Animals in the wild rarely get sick because they consume the plants around them, or consume
other animals who consume these plants. Lacking the freedom of a human being, animals have
naturally-balanced processes with no need for correction. Humans, however, can imbalance
themselves, and the plants, who are not capable of imbalancing themselves(3), receive the stimulants
from an imbalanced human (in the form of toxins) and modify their genes to produce proteins which,
when consumed, will restore balance in the human by undoing the toxins. The stimulants can be
received from a man treading on a path where plants are growing, such as Herbert writes about. Today
the vegetables in a garden can receive stimulants (toxins) from a gardener who plows the ground,
sows the seed, removes the weeds, breathes on the growing plant, drops sweat near the plant, or rubs
oils from his hands against the plant. If you are a gardener who grows and eats your own fruit and
vegetables, you will likely have noticed that they taste better than store-bought produce. The improved
taste is your body's way of letting you know these home-grown plants are good for your health, that
their custom-designed proteins are going to work undoing the toxins in your body.
Dann introduces the Herbert poem, "Man", in this next passage:
[page 24] Having long outgrown his infatuation with the fairy world, still the
genii loci haunt the edges of Emerson's thought: "The greatest delight which the fields
and woods administer is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the
vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them." A
paragraph later he alludes to the "frolic of the nymphs," and then quotes George
Herbert's statement that "More servants wait on man/Than he'll take notice of."
Wholly forward-looking in its radical reliance on Nature, not God, as the arbiter
of truth, the essay's embrace of participatory consciousness yet allied it with more
traditional cosmologies. The essay's argument is itself largely a modern
restatement of the ancient esoteric doctrine of correspondences, and its prophetic
conclusion, "Prospects," returns to a language of hidden mystery: "In a cabinet of
natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy
in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric form of beast, fish, and insect."
Emerson, whose intensive reading in seventeenth-century English poetry
preceded Thoreau's parallel reading program by just one year, included
Herbert's "Man" as a prelude to his essay's Orphic apotheosis. Thoreau loved the
poem as much as Emerson did, copying it out in full in his notebook.
Like Emerson and Thoreau, once I heard of Herbert's 1633 poem, "Man", I wanted to read it, so I immediately Googled
the poem so I could read all of it. Here was a man, Herbert, still holding onto some spiritual vision of the
natural world who was able to understand that the commonest of plants, the ones trod underfoot by
passersby, could cure their ills if they but knew to pick them up and eat them. Since these paths were
walked upon often in those days of limited means of travel, the plants would have adjusted their genes
to produce health-giving proteins to these oblivious local travelers.
In Rudolf Steiner's works I studied the microcosm of Man in the macrocosm of the Cosmos
around us. In the evolution of Man and the Cosmos, Man in the earliest stages of evolution went
through the plant stage of being. This allows plants to know the deep insides of Man today, leading to
what Dann calls "a cosmic hospitality" between Man and Nature, between the human being and the
plant kingdom.
[page 24] Herbert's poem presented the highest expression of the doctrine of
correspondences, the ancient assertion that man was microcosm, embodying the
macrocosm — not just the Earth but the planets and stars as well. Herbert's
poem affirmed a cosmic hospitality that both Emerson and Thoreau knew
personally.
This next passage comes from Emerson's Nature, included in my 1950 Modern Library Edition
of The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He never identifies the "poet
who sang" this to him, but we can suspect it was his own Muse or daimon which
did so.
[page 39, 40 of Writings] I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions
of man and nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have
always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both
history and prophecy.
'The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the element of
spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest
chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from whom
the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the
epoch of one degradation.
'We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own and
disown our relation to it, by turns. We are like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned,
bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can set limits to the
remedial force of spirit?
'A man is a god in ruin. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and
shall pass into the immortal as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world
would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds of
years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah,
which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to
paradise.
'Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by
spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the
sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon. The laws of his mind,
the periods of his actions externized themselves into day and night, into the year
and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired;
he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees that the
structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now
it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. Now
is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of the moon. Yet
sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and
muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that if his
law is still paramount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is sterling yet
in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is
instinct.' Thus my Orphic poet sang.
How can we understand Emerson's paragraph above beginning, "A man is a god in ruin . . . "?
We are fallen from the spiritual world into a material body. If we were innocent and pure, we would
live much longer and enter consciously into the spiritual world. But, in our present state of impure
materiality, if individual humans were to live for centuries, they would destroy each other maniacally.
We are saved from that sad end by dying short of a century, and returning as a baby in a new life.
When we receive an infant into our lives, or merely take one into our arms, the babe reveals to us the
paradise of the spiritual world from which it has just entered into life and reminds us of our own
destiny.
Emerson's next paragraph reminds us that we humans have evolved along with the Cosmos
which surrounds us — we were all one in the earliest stage of evolution. In dreams we catch glimpses
of the resemblance between the Cosmos (our house) and ourselves (the drop).
Here is how the magnificent passage by Emerson in Nature was summarized in this book. Dann
gives us a gentle nudge and bids us to crack open our eyes a bit to see the spiritual realities in which
we humans live, move, and have our being.
[page 25] Emerson acknowledged that the reciprocal hospitality between man and
nature was broken, not by virtue of human degradation of wild nature, but
because modern man mistook himself for a material, rather than spiritual,
creation. "A man is a god in ruin. . . . Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was
permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents.
. . . But . . . he is shrunk to a drop." As remedy for this disenchantment,
Emerson's Nature offered the vague outlines of a transcendental — and what was
to become a transcendentalist — research program. Men could not be naturalists
until they redeemed their soul and spirit natures, and birthed from themselves
higher faculties. When that moment arrived, facts, not fables, would feed man.
