conscious cognition that all this was planned for. That all of this was made possible because of 50 years of incredible revolution and turmoil making possible these insights.
In fact in Thoreaus journal we read, quite interesting. Walking by night again. 1851 again. This is from August the 12th 1:30 a.m. and he writes, "Sitting on the sleepers of Hubbard's Ridge. Which is being repaired now three o'clock a.m. I hear a cock crow. How admirably adapted to the dawn is that sound. Is it made by the first rays of light renting the darkness. The creaking of the sun's axel heard already over the eastern hills. Though man's life is trivial and hand selled, nature is holy and heroic. With what infinite faith and promise and moderation begins each new day. It is only a little after three o'clock and already there is evidence of morning in the sky. He rejoices when the moon comes forth from the squadron's of the clouds unscathed. And there are no more obstructions in her path. And the cricket also seems to express joy in his song. It does concern men who are asleep in their beds but it is very important to the traveler. Whether the moon shines bright and unobstructed or as obscured by clouds. It is not easy to realize that serene joy of all the earth when the moon commences to shine unobstructedly. Unless you have often been a traveling by night. The traveler represents as it would the wind, and rustles the leaves. Or rustles the water. Increasing the coolness of the night at such an hour. A solitary horse and his pasture was scared by the sudden sight of me. An apparition to him. Standing still in the moonlight. And moving about inspecting with alarm but I spoke and he heard the sound of my voice. That once stood reassured and expressed his pleasure by wagging his stump of the tail. Though still half a dozen rods on. How wholesome the taste of huckleberries when now by moonlight I feel for them amid the bushes. And now the first signs of morning attract the travellers attention. And he cannot help rejoicing. And the moon begins gradually to fade from his recollection. The wind rises, rustles the trees. The sand is cool on the surface but warm two or three inches beneath. And the rocks are quite warm to the hand. So that he sits on them or leans against them for warmth though indeed it is not cold elsewhere. As I walk along the Fair Haven Hill I see a ripple on the river. And now the moon has gone behind a huge black mass of clouds. I realize I may not see her again in her glory this night. That perchance ere she rises from this obscurity. The Sun will have risen and she will appear but as a cloud herself. And sink unnoticed in the west as yet no sounds of awakening men. only the more frequent crowing of cocks still standing on their purchase in the barns."
And so Thoreau glides phantasmal like some hermetic messenger of a new kind of day. Man is a natural spirit moving phantasmally in industrial civilization. Beginning to record the observations of people who haven't even yet been born. A generation that will find in Thoreau a great-granddaddy. Someone whom they can claim to be part of their family.
Well let's take a break and we'll come back after the break and have some more. Time for a break.
Please turn to your cassette. Please turn your cassette over now and I'll start playing again the other side after a brief pause.
END OF SIDE 1
I'm going to put into the record a page from Civil Disobedience. Of course you can find it for yourselves and read the whole thing. "If the tax gatherer or any other public officer asks me, as one has done, but what shall I do? My answer is if you really wish to do anything resign your office. When the subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his office then the revolution is accomplished. Both sides have to do it. We have to say that this relation will no longer obtain. And if we withdraw our consent on both sides of it, the relation ceases. Was it real in that case? It was unreal. Was it necessary? It was unnecessary. The mind that saw it as real and as necessary was deluded. This of course is basic Buddhism. Emerson used to call him a Spartan Buddhist.
He went to to London and he's going to be gone for about a year. And so he made arrangements to have Thoreau take over his family. Trusted the man so implicitly. He had three children under 8 at that time. And Thoreau tended everything. Kept up the garden which produced food in those days. Kept up the household. Took care of the family. And when the youngest one three years old said are you my new daddy, Thoreau wrote to Emerson and said I thaink you better come home.
When he came back from Walden with the manuscript of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he went through the terrible process of trying to find a publisher. Which was then ever as it has been. It's hard to find an honest publisher. I've never published anything for 20 years because I can't find an honest publisher. Thoreau finally settled with a company that would produce a thousand copies of the week. And they would be paid back through the proceeds of the sale. And so it came out. 75 copies were sent out to reviewers of all kinds. It recevied some notice but it didn't sell. And so it took Thoreau four years to work off the debt. And finally when he had paid it off he received a wagonload of seven hundred and six copies of his book. He recorded in this journal, he said "I have a library now of nine hundred volumes over 700 I've written myself." Years later some man recalled as a young boy being sent as a messenger over to the Thoreau household and they'd heard about this library of one volume. So when the door was open and there was Thoreau, as a young boy this man said he kept looking around the room to look up the stairs to see if he could get sight of this famous library of one book. Many, many times a whole wall just one book.
