The Journals of Henry David Thoreau: Part Two

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

The Journals, Part Two: The Sage of North America
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, March 28, 1985

Transcript:

The date is March 28 1985. This is the last lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Hermetic America. Tonight's lecture is on Thoreau continued, the journals part two the sage of America.

The difference between Emerson and Thoreau. Emerson organized his expression and Thoreau organized his being. There's a different emphasis. It's difficult to appreciate it, Thoreau. It's difficult to appreciate the tremendous distinctive difference of the United States by the 1850s. The gap between Europe and the United States that was initiated in the individual person of Benjamin Franklin, that had become almost an expressive doctrine by the time of Jefferson. Now reaches epic proportions. By the 1850s the United States was a very peculiar place in which to have human being. And in fact the perception of this whole era was unavailable for critical analysis until the late 1920s.

The first individual to understand that something special had happened was a man named Parrington, Vernon Parrington. And he wrote a series of books that collected together make a nearly a thousand page volume. Main Springs of the American tradition came out in 1927. And Parrington is the first writer to understand that Thoreau was not an appendage of Emerson. But Parrington's insight was lost on the generation of the 20s.

And it wasn't until 1941 that a man named F.O. Matthiessen wrote a book called American Renaissance. In which he threw out on to his desk and said here we have five or six of the greatest books ever written in the English language and they all came within a five-year period in the northeastern corner of the United States. Something must have happened there. That Moby Dick and Leaves of Grass and Representative Men and Walden and Scarlet Letter, a number of these great works all occurred at the same time. And when he look closer all these men knew each other. And so he devoted this incredible study, which is still in print, American Renaissance to examinate was this happenstance. Or was this in fact some phase that had matured.

Now Parrington and Matthiessen are literary men. They in fact give us the insight that American literature by 1850 had achieved something very difficult. It has achieved a very distinctive tone and conscious expression that did not mirror condition so much as structure them. Thoreau in this group is the most inscrutable. He's the most difficult to come by. Even with Melville's reluctance to be clear even to himself. He is still more easily understood..stood than Thoreau.

And we have to review some of the facts of Thoreau's life up to the point of the publishing of Walden in 1854 in order to understand this. If you recall Thoreau tried to be a teacher and was unable to toe the line. To discipline his students. To apply the rod. And had resigned his teaching job, one of the first that he had. He also took up lecturing much like I am doing here. And was the head of the Concord Lyceum for some time, that also he resigned. He attempted to make his way by writing articles, by putting them together to publish books. And we saw with Cape Cod that when the first half of that was published he withdrew the rest of it from publication from Putnams Magazine. Thoreau is constantly reigning himself in. Is this a bad habit or is this indicative of a master strategy. Which was in danger of being impaired by the directions that were being developed.

Thoreau's observation in New York City, when will man ever learned the value of a man, is very close to Emerson's great ideal that the individual he is a focus of infinite capacities. That the individual is not a defined area limited and to be colored in by various experiences and context. But that the individualist focus is a prism of infinite capacities. That the value of an individual human being is transcendental to the physical occurrence of that human being. That however much we may respect the capacity of the mind to overflow those physical limitations, those temporal limitations, those geographical limitations. That even the dimensions of the mind are paltry compared to that of the human spirit. That the human spirit cannot be a genie in a bottle. You can't cork it. You cannot bottle it. The human spirit manifests but it manifests in a dynamic way. It must pass through this form for its efficacy in this world. But under no circumstances does it belong any specific place, any specific time. It is this, what we would call in definiteness of time and space, that gives it its great value. It's peculiar ability to have whatever value it will choose for itself.

So that the individual becomes, in Emersons eyes, in in Thoreaus life a sacrosanct altar that must be protected against profanity. Man is sacred. His being, his self is sacred. But he needs to have an order where he cannot be satisfied with the form of geography or physicality or race or sex or religion. None of those lines of approach are capable of sticking of defining man. But he needs an order. And his order as a sacred focus must come from a holy source. that holy source for Thoreau was what we call nature. We say it rather glibly. He would say it rather specifically.

When we find Thoreau late in his life knowing he is going to die. Ill he still records in his journals towards the end the effects of a storm upon gravel. The minut changes that take place in their exact sequence. The gravel in face of the approach, the arrival and the aftermath of a storm. There is no Zen master that can be more aesthetic than this particular approach. Is there humanity here in this? If so what scale, what dimension of humanity are we speaking of. Only that infinitude so that holy order that man's sacred nature receives from nature has a very peculiar form to it.