Thoreau got a copy of Nature and had just finished reading it when Emerson's sister-in-law who
was boarding in the Thoreau home, brought him to visit Emerson. Thus began the interweaving
tapestry of their two lives. They had only come close to meeting several times before. Thoreau had
found him earlier in Nature, and now would meet him in the flesh.
[page 25] Over the mantel in Emerson's study hung New Bedford artist William
Wall's painting of The Three Fates, a copy of a painting that Emerson had seen in
the Pitti Palace in Florence on his life-changing pilgrimage in 1833. Within the
year, the spinning sisters Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos would weave together
Emerson's and Thoreau's destinies more tightly than they could imagine.
Emerson ended his famous American Scholar lecture with these words which Thoreau could have
taken as his marching orders, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we
will speak our own minds." (Page 34) We don't know if Thoreau was at this speech just outside the
Harvard main gate on the day after his Harvard graduation, but he lived his life as if he had taken
those words to heart. This is a simple example of the interweaving of the two men's lives. Another
example: they shared a rebellious streak. Emerson gave a lecture to the senior class of the Harvard
Divinity School on July 15, 1838 and the clergy were so incensed by his words that it was 30 years
before Emerson was invited to speak at Harvard again. (See page 65 of Writings) Dann tells us that
Thoreau in his second week as a school teacher was reprimanded for not using the cane to enforce
discipline. "Thoreau went back into the classroom, selected six students at random, and struck them
with the cane. He then resigned." (Page 35)
Dann also points out two salient episodes of rebirth in
Thoreau's life. In his first publication, an obituary he wrote for the Yeoman's Gazette, he changed the
order of his first and middle names and recast himself as Henry David Thoreau, which names stuck.
The second rebirth came when Emerson met his new acquaintance on October 22, 1837 on the street
and asked him, "What are your doing now? Do you keep a journal?" Within days, Thoreau was
collecting scraps of his writing to place in his Journal which he kept writing into until l861(4). Here is an
excerpt from my review of the first volume of his Journal:
On October 27, he wrote a complete story about his finding an arrowhead. Many
people find arrowheads, but few have ever found one the way Thoreau did — as the
culmination of an imaginative story about Indians.
[page 7] "There on the Nawshawtuct," said I, "was their lodge, the
rendezvous of the tribe, and yonder, on Clamshell Hill, their
feasting ground. . . . Here," I exclaimed, "stood Tahatawan; and
there is Tahatawan's arrowhead."
We instantly proceeded to sit down on the spot I had pointed
to, and I, to carry out the joke, to lay bare an ordinary stone which
my whim had selected, when lo! the first I laid my hands on, the
grubbing stone that was to be, proved a most perfect arrowhead, as
sharp as if just from the hands of the Indian fabricator!!!"
Thoreau wandered inside his own magic circle, his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, and was
often aided by unseen helpers similar to those who aided Fortunatus in the popular chapbooks of his
adventures. Thoreau was reading Goethe at the time he found the arrowhead.
[page 39] Goethe's conception of the poet was one to which Thoreau clearly
aspired — one who found unity in diversity, whose mind took in all sensations,
and who "In his own magic circle wanders." The magician's circle circumscribed
a microcosmos where he became master of the elemental beings of nature, with
whose help he could make things appear and disappear. Concord would become
the magic circle into which this nascent master of the elementals would soon draw
his own — and America's — destiny.
Emerson wanted a poetry for a new generation, not a rehash of past generations. He wrote in his
Introduction to Nature, "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through
their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have
a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the
history of theirs?" These words had a powerful impact on me when I read them after I bought my
Modern Library copy of Emerson's Writings as a freshman in college. It was only a short time later
that I bought a copy of Samuel Hoffenstein's humorous and satirical poems which I found to be full of
insight while making fun of tradition. Here's my favorite poem of his, which I quickly memorized and
have carried with me since:
Little by little we subtract
Faith and Fallacy from Fact,
The Illusory from the True,
And starve upon the Residue.
This quatrain triggered my search to find a way to add a nutritive essence to what traditions of
thought have removed from our now vacuous reality. My own poetry seeks to be a poetry of insight in
the manner suggested by Emerson, a poetry which waters and nurtures the residue back into a living
reality. Sometimes the best nurturing comes from a good laugh, and a biting satire can offer that to a
true philosopher who takes no tradition seriously. Thoreau would agree.
[page 71, 72] The sly satirist Thoreau hides in plain sight as he says, "But the
divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire; as impersonal as
nature herself, and like the sighs of her winds in the woods, which convey ever a
slight reproof to the hearer. The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the
satire."
Emerson learned about the out-of-doors from Thoreau, grafting apple trees, walking, and boating.
Emerson writes of a magical night where the magician's wand was a paddle.
[page 74, 75] In June, out with Emerson for a crepuscular paddle on the Concord,
Thoreau shared with his friend his especial dwelling — the night: "Then the good
river-god has taken the form of my valiant Henry Thoreau here & introduced me
to the riches of his shadowy starlit, moonlit stream, a lovely new world lying as
close & yet as unknown to this vulgar trite one of streets and shops as death to
life, or poetry to prose. Through one field only we went to the boat and then left
all time, all science, all history, behind us, and entered into Nature with one stroke
of a paddle.
The riches he shared with Emerson was an everyday experience to Thoreau, so one can find no
notice of it in Thoreau's journal, and yet Emerson experiences an ecstacy that he had rarely
experienced before.
[page 75] Emerson always craved the sort of ekstasis he had experienced as a
young man crossing that "bare common" when he felt himself become
transparent, and on the moonlit river with his friend, Emerson felt caught up in
"A holiday, a villegiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most magnificent, most
heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and poetry ever decked and
enjoyed — it is here, it is this." Thoreau's journal records no similar ecstasy, but
what for Emerson were episodic encounters were for Thoreau nearly quotidian.
