Walden Wasn’t Thoreau’s Masterpiece
In his 2-million-word journal, the transcendentalist discovered how to balance poetic wonder and scientific rigor as he explored the natural world.
Andrea Wulf
November 2017 Issue
n late 1849, two years after Henry David Thoreau left Walden Pond—where he had lived for two years, two months, and two days in a cabin that he had built himself—he began the process of completely reorienting his life again. His hermit-style interlude at the pond had attracted quite a bit of attention in his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. “Living alone on the pond in ostentatious simplicity, right in sight of a main road,” his latest biographer, Laura Dassow Walls, writes, “he became a spectacle,” admired by some and belittled by others. Thoreau’s subsequent life change was less conspicuous. Yet it engaged him in a quest more enlightening and relevant today than the proud asceticism he flaunted throughout Walden, a book that has never ceased to inspire reverence or provoke contempt.
What the 32-year-old Thoreau quietly did in the fall of 1849 was to set up a new and systematic daily regimen. In the afternoons, he went on long walks, equipped with an array of instruments: his hat for specimen-collecting, a heavy book to press plants, a spyglass to watch birds, his walking stick to take measurements, and small scraps of paper for jotting down notes. Mornings and evenings were now dedicated to serious study, including reading scientific books such as those by the German explorer and visionary thinker Alexander von Humboldt, whose Cosmos (the first volume was published in 1845) had become an international best seller.
As important, Thoreau began to use his own observations in a new way, intensifying and expanding the journal writing that he’d undertaken shortly after graduating from Harvard in 1837, apparently at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s suggestion. In the evening, he often transferred the notes from his walks into his journal, and for the rest of his life, he created long entries on the natural world in and around Concord. Thoreau was staking out a new purpose: to create a continuous, meticulous documentary record of his forays. Especially pertinent two centuries after his birth, in an era haunted by inaction on climate change, he worried over a problem that felt personal but was also spiritual and political: how to be a rigorous scientist and a poet, imaginatively connected to the vast web of natural life.
Thoreau’s real masterpiece is not Walden but the 2-million-word journal that he kept until six months before he died. Its continuing relevance lies in the vivid spectacle of a man wrestling with tensions that still confound us. The journal illustrates his almost daily balancing act between recording scrupulous observations of nature and expressing sheer joy at the beauty of it all. Romantic predecessors like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, centuries before that, polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci thrived on the interplay between subjective and objective exploration of the world. For Leonardo, engineering and math infused painting and sculpture; Coleridge said that he attended chemistry lectures to enlarge his “stock of metaphors.”
For Thoreau, along with his fellow Transcendentalists, the by-now familiar dichotomy between the arts and the sciences had begun to hold sway. (The word scientist was coined in 1834, as the sciences were becoming professionalized and specialized.) Thoreau felt the disjunction acutely, and his journal lays bare both his fascinated scrutiny of the most intricate factual details and his fear of losing his grasp of nature or the cosmos as a whole.
Today scientists churn out data-stuffed reports assessing the perils we face—shrinking Arctic ice, rising sea levels, extreme floods and droughts, the acidification of oceans, forest fires. Their daunting graphs, tables, and technical language stir up debates and doubts. Such dry projections, devoid of poetry and imagination, serve as an implicit summons to experts to come up with solutions. Crucial though the data and reports are, they eclipse precisely the sort of immediate, intuitive, sensual experiences of nature that are, in our Anthropocene era, all too rare. For Thoreau, a sense of wonder—of awe toward, but also oneness with, nature—was essential. We will, he understood, protect only what we love.
n the bicentenary of his birth, Thoreau the journal writer is in the limelight. “This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal,” an exhibit that began at the Morgan Library, in New York, is now at the Concord Museum through early 2018. Eight of a projected 17 volumes of the journal have been published by Princeton University Press so far, and the transcripts and copies of the others are available online. For those daunted by the millions of words, selections of Thoreau’s observations on trees, wildflowers, and animals stand out in the recent flurry of publications and offer a fascinating taster.
In her comprehensive Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Walls—who has previously written about Thoreau’s “turn to science”—calls attention to the pivotal moment when he began to use his journal as he never had before. On November 8, 1850, a year or so after his naturalist’s regimen had begun, Thoreau “wrote up everything he noticed and thought during his daily walk as one long entry.” He did the same the next day, and two days later, Walls notes, and then again a couple of days after that, and the next day,
filling pages with a stream-of-consciousness flow of words as if he were writing while walking: “I pluck,” “I heard,” “I saw yesterday,” “I notice.”
“And this is what truly staggers the mind,” Walls goes on. “From this point, Thoreau did not stop doing this, ever—not until, dying and almost too weak to hold a pen, he crafted one final entry.”
University of Chicago
A week after that first extended entry, he wrote, “I feel ripe for something; it is seed time with me—I have lain fallow long enough.” Thoreau went on, “My Journal should be the record of my love.” At the same time, his journal was a repository of constant measurements, minute and expansive: of the depth of streams, the wingspan of a moth, the number of bubbles trapped beneath the frozen surface of the pond. “What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more,” Thoreau had written back in 1846, when his journal had still been a source to plunder for other writing projects, not yet a compendium of exhaustive field notes. Now his quest for unifying order became more focused, and he set out to pursue it by counting the petals on a blossom or the rings in the stump of a fallen tree—hoping not to lose a sense of beauty and mystery in the process.
The tension between the particular and the whole wasn’t new. Transcendentalists like Emerson were searching for unity in nature, but resisted what seemed to them the blinkered reliance on deductive reasoning and empirical research enforced by encroaching science. Such methods tended to “cloud the sight,” Emerson said, and he endorsed instead a conception of nature as “the symbol of spirit.” That Emersonian notion of natural phenomena as the embodiment of what his mentor called “ideas in the mind of God” had once thrilled Thoreau, as Walls writes. But by the time Thoreau reoriented his life, he needed more direct contact with the “marrow of nature.” Thoreau had already framed the poet-scientist dilemma in 1842, when he reviewed a series of natural-history reports published by the State of Massachusetts: How could such dry summaries hold any interest for the general reader? Where, Thoreau asked in his review in the Transcendentalist literary magazine The Dial, was the joy of nature?
Reading Humboldt’s most popular books, Cosmos, Views of Nature, and Personal Narrative, during his evenings of study, Thoreau learned a way of weaving together the scientific and the imaginative, the individual and the whole, the factual and the wonderful. A vast array of observations, Humboldt insisted, revealed “unity in diversity”—each fact and detail of nature threading together into an interconnected whole. Even before he adopted his systematic regimen, Thoreau’s journal—packed with observations about the songs of birds, the chirping of crickets, the careless pace of the fox, the scent of musk, the “dreamy motions” of fish’s fins—was proof of his visceral relationship to nature. In Thoreau and the Language of Trees, the writer Richard Higgins describes Thoreau sniffing the bark of twigs, listening to the creaking of hardwoods in winter, sampling the taste of lichens (he liked rock tripe and Iceland moss best), delighting in the play of light and shadow in the canopy of trees.
“We must look a long time before we can see,” Thoreau had concluded in his Dial essay on the “Natural History of Massachusetts,” pronouncing that “the true man of science … will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men.” Moving beyond Emerson’s grand and spiritual ideas of nature, Thoreau became part of a lively scientific discourse, aware of the latest discoveries, and he used the libraries at Harvard and the Boston Society of Natural History extensively. He collected fish specimens for the zoologist and geologist Louis Agassiz at Harvard. And though he was a little squeamish about gathering birds’ eggs for another scientist there, he agreed to commit “deliberate murder” if the advancement of science demanded it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...au-saw/540615/