And in appreciating this it is almost impossible without a look at a large strategic flow of human nature. If we put, for instance, on board nature as a beginner and we move counterclockwise, nature presents us in our very first experience with it consciously with the capacity to select out some major elements. Which you recombine in a ritual disposition. This disposition tends to develop expresive capacity. Which we might label myth. The ability to say what we are selecting and why. How we have put together why. And by this time nature has become for man in language. And language has its natural capacity. The motion of language is to internalize and this produces the capacity for symbol. The terrorization of language through meaning. The tendency of the inner integration is to relate back to nature, to come back. But this does not happen. Instead the inner symbolism seeks to re-express itself in a very mysterious process. It becomes transcendental. It changes its form from civilization, what we would **inaudible** upon as an expression of interiorized meaning of language par down to the basics and expressed out again into the world. And this has its career of freeing oppressive forms. We recognized as art. And art deepens the sense of expressive form to religion. And this consent and nature then becomes changed and becomes cosmic.

It is at this point that Thoreau is consciously understanding that some great cycle has been completed. That is no longer a question of progress, as in further progress. That this motion has not only brought man back to nature consciously so that nature is no longer an unconscious context within which he must struggle for survival. But is the very defining order by which his infinite focus is able to function. And this is different.

But another dimension opens up at this stage, at this phase. Put in this graphic form it becomes easy to see that there is an antonin that is open. That is not in the form. For want of a better word, we call this the mystic. And the mystic dimension is free always to come and go. And not only come and go but makes this whole form of civilized, the civilized psyche permeable to transmutation. The changes that happen from nature to ritual to myth all these transformation members are possible because the mystic forms articulates this for man. And man's very mobility being able to transmute himself from phase to phase towards wholeness is all graced and carried on by the mystic capacity. Which at last becomes visible in its own right when man attains the ability to see nature as a cosmos. It is then that he stops his transforming for himself and delivers himself to the openness. One almost is tempted to objectify and say to the other. But it's an openness and not an other.


This is where Thoreau is. he is dressing himself as a defined articulate mobile consciousness to that mystic openness. Which begins with nature and which finds its wholesomeness in cosmos. In a cosmic naturalness. With this in mind all of Thoreau's work becomes intelligible, understandable. In fact Thoreau becomes for us a harbinger of what in the late 20th century we are now almost forced to understand and accept.

I think in this biography of Thoreau by Walter Harding, who's the head of the Thoreau...Thoreau society in Concord. It's interesting, some of Thoreau's experiments. He was constantly collecting items. And people after they got over the idea that Thoreau was a an oddball around the town they began to accept him. They...they brought him things. The wing of a falcon little nests and eggs. And he lived up in his attic room and he would carry these collections up there. And later on they went to a Natural History Museum in Massachusetts.

He also experimented at one point in his life with making wine from tree sap. Which is very strange because Thoreau did not drink. He almost never drank water. He was a camel like being that he would have to think and tell you the last time he took a drink of water. It's very peculiar. But he experimented because he realized that the trees were a go-between like men is a go-between. The trees are the indication of the scale of nature. And it is through the forest that man has an affinity with mountains. And is through the mountains that the earth has its affinity with sky. And so man by this translating staging is able to comprehend the vastness of the whole.

And so trees for Thoreau were very interesting. Each tree was an individual. And he kept minut records there. One of the reasons he stayed in one little area for most of his life was to keep in daily personal contact with all of the living entities in that dimension in that area. He knew every tree individually. He knew all the rocks, all the streams. He knew all the wildlife. And so making wine, distilling the tree sap and making a kind of a mead. It was out of birch, if you can imagine birch wine. Which was horrible when you drank it first. And after it's set for a couple of months it was sipable. And towards the end it didn't last long enough because of the neighbors coming in that he could age it all the way. He was quite interested in this fact.

For Thoreau this capacity to address nature as a cosmos kept him in the one still spot that he could find. He realized that after he had built the walden cabin that it was no longer a sense of finding a location. There was no retreat hut that was necessary. Just like when asked, Gandhi was asked why don't you go and meditate in the cave if you want to be a yogi and he said I carry my cave within me. Thoreau carried his retreat, his cabin within himself.