Thoreau could see fairies in his youth and regaled the children of Concord with fairy stories,
becoming a living Pan to them. Chaucer, whose works were read by Thoreau, explains how
fairies were "illusions" subtracted from fact by the church so that but few men like Thoreau
could see them.
[page 93] Reading Chaucer this year, Thoreau had transcribed the opening
stanza of "The Wife of Bath's Tale," which tells of how in King Arthur's
time, "all this wide land was full filled of faerie," how "many hundred years
ago" the elf-queen and her "jolly company" would dance on green meads.
"But now no man can see the elves, you know," the narrator had lamented,
due to the "limiters and other holy friars," whose activities had driven them
away. Chaucer was satirizing the sort of Christianity that rather than respect
and honor the fairies, had banished them from their old haunts. For as long
as the fairies had been "going away," vanishing from human sight, there had
always been individual seers who could catch glimpses of them and report on
their activity. Thoreau was — at least up until his twenty-eighth year — such a
seer.
Remember the rebellious lecture Emerson gave to the Divinity School which made him persona
non grata at Harvard for 30 years? In his talk he called for a hero, a new Teacher, to come, not
knowing that would be Thoreau, nor that he would provide the land near Walden Pond where
Thoreau would come to give his greatest teachings in his small book Walden, teachings which
would echo down the generations, inspiring non-violence in Gandhi, King, etal, and attracting
millions of readers.
[page 98] Just days after Thoreau's twenty-first birthday, Emerson had
concluded his Divinity School address with a plea for the American hero yet
to come: "I look for the new Teacher that shall follow so far those shining
laws that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete
grace; shall see the world to be a mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of
the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought,
that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy." At that
moment Emerson, almost exactly twice seven years Thoreau's senior, hardly
could know that he would eventually provide the land upon which the
anticipated new teacher would harmonize Duty, Science, Beauty, and Joy.
Anyone reading this book will want to know about how Thoreau selected the spot for his tiny cabin
alongside Walden Pond. A month after moving into the cabin he remembered his first visit to the pond
at age five:
[page 105] "That woodland vision for a long time made the drapery of my dreams.
That sweet solitude my spirit seemed so early to require that I might have room to
entertain my thronging guests, and that speaking silence that my ears might
distinguish the significant sounds. Some how or other it at once gave the
preference to this recess among the pines . . . as if it had found its proper nursery."
Dann calls Thoreau's modest cabin his temple, evoking the cathedral-like effect its Walden Pond
milieu had on its owner and sole inhabitant.
[page 105, 106] Unadorned by a single graven image, cluttered with no relics or
statuary, fronted by no massive portal, and bearing no towering steeple or spire,
Thoreau's Walden temple yet presented more beauty than the eye might imagine,
and had a thousand entrances of the most splendid form. Divinity leaped from
every niche and transept of the Walden woods, while a cathedral choir was ever
singing ethereal hymns.
Dann writes on page 116 that Emerson eschewed Swedenborg's philosophy of pure evil, preferring the
comforting philosophy that "evil is good in the making". This resonates well with Rudolf Steiner's
view that "evil is a good out of its time", e.g., Lucifer's so-called evil deed which precipitated
humanity's Fall into materialism, but which deed turned into a good when the deed of Christ arrived to
allow humanity to rise again to spiritual realities. Look at the early evils of Irish emigration to the USA
which resulted in generations of Irish cops defending our people. Each new wave of emigration seems
like an evil because the good it will bring will only arrive later.
On page 119 Dann quotes Thoreau as saying, "I know of no rule which holds so true as that we are
always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect." This parallels my rule, EAT-O-TWIST, which
avers that "Everything Allways Turns - Out - The Way It Is Supposed To"(5). Change the suppose to suspect
and they are equivalent.
When I read on page 120 about Thoreau wondering about the "vanished neighbors at Walden Pond" who
left only a shut up road as a sign of their presence, I was reminded of the years I spend at Union Carbide and
Waterford 3 in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. For three years in Taft and fourteen years in Waterford,
Louisiana, I was daily walking over the sites of the first German settlers of the 1720s. This was in my
twenties and forties when thoughts of previous settlers had never settled into my busy mind. Only later did
I discover those vanished settlers when I read this book, Germans of Louisiana. Their early settlements were
wiped out by the spring flooding of the then un-leveed Mississippi River, which caused them to move to
higher ground.
It is a service to the history of science that Dann explains the move from the use of hypnotism
(mesmerism) for surgery to the use of ether. He points out that it was a move from a spiritualized agent to
a chemical agent. Ether killed people due to overdoses, but it did avoid the appearance of clairvoyance
episodes that accompanied hypnotism, so its use proceeded into the twentieth century when it was replaced
by other forms of chemical anesthesia.
[page 130] On October 19,1846, the day before the arrival of the news of Neptune's
discovery, a Boston doctor named William Morton rejected his patient's request for
mesmeric anesthesia, which had become the safest and most effective form of anesthetic,
and instead applied ethyl ether before removing the patient's tumor. The success of this
operation dealt the death blow to mesmerism as a therapeutic agent, since its full
extinguishing of consciousness without provoking somnambulic lucidity meant that
dentists and physicians would not have to confront the philosophical question of
mesmeric anesthesia's puzzling side effect — clairvoyance.
Why is this history unknown today to the majority of people? Doctors are as capable as any despot
of disguising unpleasant historical facts, rewriting history, to hide things they would feel uncomfortable about
explaining to their patients.