I don't think it was until 1868 that the edition was finally sold out. Long after Thoreau was gone. Incidentally when it was finally printed in a corrected edition in 1868, it's been in print now for 120 years, and has sold adequately every year since then. This is a classic literature. This is a literature for the ages. This is a kind of a person who's making a new scene. A new scene. A different genre. Something that hadn't been seen before.
But we notice after Walden Thoreaus emphasis begins to change. He becomes more and more exacting. He becomes more and more scientific. Sometimes to his own chagrin. He says what am i doing. I am not happy until I know the Latin scientific name of a grass. And when I hear the scientific name I suddenly feel akin to it. He is in the Hermetic tradition, where science and mysticism are the same process. This is what makes it Hermetic. What makes it Hermetic is that it comes from a standpoint of unity rather than a standpoint of multiplicity. This is not a mental structure. it is a spiritual flow. And it's Hermetic because it is sealed. It's not sealed against something or against anything else it is sealed with the holy seal of unity. It has no moving parts. When it moves, all moves as one. Nature for Thoreau is a hermetic horizon. Where unconsciousness occurs rather selflessly because there is no differentiation particularly to recommend structure.
One of the lost journals from 1840/41 was found in our time. Not too long ago published in 1958 by Perry Miller. He gave it the title Consciousness in Concord. Here's an entry, interesting for the tone Saturday October 3rd 1840. "No man has imagined what private discourse his members have with surrounding nature. Or how much the tenor of that intercourse affects his own health and sickness. While the head to go stargazing, the legs are not necessarily astronomers too. But are acquiring an independent experience in lower strata of nature. How much do they feel when they do not in...which they do not impart? How much rumour dies between the knees and the ears? Surely instinct uses this experience of the dumb members. I am no more a free man of my own members than of universal nature. After all the body takes care of itself. It saves itself from a fall. It eats, drinks, sleeps, perspires, digests, grows, dies. And the best economy is to let it alone in all these. Why need I to travel to seek a site and consult the points of the compass? My eyes are south windows and out of them I command a southern prospect. Now when man is unified wherever he looks, that's the coordinate. However he is that is, that the state of the universe. That the edge, the palpable threshold of consciousness, is the physical world and if man is unified all nature sings to him. Is one song." And so he writes, "But pray what has seen to do with the soul that she must always sit at a window? For I find myself always in the rear of my eye. However I look, my looking is me. However I compose as I see, that composition is my self. Consciousness in Concord"
Notice now the contrast thirteen years later the same journalist. The journals of Thoreau run to 20 volumes. 20 volumes. Incidentally this experiment of Thoreau will become picked up by Walt Whitman. And Whitman will work with it not in terms of landscape but in terms of people. Leaves Of Grass is he a visionary unity in terms of people, humanity. Thoreau in terms of nature.
And it won't be until our time and a great American poet will put it all together and take people in nature as an interval. And of course because we live in such a degenerate age with no taste at all. That the poet is you almost unknown his name is Theodore Roethke. And in the library of the University of Washington there are 12 feet of Roethke's notebooks of every instant for years and years and years on end integrating. And he wrote his poems out of these notebooks. Sometimes taking images from dozens of separate years and putting them together and drawing universal poems out of a substratum of a life flow which was chronicled in definitely in detail. In terms of both landscape and personage. Sometime in the 21st century why they'll be a poetry again and Roethke will be high on the list.
Can you tell us how to spell it? R-o-e-t-h-ke.
It was his sister that taught me to write when I was 12 or 14 years old.