After the two years two months and two days in Walden. He had become capable of reestablishing himself. So that the earth itself and the sky itself in his geographic area had become a temple. This is why he refused to go into a church. He privately confided to friends that it was blasphemous to think that man could carve out some space other than the whole of nature to worship the divine in. That is the whole of nature, that is the cosmos that is the proper temple for man to worship the divine in. And that his worshipping the divine takes a very peculiar form. It has no liturgy. There is no litany. There is the ongoing accurate apperception of the continuity of the whole. Of how every element in each element flows continuously from one to another. With this mystic penetration of the mobility of transformation consonant with the scale of a single unity. And that man abides there in that condition. His at one-ment with nature is hermetically sealed. Sealed tighter than a vacuum seal could seal. It is sealed in the recognition of unity. That the seeming multiplicity comes from a profane view of man. Because he has let his mind, his preoccupation with his life, his desire for things, his greed for capacity to obscure and interrupt the recognition of the unity of all. And it was this profaning that bothered Thoreau tremendously.

When he would take trips, Thoreau would bring himself to the kinds of conditions that I wish to give you here from the journaling. And I think, I think this will do here. I'm going to give you a selection of about three paragraphs here where Thoreau gives us the blending of man consciously into the unity of nature by natural process. Not by some arcane alchemical transformation but by the most natural of all transformations. And this is how it reads. This is from January first New Year's Day 1853. It was a Saturday. "This morning we have something between ice and Frost on the trees. the whole earth as last night but much more is encased in ice. Which on the plowed fields makes a singular icy coast about a quarter of an inch thick. About nine o'clock a.m. I go to Lee's via Hubbard's wood and Holden swamp and the Riverside. For the middle is open." Everywhere without alluding to it. Without metaphor. With acridness. Thoreau is talking mysticly and yet naturally the same time. Because he has a cosmic eye.

"The stones and cow dung and the walls too are all cased in ice on the north side. The ladder looked like alum rocks." He's saying the cow dung with the ice over it begins look like alum rocks. "This not frozen, Mr. Frost but frozen drizzle, collected around the slightest coors gives promise to the least withered herbs and grasses. Where yesterday was a plain smooth field appeal...appears now a teeming crop of fat icy herbage. The stems of the herbs on their north sides are enlarged from ten to a hundred times. Everything points north. Everything shows a direction. A seasonal direction. A magnetic direction. Everything is correlated." And Thoreau is being absorbed by this unity. You'll see it.

"The addition is so universally on the north side that a traveler could not lose the points of compass today." You can't get lost in a universe of one. Where you going to get lost? "Though it should never be so dark for every blade of grass that served to guide him." Remember Whitman's phrase now leaves of grass. "These straight stems of grasses stand up like white batons or scepters and make conspicuous foreground to the landscape from six inches to three feet high. Channing thought that these fat icy branches on the withered grass and herbs had no nucleus. But looking closer I showed him the fine black wiry threads on which they were impinged. Which made him laugh with surprise. The very cow dung is encrusted and a clover and sorrel send up a dull green gleam through their icy coat like strange plants. The pebbles in the ploughed land are seen as through a transparent coating of gum. Some weeds bear the ice and masses. Some like the trumpet weed and pansy in balls for each dried flower. What a crash of jewels as you walk."

You see how easy it is to slip into the mundane. And yet one could read very advanced Mahayana doctrines like the jewel matrix of Gampopa and you find the same description of the universe as a field of jewel like nexies. "The most careless a walker who never dined to look at these humble weeds before cannot help observing them now this is why the herbage is left to stand dry in fields all winter. Upon a solid foundation of ice stand out. Pointing in all directions between northwest and northeast. Or within the limits of 90 degrees little spicula or crystalized points half an inch or more in length upon the dark glazed plowed ground. Where a mere wiry stem Rises its Northside is thickly clad with these snow-white spheres. Like some Indians headdress as if it had attacked all the frost. I saw a penois(?) bush full of large berries by the wall in Hubbard's field standing on the west side the contrast of the red berries with their white incrustation of prolongation on the north was admirable."

And skipping over to here, "But finer than all is the red oak. Its leaves and crusted like shields a quarter of an inch thick in a thousand fine spicula like long serrations at right angles with their planes upon their edges. It has an indescribably rich effect. With color of the leaf coming softened through the ice. A delicate fawn color of many shades. Where the plumes of the pitch pine are short. And spreading close upon the trunk sometimes perfect cups or rays are formed. Pitch pines present rough massey grenadiers plumes with each a darker spot or cavity in the end. Where you look in there are the buds. I listened to the booming of the pond as if it were a reasonable creature. I returned at last in a rain and am coated with a fine glaze like the fields."