[Page 130, 131] In banishing the phenomena of mesmerism from open investigation,
nineteenth-century American scientists closed their eyes, sleepwalking in the face of the
animating power of nature. The exclusion of the history of mesmerism from
contemporary history of science attests to the triumph of mechanistic and materialistic
theories of nature.
This pyrrhic triumph of materialistic science eliminated all knowledge of understanding ancient myths
as records of clairvoyant abilities of early humans. "When knowledge ends, discussion begins" is a major
insight I found in Rudolf Steiner's writings. When knowledge of the real basis of myths was lost, the
academic discussion and study of what they called mythology began.
[page 131] At Walden, Thoreau was mythologizing Nature and Self at the very moment
when modern materialist science made it all but impossible to appreciate the deep truths
of ancient myth. The advent of academic interest in mythology came just as the
understanding of myth as the record of ancient clairvoyance of spiritual realities
disappeared.
Thoreau was a punster, Dann says, he hid his Truth, never doubting it, but often doubling, adding light
in juxtaposition to darkness, a darkness that we are forced to cast our own light upon, either while we are
reading Walden or while we are sleeping and our own spirit is walking through Walden.
[page 135] That is the beauty of a pun: it deceives and enlightens at once. It is a gift
offered also with no guarantee of acceptance or even recognition on the part of the
hearer.
My dad kept a copy of Parts Pup in his bedside drawer, a monthly magazine of jokes which he got from
the Auto Parts dealer across the street. One regular column was about the writer's "Shirt Sharpener," and,
as a ten-year-old, I had no idea what that meant. I thought of a pencil sharper, but how could you get a shirt
into a pencil sharpener? It took many years before I realized that man was talking about his wife who kept
his shirts looking sharp! It was my first exposure to a pun, and the one person I knew who could tell me what
it meant, my dad, was the one person I couldn't ask! I held that phrase as an unanswered question for a
decade or so before I happened to revisit it in my memory and solved the hidden part of the pun. This pun
was an unanswered question. It was like the "strong and beautiful bug" in Thoreau's parable which appeared
out of an old table after someone placed a hot tea pot on the spot inside the tabletop where it had gestated
for decades! (Page 139) Thoreau, when he received the 500 or so unsold copies of an early print run of
Walden, must have thought of his fine book as just such a strong and beautiful organism in gestation.
Thoreau called a secret agreement an "East quarter bargain".
[page 157] For Thoreau, an "East quarter bargain" was one he made with the wild
places around him:
How near to good is what is wild. There is the marrow of nature — there
her divine liquors — that is the wine I love. A man's health requires as
many acres of meadow as his farm does loads of muck. They are
indispensable both to men & corn. They are the only strong meats — We
pine & starve and lose spirit on the thin gruel of society. A town is saved
not by any righteous men in it but by the woods & swamps that surround
it.
Thoreau was an early advocate of burning of forest lands as a means of creating new growth of plants
and even trees whose seeds had to be charred to sprout a new tree. Planned burning is a common practice
in forest management today , but it was a radical thought that Thoreau offered the world in his day.
[page 168, 169] Because it would be another decade before Thoreau himself would
discover that the forest type growing in the location was itself the product of millennia
of fire, he couldn't congratulate himself as an agent of ecological restoration, but he did
claim that forest fires were advantageous to both nature and man. He noted that by
destroying underbrush they favored the "larger and sturdier trees," which in turn made
walking in recently burned woods much easier. The berry crop that arrived in two or
three years after a burn was a boon to both birds and people. Thoreau speculated —
with good reason — that New England's "noblest natural parks" were a consequence
of "this accident."
In the middle of a long, rambling description of Thoreau's activities, Dann includes a reference to a real-time interruption while Thoreau was writing in his Journal (V2). My interest was piqued because Henry
rarely wrote of something that was happening in the present moment of his life. Here is the cat interruption
in Henry's own hand:
[page 98, Thoreau Journal, V2] Somebody shut the cat's tail in the door just now, and
she made such a caterwaul as has driven two whole worlds out of my thoughts. I saw
unspeakable things in the sky and looming in the horizon of my mind, and now they are
all reduced to a cat's tail. Vast films of thought floated through my brain, like clouds
pregnant with rain enough to fertilized and restore a world, and now they are all
dissipated.
I recall another real-time interrupt while he was walking. He commented, "Some bird flies over, making
a noise like the barking of a puppy. It is yet so dark that I have dropped my pencil and cannot find it." (Page
484, Thoreau Journal,V2) We can only guess that he had a second pencil at hand to record this occasion. The
immediacy of the note indicates that Thoreau was writing these notes while they were happening, somehow
managing it in the dark. Thoreau ruminated while he walked and apparently wrote down some of his
ruminations while walking. He seemed to contrast his meandering way of educating himself to academic
education when he wrote in 1850 (Page 83, Thoreau Journal,V2), "What does education often do? It makes
a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook." And directly below that line, he added, "You must walk
like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when it walks." Well, we might note that
Thoreau was a thoughtful beast like the camel. Since one can do a lot of ruminating on a walk between
Montreal and Brooklyn as Dann did, we must add his name to the honor roll of walking ruminators.
When Thoreau went into ecstatic states, Dann says that he entered more deeply into his body and the
earth instead of leaving them, that he was able to get into them because he able to experience them without having
to understand them beforehand. I have known "I know that!" people who say those words whenever they hear
about something new. These are people who cannot, like Thoreau did so beautifully, hold an "unanswered
question." Unable to hold questions such as "What might I be missing about this situation?", they fail to learn
much about the world they live in and simply whitewash over the beautiful artwork of the world around
them. Here is a passage where Henry shows that he appreciates the power of an unanswered question.