Here is Thoreau now 1853, 13 years later from the Consciousness and Concord journal, "Evening draws on while I am gathering bundles of pennyroyal on the further kanatam height." It was a hill, pillar. "I find it amid the stubble mixed with blue curls. And as fast as I get my hands full, tie it into a fragrant bundle. Evening draws on smoothing the waters and lengthening the shadows. Now half an hour or more before sundown. What constitutes the charm of this hour of the day? Is it the condensing dews of the air just beginning? Or the grateful increase of shadows in the landscape?" This is August. "Some fiat has gone forth and stilled the ripples of the lake. Each sound at each site has acquired inapplicable beauty. How agreeable when the sun shines at this angle to stand on one side and look down on flourishing sprout lands or forests where the cool shade is mingled in greater proportion than before with the light. Broad shallow lakes of shadow stretch of the lower portions of the top of the woods. A thousand little cavities are filling with coolness. Hills and the least inequalities in the ground begin to cast an obvious shadow. The shadow of an elm stretches crite(sp?) across the meadow. I see pigeons in numbers fly up from the stubble. I hear some young bluebirds plaintive warble near me. And some young hawks other a pulsing screen from time to try across the pond. To whom life is yet so novel. Far over the pond and woods. I also hear a farmer calling loudly to his cows in the still air. Ceer, ceer, ceer(?). What shall we name this season? This very late afternoon or very early evening. this severe and placid season of the day most favorable for reflection. After the insufferable heats and bustles of the day are over and before the dampness and twilight of evening. The serene hour. The muses hour. The season of reflection. It is commonly desecrated by being made tea time. It begins perhaps with the very earliest condensation of moisture in the air. When the shadows of hills are first observed and the breeze begins to go down. And birds begin again to sing. The pensive season. It is earlier than the chaste eve of the poet. Bats have not come forth. It is not Twilight. There is no dew yet on the grass. And still less any early star in the heavens. It is the turning point between afternoon and evening. The few sounds now heard far or near are delicious. It is not more dusky and obscure but clearer than before. The clearing of the air by condensation of mists more than balances the increase of shadows. Chaste eve is merely preparing to draw overall. It is a season somewhat earlier that is celebrate...than that celebrated by poets. There is not such a set of...sense of lateness and approaching night as they describe. The poet arouses himself and collects his thoughts. He postpones Tea indefinitely. Thought now takes her siesta. Each sound is a broad and deep relief of silence." There's a mature consciousness.
Thoreau's journal grew constantly as he is working on it. But he was attempting at this time to bring books into being. To give them a shape. He began to take journeys. He took a journey to Canada. He went by rail. Went to Montreal. Went to Quebec. Finally would walk as far down the Saint Lawrence of Saint Anne's. He was appalled by the presence of armed and uniformed troops in the streets of the Canadian cities. How unlike America. How unlike the New England where the civilian held sway. The citizen was the population. There was a definite military presence. And they were so used to walking across land and he would come across fences constantly. And when evening came in New England you could knock at anyone's door and they would rent you a sleeping space for the night, in the house or the barn. It was the open courtesy of a free land. And in Canada when they knocked to find a place for the evening they were told to go away. They're robbers. They're under suspicion. He said this is the underside of the military presence. The militarization produces this skittishness. And finally he would lay the blame for it all at the door of the church. He says the church with the false religion has led men astray from himself.
And when A Yankee in Canada was finally put into magazine serial form, the magazine editors began to delete all the tooth passages. And Thoreau withdrew it from publications half published. And he said no more and it was never published again in his lifetime. And people say well it's such a boring, boring work it really is minor. There's nothing boring that comes forth from an awakened consciousness. It is he who is the guiding star who points to our presence. Not his alone, our presence. And this is what makes Thoreau valuable. valuable to us. He constellated the tremendous energy field that was engendered consciously by Franklin and Jefferson and brings it home to some human heart. Someone you could talk to.
He would begin taking travels then in various spots. And again and again he would notice the contrast between the life vision that he was enjoying daily, momentarily and the tremendous sense of confusion arising within society. Within the cities. Within his other population.
He went with his friend Ellery Channing to see the ocean. He wanted to see the ocean. Experience the ocean. So they went to Cape Cod. And he went back to Cape Cod some 10 or 11 months later by himself because Emerson had gone there in between and brought back some berries he hadn't seen. And Thoreau was upset with himself because he had not paid attention. He had not done his work. He had not recorded the fine detail of reality properly. And so he sent himself back. Go back to Cape Cod. Go back and so and he went alone. And he came back to the lighthouse great state and the keeper said you know the soldiers men, the police were looking for you. There had been a robbery in Providence and I thought that you had done it, you and your friend. Why else would people go to all the trouble to walk along the Cape Cod stretch of beach out of sight of other people. You were looking for a way to get off Cape Cod get away with the stolen goods.
Already in the 1850s the sense of corruption, of suspicion was coming in. Where is it coming from? It's coming obviously from some kind of militarization of life which is not yet visible in Concord but must be there in the air. And then of course as soon as he looked at the papers, the Mexican War was proof enough. Of course, oh yes. Thoreau so sensitive to events that when the John Brown events occurred he became physically ill. Almost into a coma. He could not stand the fact that man on this verge and this threshold of being real for the first time in 3,000 years to himself, was gonna corrupt it all over again. With the delusions that always schmear and always blur, not only the real that the sense of the individual who is the threshold of the real. This became a real problem for him and so he began returning, at least once more to various places that he would visit. And so he fell into a pattern of visiting place, taking notes on the way, bringing them back, writing out his memories and his imaginations. Then several months or a year or so later going back to the same place and reckoned **(inaudible)**. and comparing what has he seen.