This is the essence of Thoreau the journals. The capacity to effortlessly not only describe the world of nature. But he describes the cosmos where man and nature are unified and inseparable. Where nature has reabsorbed man back to herself. And in reabsorbing man back to herself his consciousness has been added to nature. And all of it is alive and alert and understanding.

Thoreau used to amaze people. They would be after him to take students through the woods and he would go through and he would stop and he would start whistling little tunes and tell the children this is the tune of such-and-such a bird. Then he would whistle another one this is the tune of another bird. And he would pick out all the individual tunes of the birds in that section of the forest that would be chirping. And the children hearing each one individually would then begin to recognize that all these tunes were going on at the same time. Always had been going on. They had never heard the tunes, they had always just heard birds. They had always paid attention only to the blur of the background, the birds are singing in the trees. Now it was this kind of bird sings this kind of song. And that kind of bird sings that kind of song.

The differentiateness of nature is consciousness. One does not analyze to take apart what one differentiates to enrich. It is this enrichment of nature by consciousness that makes it a cosmos. And for Thoreau it is man's responsibility to make sure that this continues to happen. And the travail of modern man for Thoreau is that he is forgetting this responsibility. That it no longer even occurs to him but he has a necessary place in nature. That without this concomitant nature begins to lose its consciousness. It begins to lose its cosmic capacity. And when that happens the very foundations of reality began to ebb and fade. This irresponsibility was something that Thoreau refused to let happen. Refused to allow this to happen.

His writing, and then we'll take a short break. Here is June June 17th, which is a Saturday, 1854 5 a.m. in the morning.
Remember Thoreau was up at all hours. He surveyed the entire terrain and every hour of the 24 hour day, over many years. We've read a couple weeks ago a passage where at 3:00 in the morning, he was standing still for several hours on a rise outside of Concord surveying all the sleeping farms and all the sleeping animals. Be carrying consciousness and humanity to that most unconscious hour of the night. To regenerate nature. To bring its cosmic capacity back in to operation. For it was in danger of losing it.

In his journal on June 17th he writes, "A cold fog. These mornings those who walk in grass are thoroughly wetted above mid-leg. All the earth is dripping wet. I am surprised to feel how warm the water is by contrast with the cold foggy air. The frogs seem glad to bury themselves in it. the cobwebs are very thick this morning. Little napkins of the fairies spread on the grass. World ultricularias, a pot of gimmeaton off-dodds(?) with fine grassy thread like leaves and stems. Somewhat flattish in small globular spikes. Maybe some thyme. Ranunculus maybe a day or more. A duck, probably a wood duck which is breeding here. From the hill I'm reminded of more youthful morning seeing the dark forms of the trees eastward and the low grounds partly within. And against the shining white fog the Sun just rising over it." Now this is a very traditional image of meditation. This is from Upanishadic India. This is how the discipline was given in ancient India. Just these kinds of images.

"The mist rolling away eastward from them their top at last streaking the message and driving it into the vails. All beyond them a submerged in unknown country. As if they grew on the seashore. Why does the fog go off towards the Sun. This is afar and is seen in the east when it has disappeared from the West. It surprises most people that this actually occurs and is mysterious. The waves of the foggy ocean divide and flow back for us Israelites(?) of a day to march through. I hear the half-suppressed guttural sounds of a red squirrel in a tree. At length it breaks out into a sharp bark. Slavery has produced no sweet scented flower like the water lily for its flower must smell like itself. It will produce a carrion blossom, slavery will."

This meditational use of nature is not for self-aggrandizement. It is just the opposite flow. For this flow towards interiorizing meaning in symbolic vision has a reversed flow leading back to nature. And that's how cosmos is produced. By men giving his expressive forms back. If he stops anywhere along the way this is where the little stagnant pools breed selfishness. It is the on flowing back to a completion. A completion which ends not with a completed circle but with the perception that a universal openness is essential to man's completed form. That the mobility of his transformations requires this mystic openness. And without it nothing will exist.