[page 183] This moment of ecstatic participation was fleeting but unforgettable. Eleven
weeks later he spoke of this episode again, repeating almost verbatim the words he
wrote in November but expanding the "I" to "we," turning his singular experience into
a general epistemological law: "We shall see but little if we require to understand what
we see."
In the passage below Dann conjures up a vision of winter snows in Concord which is vivid and sweet,
like the natural sweet cider produced by the freezing and re-freezing of crab apples. For me only 40 miles
or so south of Concord, my town of Foxborough had a State Forest full of paths which I daily went through
on my trail bike during my lunch break, loving the solitude, the greenery, the flowing streams, the water falls,
and even the rough ground of the long abandoned granite quarry on its south end. But nothing was more fun
for me than wintery days with new snow on the ground. What I loved was the trails that the partridge, the
rabbits, and other fauna left behind as footprints in the snow. No trace of these animals ever appeared to me
in the green months, so I braved these slippery paths in winter to gaze on the natural artworks that the forest
denizens traced in the snow. Never did I see a human footprint in the snowy paths.
[page 184] Winter's snows shut up Concord's cows, so cowherds — and "cowards" —
vanished from remote pastures and hills, but Thoreau kept up his daily walks,
appreciative of the extra solitude brought on by winter. Winter's bareness afforded all
manner of revelation unavailable in the green months; shrubs and trees inconspicuous
at other seasons now leaped out in full silhouette; frozen ponds could be traversed
easily, and Thoreau discovered new plants like sweet gale and panicled andromeda on
islands previously unexplored; sour, inedible crabbed apples after repeated freezing
and thawing were full of sweet cider; wind patterns could be studied from the humping
and hollowing of snow, and the winter deposition of sand and stones from cut banks
was revealed to leave lines of demarcation as pronounced as the pine pollen which
ringed Walden Pond in summer. New walks could be traced out, like the path following
the line of bare ground or snow just between the high water mark and the present water
line of wet meadows.
It was winter which gave birth to much of Thoreau's poetry, little of which appeared in his Journal, so
I appreciate Dann's sharing of these from Thoreau's Collected Essays and Poems, particularly his sharing
of Thoreau's "tropes of triumph" and the passage, "there is truth in a small degeneracy."
[page 185] Winter's highlighting of essentials was conducive to poetry. In February 1851
Thoreau wrote four poems reflecting on the meaning of his own life and of life for all
who were given the gift of it. Comparing his life to "a stately warrior horse," Thoreau
asks when the horseman's "rambling head and neck" will meld with "that firm and
brawny beast." He overcomes his hesitancy about his destiny, declaring "my unresting
steed holds on its way," and then the steed becomes a ship with "expanded sail, and an
eagle with unwearied wings," all tropes of triumph. Another poem allows that while
moon, brook, and meteors move "without impediment, . . . No charitable laws alas cut
me / An easy orbit round the sun," his current never "rounds into a lake," nor does his
life "drop freely but a rod. . . as Meteors do." A third poem gives thanks for this very
fact, that by aiming at "the splendid heights above," he inevitably must fall along the
way. Out of this richly textured life he lifts the image of an "unanxious hen" bragging
of a new laid egg — "Now let the day decline / They'll lay another by tomorrow's sun."
The last poem — "Manhood" — though taking as its subject other men, is pure
Thoreau. Beginning "I love to see the man . . . as yet uninjured by worldly taint" and
continuing "But better still I love . . ." him who "proudly bears his small degen'racy."
Thoreau at thirty-three had seen enough of life to know that its nobility lay in the fight
against mere fatedness, that "man's eminence" sprang from his undying resolve to make
his own fate. The brave man was finally he who, though struck down repeatedly, never
lost sight of his high goal.
From reading Thoreau's Journals, I became aware that the verbs "want" could mean "lack," "wonder"
could mean "amazed by", and "improve" could mean "make the best use of" — each of these are archaic or
unfamiliar usages, but one needs to understand them this way when they appear in Thoreau's writings. Here's
one example from page 186, as Dann writes, "The voice of his genius spoke a familiar dialect: 'Improve your
time,' it hinted one July morning as he awoke." We today could easily imagine that he understood being told
to "make the present time of the world better" but that would be a mistake, as I understand it. Thoreau was
being encouraged to "make the best use of his own time." So, instead of trudging the ruts of travel, Thoreau
instead enjoyed an adventure under a magnificent blue sky such as was never recorded in history. Here is an
example of "wonder" used to mean am amazed, "It is a certain faeryland where we live . . . I wonder that
I ever get five miles on my way, the walk is so crowded with events and phenomena."
On the first intercity telegraphic message, Samuel Morse sent this quote from the Bible, "What hath God
wrought?" The telegraph was the nineteenth century equivalent of launching the Internet in terms of the rapidity of
human communication it unleashed upon the world. When the first telegraph line came into operation
through Concord, Thoreau heard the wind singing in its wires and sat down to receive a celestial message
from the new invention.
[page 198] Quoted from Thoreau Journal v2: I instantly sat down on a stone at the foot
of the telegraph pole, and attended to the communication. It merely said: "Bear in mind,
Child, and never for an instant forget, that there are higher planes, infinitely higher
planes, of life than this thou art traveling on. Know that the goal is distant, and is
upward, and is worthy of all your life's efforts to attain to." And then it ceased, and
though I sat some minutes longer, I heard nothing more.
The ethereal sound of the wind blowing through the wires and humming of the telegraph pole inspired
Thoreau to call this new invention, the "telegraph harp", a musical instrument soon to be strung from the
Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, bringing its music to all who walked along the railroad tracks and telegraph
lines. Many wondered about the origin of the music, but to Henry it seemed clear, as Dann writes: "The
telegraph harp seemed to give Thoreau a way to hear the music of the spheres directly." (Page 206)
Thoreau wrote about rules, "Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it." (Written in his
Journal, February 3, 1860.) Maybe, but if the rule is useful, even the wise will mind it.