He did this when he went to Maine. The Maine Eoods is a record of his desire to go and climb Mount Katahdin, the highest point in Maine. Which at that time was beyond the edge of civilization. One had to go some 80 miles in from the coast. And then one went by canoe another 15 or 20 miles. and then one hike from there. And for Thoreau it was a tremendous realization that the only people that still live there were the Indians. They were still alive. Still there. And we got, and you can read for it in The Maine Woods, when he got to the top, the top was not a point but was a plateau limit. And it was all shrouded in clouds and there was nothing but glistening wet boulders and rocks and the clouds. And Thoreau walking in them. And these intuitions of man being caught in this nightmare all over again. Of the faults, the Demiurgic world of delusion.
And he records how he was glad to come down off the mountaintop. There was something there, an insight that he was not ready to make conscious for himself. It was before his time. He wasn't ready to face that scale of disappointment. For weeks afterwards Thoreau extremely depressed. One finds a kind of almost irritability in his journal, against everyone. He had glimpsed something which was there in nature which we call evil. which still circulates for man. And that it was not going to be easy. It is difficult because the path to the top of the mountain leads to this kind of morass. Where you need an inner coordination because the external coordinates do not work. The textbooks are no good. The systems of orientation don't work. And if one is not real and free from within, then you are lost.
Thoreau in writing The Maine Woods, in writing Cape Cod, writing Walden, writing Week on The Concord and Merrimack, gave a shape to limited excursions. Trips. Travelers books. Naturalist books. Which when you read them as naturalist books dissolve back into a portrait of some consciousness seeking to objectify itself.
Roethke writes in one of his notebooks, to love the object is to love life. Life requires that it be manifest. Requires that it be there. The urge to materialize, the urge to matter, is a natural direction. A natural vectoring of life energies. It of itself comes into being. And the objectification is not a illusion or delusion but is a natural occurrence.
And for Thoreau these works were excursions into the materializing. But the work that was not published, except in excerpts throughout his lifetime, were the journals. And that was where he was recording in the largest possible scale that flow that he was beginning to recognize as himself. He entered into a wonderful correspondence with a man named Harrison Otis Gray Blake, who saved a number of his letters, some 49 of his letters. And they were published later on in his life. And we see the philosophic Thoreau coming out in those.
But here from the journals, 1851. Christmas Day, 1851. "It would be a truer discipline for the writer to take the least film of thought that floats in the twilight sky of his mind for his theme. About which he has scarcely one idea. That would be teaching his ideas how to shoot. Faintest intimations. Shadowiest subjects. Make a lecture on this. By assiduously, assiduity and attention get perchance two views of the same. Increase a little the stock of knowledge. Clear a new field instead of meandering the old. Instead of making a lecture out of obvious truths hackneyed to the minds of all thinkers. We seek too soon to ally the perceptions of the mind to the experience of the hand. To prove our gossamer truths practical. To show their connection with our everyday life. Better show their distance from our everyday life. To regulate them to the cider mill and the banking institution. Give me pure mind. Pure thought. Let me not be in haste to detect the universal law. Let me see more clearly a particular instance of it. Much finer themes I aspire to. Which will yield no satisfaction to the vulgar mind. Not one sentence for them. Perchance it may convince such that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in their philosophy. Dissolve one nebula and so destroy the nebular system and hypotheses. Do not seek expressions, seek thoughts to be expressed by perseverance. You get two views of the same rare truth. that way of viewing things you know of least insisted on by you however least remembered, take that view. Adhere to that. Insist on that. See all things from that point of view. Will you let these intimations go untended to and watch the bell or door or knocker? That is your text. Do not speak for other man speak for yourself. They show you as in a vision the kingdoms of the world and all the worlds. But you prefer to look in upon a puppet show. Though you only speak to one kindred mind in all time. Though you speak not to one but only utter aloud that which you the more completely realize. And live in the idea which contains the reason of your life. That you may build yourself up to the height of your conceptions. That you may remember your Creator in the days of your youth. and justify his ways to man. That the end of life may not be its amusement. Speak through your...though your thought presupposes the non-existence of your hearers. Speak thoughts that transcend life and death. What through mortal ears are not fitted to hear absolute truth. Thoughts that blot out the earth are best conceived in the night when darkness has already blotted it out from sight. We then look for inspiration."
And so Thoreau at the same time is Melville writing Moby Dick, says Americans have come to a specialty. They're going to be at home in the unknown. They're going to be free to be themselves without any identity. They had cut loose from the shores of recognition. And had got out on the oceans of presentation.
Well we'll see more because Thoreau lived another 12 years and developed incredible capacity. And we'll see next week how he manages to waken in Walt Whitman's mind in New York a glimmer of possibility.
END OF RECORDING