He took his wonderful friend Daniel Rickettson once out to the eastern part of Massachusetts to Mount Monadnock. And they climbed it at four o'clock in the morning to get up there before sunrise. Rickettson said why, why are we having to get up here at this time of the morning. Thoreau saying you'll see, you'll see. And they got up to the top and at the top of Mount Monadnock when the Sun came up the early morning shadow of the mountain, when it first came was spread all across the whole state of Massachusetts into the distance. And as the Sun came up the shadow came racing toward them. And it was a perceptible image of the way in which reality begins to occur more and more here where we are. In this ancient meditation discipline occurred to Thoreau in a natural way. He didn't have to go to India. He didn't have to go to China. He didn't have to go to the whole deal. His point, I think, was well taken.

And perhaps after the break we can fill in a few of the little kinks still remain. Now let's have a break and have some tea.

Please turn your cassette now and we'll commence playing again on the other side after a brief pause.

END OF SIDE 1

And he was astounded at the qualities of his grown-up sister. She was 17 when she was brought into his kin in Concord. And he fell madly in love with Ellen Sewell. But for Thoreau what he brought to that experience was not a manly pride of purpose, not a personality which is ready to work with or try to work with another human being. He brought a force of personality that was wispy as the wind itself. An expectation that was constellation wide. And he expected that if she were the true one for him that she would know it without his having to say it. And he records in his journal, "She couldn't possibly be the one because she has asked questions. If she were the one she should have known without needing to ask for questions." But nevertheless Thoreau somewhat goaded on by his brother, who also fell in love with her, who also courted her, who also proposed to her and was turned down. The father's criticism of poor Jon Thoreau was that he was a transcendentalist. He hadn't even met Henry yet.

He finally sent a letter to Ellen Sewell asking her to marry him. and knowing that she would turn him down. He had already recorded the poems in his journal of the rejection. But it wasn't a rejection of a person to a person. It was that he must superintenuate himself ever closer to universal patterns. And not be deterred by the appearances of human form no matter how graceful, how enticing they might be. and so when her rejection came with the request for him to burn the letter, as she had burned his letter. She wrote to the aunt who knew them both and said it is over. It was a short letter. Later in her 70s her children asking her did the famous Henry David Thoreau actually propose to you mother. She said yes it was a very fine letter. He was an excellent man.

Well we need to take a break here. And then we'll come back and we'll have, I've got some slides and some other material for you.

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

The United States after Jefferson was one of the few times in human history where the problems of the polarities rose in a people so that proper description....(audio break) for six lines in a book called The Fabulous Forties: A Presentation of Private Life in the United States 1840 to1850. The decade of the 40s in America was a brilliant three-ring circus filled with marvelous sideshows and prodigious natural curiosities. Glittering with mirrors and chandeliers. Thunderous with brass bands and fireworks. Choked with the dust of glorious caravans. And as if to root this world of charisma into time-honored models the frontispiece of this book showed the American family at home. The mother, the father, the three children. One child has a little doll. They're all well-dressed. They're all sitting in a well furnished house which they own. They have a place in the world. They have position. The American Dream. Man's house is his castle. His family is his kingdom. And all of this was coming true not for some few elite but for hundreds of thousands of individuals. And the promise was that everyone would be able to have this. So that the great archetypal movements of polarities came up bubbling to the surface of the United States in the 1840s. This is the period of Thoreau's maturity.

Moby-dick which was mooted and written in those 1840s, has an interesting description by Ishmael. He writes this is in The Carpetbag in Moby Dick, "As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at the same New Bedford thence to embark on their voyage. It may well be related that I for one had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail and no other than a Nantucket craft. Because there was a fine boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old Island. Which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling around the world. And though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her. Yet Nantucket was her original. The tire of this carthage. The place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those Aboriginal whalemen, the Redman, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the leviathan. And where but from Nantucket too did that first adventurous little sloop put forth partly laden with imported cobblestones so goes the story. To throw at the whales in order to discover when they were nei enough to risk a harpoon from the boat spread."

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

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

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

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

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

So we have some slides and I hope that you can see in so these images see people we didn't have been mentioning. Then we've got three more lectures on Thoreau and we'll just keep developing him. This First one I think is the... yeah this is.... catch that light there by the door there. Just flick it over. This is taken from a volume written by a man named Sache S-A-C-H-S-E. Julius Sachse, who in the 1890s realized that all of this fragile material of the early United States and in the 1600s in Philadelphia was going to be lost. And so he did a number of books trying to reconstruct what happened. Who were these people. What were they doing. Why were they here. Where did they come from. And his book on German Pietists and Rosicrucians in Philadelphia. And this is the frontispiece and this is the cave in here. Far above it, not sure if you can see it, is part of the **(inaudible)** there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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