[page 215, 216] He even discovered a rule of thumb about the ideal distance between
perception and conception. "I succeed best when l recur to my experience not too late,
but within a day or two; when there is some distance, but enough of freshness." This
rule of thumb is actually a universal law, a function of the rhythm of the etheric body.
It takes three days for experiences — observations, images, ideas — to become
imprinted into our body of etheric formative forces, and thus permanently into our
memory, and more important, even when we have lost our own individual memories of
them, into the cosmos, where they are stored even after our death. After three days, the
more intensively and faithfully an individual attends to some thought, the more deeply
it becomes inscribed into the universe.
One challenge as a writer is to correct one's early drafts of a text. I've found that three days is an ideal
time between writing something and going over it thoroughly. This is a process that I call "playing with
sentences". Here's how it works. My first draft goes to my Copy-Editor and she finds the missing "a" "an"
"of" which I elided while typing quickly, plus she marks passages she has trouble with. Once she pointed to
a sentence and said, "No hairdresser could understand that sentence." I resisted but had to agree that one
should write at the level of an eight grade education to reach readers in a comfortable way. I usually proof
and correct her edits almost immediately. But during this first editing phase this is my writing and I do not
really want to change anything. Not until three days have passed. That's when the real work of editing
happens for me. After this 72-hour break, I come back and read my own piece as if it were written by
someone else. It is then I can see obvious mistakes and can question the text harshly. "What did this dimwit
mean by this?" "What an awkward way of saying that!" "Ooh, here's a place where I can add something that
he should have said about the subject!" These are the kinds of mental comments which come to me when
I undertake the proofing after three days. It is a playful time for me — Why? Because all my life I've read
pieces with typos, mistakes, badly worded tripe, etc, and because they appeared in a magazine, newspaper,
or book, I was unable to fix them. The wonderful aspect of writing on the Internet is that I can edit my own
writing any time I find a way of improving it. The most important improvement typically comes after the
magical "three days", the time after which my own writing has become imprinted in my etheric body forces,
the time when I can play with sentences to make the best of them. I can imagine that I'll have fun with this
paragraph in about three days!
Thoreau built his "woodshed" alongside Walden Pond at age 28 and I built a garden shed in my back
yard at age 28. We both used modest materials and built the structures of our own design and own hands.
This coincidence had escaped my notice till Kevin Dann wrote this next passage:
[page 225] On this day after his thirty-fifth solar return, Thoreau [wrote]: "The youth
gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or
temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed
with them." Having impeccably built his temple at age twenty-eight, it seems hard to
believe that Thoreau now looked back on it and declared his Walden cabin a woodshed.
It is not hard for me to believe that because I, as a boy, avidly read science fiction, gathering materials in
my mind to build a bridge to the moon, and I would at age 28 gather actual materials from hurricane debris
to build my own temple, a modest garden shed about the size of a wood-shed.
Thoreau wrote about the earth accepting and mothering the abandoned eggs of the turtle, and Dann
comments:
[page 243] This was no Darwinian history, telling of nature red in tooth and claw, but
a sympathetic biology founded on the recognition of the "universal world turtle," that
same great mother spoken of in Native American mythology, who not only supported
the globe with her stout back, but also with her nurturing warmth could penetrate the
cools sands to quicken the life-giving yolks below.
This reminds me of a story I heard about William James who was accosted by a society matron after a
lecture when he talked about the Earth spinning in space. She said, "Professor James, surely you know that
the Earth sits on the back of an elephant." James asked, "If that's so, my dear lady, what does the elephant
stand upon?" "Why, on the back of a giant turtle, of course!" "I see, and what, pray tell, does the turtle stand
upon?" "Oh, Professor James! Everyone knows it's turtle all the way down!"
On Thoreau's visit to Cape Cod he learned that light along its shore could be misleading.
[page 250] Even light, the transcendental symbol of divine
truth, proves untrustworthy when reflected off the sand
and sea of Cape Cod. The Highland lighthouse keeper tells
about a "looming" of the sun he once witnessed, which
caused him to extinguish the lighthouse lamps fifteen
minutes before the actual sun had risen.
I recall my visit to the Highland lighthouse on a frigid January day, and
note it was most beautiful lighthouse that I had seen anywhere in the world,
before and since. This lighthouse appears at the bottom of my early reviews' webpages. It stands above the motto, "Books are lighthouses erected in the sea of time."
One other lighthouse we visited was at the top of an island on the east edge of the Abacos, where the
beach falls away to 2 miles deep in a hundred yards. The inhabitants of the island lived off the wrecks and
their town was called Hopetown because they lived in the perpetual hope of another shipwreck to fill their
coffers. What they did not hope for, nor want, was a lighthouse! Apparently there were Cape Cod residents
in Thoreau's time who had a similar means of surviving.
[page 253] The only Cape Cod inhabitant Thoreau portrays as possessing the landscape
is the wrecker, who gets his living by grabbing as quickly as possible that which others
own but which the sea has violently wrested from them. Amoral and nakedly
opportunistic, the salvager is the shrunken spirit of New World discovery, reduced to
the petty entrepreneurial capitalism of bandit beachcombing.
This is a wonderful description of the beachcombers, but I take issue with characterizing this activity
as capitalism, which is nothing if not the exchange of goods in such a way as both parties benefit. I cannot
perceive a shred of benefit from this kind of blatant thievery to those poor souls who might have survived a
shipwreck only to find no sign of their own property remaining on the beach.
Thoreau had a knack for finding plants that no one else knew existed in the area around Concord. He
was great at holding an unanswered question, for example, about the scarlet oak. He explains how he finds
such things.
[page 237] The scarlet oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We
cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly
see anything else. In my botanical rambles I find that first the idea, or image, or a plant
occupies my thoughts, though it may at first seem very foreign to this locality, and for
some weeks or months I go thinking of it and expecting it unconsciously, and at length
I surely see it, and it is henceforth an actual neighbor of mine. This is the history of my
finding a score or more of rare plants which I could name.
In every book I read I look for the eponymous quote, the passage in which the book's title is revealed,
and here is where I found it. Thoreau had just been surveying and found flowers he had never seen before
in the area.
[page 258, italics added] Owning that "a botanist's experience is full of coincidences,"
in that thinking about a flower never seen nearly always meant you would find it nearby
someday, he turned his botanical experience into a general law of life: "In the long run,
we find what we expect." We shall be fortunate then if we expect great things."
Unfortunately, most people act as if they expect bad things to happen to them, and the universal rule still
applies, namely, whatever you suppose is going to happen will likely happen to you. I gave this the form of
a rule with an easy to say acronym, EAT-O-TWIST, which stands for Everything Allways Turns - Out - The
Way It's Supposed To. When you find yourself supposing something bad might happen, you can quickly say
the three-syllable phrase, eat-oh-twist, to remind you to change your own supposing. If you learn to apply
this in your own thinking, you will drop every negative concept and replace it with a positive. For example,
instead thinking this is going to be bad weather, you'll think we'll get some good weather where we live. If
you study hypnosis, you learn that creating vivid images puts people into trance states. The word not cannot
remove the negative image you create in your mind, for example, when you say, "This is not going to be a
bad day for me." By the time you've thought that, some bad image will have been created in the form of an
expectation. Saying, "This is going to be a good day" will create a better expectation. If you truly learn the
power of expectation, you will agree with Thoreau that it is best to expect great things. Did Thoreau stop
expecting great things for his book Walden when he was storing in a closet 500 unsold copies returned to him
by his publisher? Given his statements above, we can predict that he expected great things to come from
Walden, and that expectation led to great things, in its enormous popularity throughout the world and the
salubrious effects it has had on so many lives.
[page 301] Magazine editors — "afraid to print a whole sentence, a round sentence, a
free-spoken sentence" — came in for Thoreau's especial vituperation. The particular
editor Thoreau was thinking of was James Russell Lowell; the free-spoken sentence was
one Thoreau had penned in his "Chesuncook" piece for Lowell's Atlantic Monthly. At
the end of a meditation on the white pine tree and the necessity of saving it as a piece
not only of wilderness, but also of the wilderness of the human soul, Thoreau wrote, "It
is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above
me still." Lowell cut this sentence without Thoreau's permission; the incident had
occurred over four months before, and Thoreau was still livid. Lyceums and institutes
were no better. His own experiences as a lecturer had taught him that "they want all of
a man but his truth and independence and manhood."
Magazine editors are likely similar today, but they live in a world in which "a whole sentence, a rounded
sentence" is becoming rare with the advent of social media, especially Twitter with its artificial limit of 144
characters in a single tweet. No whole trees anymore; only wood chips to kindle a fire! When Thoreau writes,
"The deep places in the river are not so obvious as the shallow ones and can only be found by carefully
probing it" (page 306), it reminds me that nicely rounded sentences which probe to the depth of a person
cannot be written in 144 characters.
One of the advantages of age is to learn to trust one's own opinion on matters about which so-called
experts expound contrary views. I've found the quickest way to deal with a tradesman who will not use the
components I require in a repair is take my business elsewhere or do it myself. When I repair things I strive
to use better materials than used in the original object. The alternative is to spend my time bemoaning the
poor workmanship of a repaired object.
[page 308] On this same day, he reminisced about the success of boyhood
huckleberrying excursions, and a few days later, he told a story about going to buy a
pair of shoes and asking for the shoemaker to replace the wooden pegs at the toes with
iron ones. When the cobbler offered zinc pegs instead, along with considerable advice
on the subject of shoes, Thoreau held fast: "I have learned to respect my own opinion
in this matter," he stated matter-of-factly. Year after year, Thoreau had only become
more and more like himself, refusing to compromise, independent of thought and
action, even in the humble matter of shoes.
Thoreau was speaking about National Parks as an idea at a time when none existed in this young country.
Did his words inspire Theodore Roosevelt and others who undertook to protect and preserve portions of our
country in their native and natural state? Henry knew of cow-commons but he extended the idea to men-commons and pioneered the way for what has become our state and national parks, ministerial lots
administered by the local and federal government.
[Page 308, 309] As Thoreau had come more deeply into relationship with Concord's
forests, he showed himself every bit the uncompromising two-fisted knight in his battle
with those who saw forests as commodities. Tramping in Botrychium Swamp among
larches turning golden, he dreamed that:
Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five
hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel,
a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation. We hear of
cow-commons and ministerial lots, but we want men-commons and lay
lots, inalienable forever. Let us keep the New World new, preserve all the
advantages of living in the country. There is meadow and pasture and
wood-lot for the towns poor. Why not a forest and huckleberry field for
the town's rich? All Walden Wood might have been preserved for our
park forever, with Walden in its midst, and the Easterbrooks Country,
an unoccupied area of some four square miles, might have been our
huckleberry-field. If any owners of these tracts are about to leave the
world without natural heirs who need or deserve to be specially
remembered, they will do wisely to abandon their possession to all, and
not will them to some individual who perhaps has enough already. As
some give to Harvard College or another institution, why might not
another give a forest or huckleberry-field to Concord? A town is an
institution which deserves to be remembered. We boast of our system of
education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses? We are all
schoolmasters and our schoolhouse is the universe.
Someone asked, "How many seeds are in an apple?" A wise man answered, "That is easy to count, but
who can count the number of apples in a seed?" The seeds Thoreau planted were powerful and are still
producing strong tall trees.
Earlier I mentioned my trail biking in the snow of the Foxborough State Park each day, and how much
I enjoyed observing the myriad of animal tracks in the new-fallen snow. Perhaps at some level these tracks
were planting a seed in my soul about my own tracks in life.
[page 317] The new year 1860 brought abundant snow to Concord, and Thoreau on his
walks enjoyed deciphering the impressions left by birds and mammals in their foraging.
Finding that the snow showed him woodpeckers working, a flock of goldfinches feeding,
a bevy of quail walking long the roadside, all after the fact, he exclaimed, "How much
the snow reveals!"
Certainly Thoreau knew how one tracks oneself through life.
[page 316, 317] A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or
intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear
and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not
concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is
not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken, we hear it not,
if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus
tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and
traveling. His observations make a chain.
The phenomenon or fact that can not in any wise be linked with the rest which
he has observed, he does not observe.
Thoreau loved wild apples and bemoaned their waning due to the Temperance laws which curtailed the
production of apple cider among other alcoholic liquors. He warned his audience in a lecture that "soon they
would be compelled to look for their apples in a bin," adding a quote from (Joel 1:12): "The vine is dried up,
and the fig tree languisheth; the pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree, even all the trees
of the field, are withered: because joy withered away from the sons of men." Having just returned from the
Supermarket where I bought a couple of apples out of a bin (the new apple barrel), these words rang true.
The word "inform" is part of so many modern words, that it is easy to overlook its original meaning
which was "to form inside oneself" and by doing that, to come to understand something out in the world
somewhere. I learned this from W. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. In this next passage, the procedure
Thoreau uses to determine the origin of the tracks he found in the snow was identical to how Father Brown
solved the mystery of the missing silverware.
[page 322] On his way home one night after tracking otter along the banks of the
Assabet, seeing someone a dozen rods off — covered but for his hands and face, which
he could not see at that distance — Thoreau recognized the man immediately by his
walk. "We have a very intimate knowledge of one another; we see through thick and
thin; spirit meets spirit." The next day, coming upon a distinctive footprint in the snow,
he guessed it was the trapper George Melvin's, because it was accompanied by a
hound's track. He experimented with his gait to get it to match the form of the track,
and found himself walking just like Melvin, who later confirmed that the track had
been his. "It is not merely by taking time and by a conscious effort that [man] betrays
himself," Thoreau concluded. "A man is revealed, and a man is concealed, in a myriad
unexpected ways."
There was one more eponymous quote on page 329 where Thoreau wrote (italics added), "What is the
use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? . . . Grade the ground first. If a man believes
and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him, . . . he will
be surrounded by grandeur . . . ."
Did Thoreau have a sense of humor? Yes, but admittedly a wry one such as in this story where he is
confronted by farmers whose property he must cross for his surveying job. When one of them asked Thoreau
if he were lost, not having seen him before on this land, Thoreau mused, "If the truth be known, and had it
not been for betraying my secret, I might with more propriety have inquired, 'Are you not lost, as I have
never seen you before?'" Who really owns the property but the one who walks it the most often?
Here we can read about Henry's last entry in his Journal.
[page 340, 341] He then turned to describing the storm of the previous evening and the
long striations that the winds had left in the gravel along the railroad causeway. He gave
the exact dimensions of the minute tracks: From behind each pebble projected a ridge
an eighth of an inch high and an inch long. The very last line in this his very last journal
entry reads: "All this is perfectly distinct to an observant eye and yet could easily pass
unnoticed by most. Thus each wind is self-registering." With his last steps in life,
Thoreau surely was leaving tracks that could be made by no other man.
Henry grew weak and asked Edmund Hosmer to stay the night with him.
[page 342] The next morning, Sophia read to her brother the "Thursday" section of "A
Week" and, anticipating the "Friday" section's description of the exhilarating return
journey home, he murmured, "Now comes good sailing." At nine o'clock on the
morning of May 6, Henry Thoreau set sail.
Once more, as I did on Dec. 14, 2009 when I finished reading Volume 14 of his Journal, I am sad as I
say Goodbye and Bon Voyage to my fellow traveler whose journey on the Earth ended some eighty years
before mine began. I have read your long journals, your Walden, and have saved for later your other books,
so that your memory, Henry, will never stay very far out of my consciousness and my soul.
~^~
---------------------------- Footnotes --------------------------------
Footnote 1.
My reviews of: Bright Colors, Falsely Seen, Lewis Creek Lost and Found, and A Short Story of American Destiny.
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Footnote 2.
It certainly escapes many moderns today. If you Google the phrase in brackets [george herbert's poem "Man"], you'll find
references like this: Please explain "Man," a poem by George Herbert 1633.
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Footnote 3.
Rightly understood, there are no plant diseases, only bad soil that causes plants to appear wilted, yellowing, molded, and
dying. Restore the soil to health and the plant will revive.
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Footnote 4.
To see a list of the 14 volumes of his Journals and read my reviews of them, check this link:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/tjr01rvw.shtml.
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Footnote 5.
From my Matherne's Rule #10 which you can read about here: http://www.doyletics.com/mrules.shtml#mrn10. The maps of
Taft and Waterford can be found in the book by Ellen C. Merrill.
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~^~
Any questions about this review, Contact: Bobby Matherne
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