[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
the not me to The American Scholar (1837) in which Na-
ture is the world this shadow of the soul, or other me [which] lies
wide around. 42 Such a self is, in Joseph Dunne s description, a
citadel in which a lucid reason is at the service of a naked will. 43
It is not clear that the sovereign self in Thoreau leads to a dis-
tinct philosophy, whether it finds its origin in Descartes or in
Hobbes: its relation to Idealism is as close as it comes to being a
system. Stanley Cavell has argued that Emerson and Thoreau are
philosophers just as Plato and Kant are, but it seems to me better
to think of them as sages loosely affiliated to one philosophic tra-
dition or another, mostly Idealism. In Walden Thoreau defined
philosophy as economy of living. 44 Neither Emerson nor Tho-
169
Walden
reau likes to argue a case or defend a position against opponents.
Their common styles are aphoristic, suggestive, flinging out an
idea and moving on to another one, inspiring or not. The Brah-
man never proposes courageously to assault evil, but patiently to
starve it out. 45 That sentence is typical of Thoreau in one of his
favorite quasi-philosophic styles: it is assertive, it depends on two
oppositions courageously/patiently and assault/starve it out
and it incites further thought about the ways of life it refers to. It
is not self-consciously elegant, but it is elegant. It is sage.
Thoreau is never more at one with himself than when he re-
laxes into the mood he thinks of as Oriental and recommends the
Bhagavad-Gita as a contemplative ideal. In this mood he becomes
not a truculent New Englander but a quietist of Hindu persua-
sion, as if he had long since brought to a standstill the routines of
acrimony, telegrams, and anger. From the Brahmans, Edward
Dahlberg said, Thoreau learned patience, how to sit and wait,
and, so needfully, how to be bored! 46 He is rarely petulant or fret-
ful, even with his boredom. He usually whiles away the boredom
by playing with a word or two, as in this passage he lets his mind
drift upon water:
Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of
Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay
and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe
my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philoso-
phy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition
170
Walden
years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with
which our modern world and its literature seem puny
and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be
referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its
sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and
go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant
of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and
Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading
the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust
and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for
his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in
the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with
the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is
wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis
and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and,
floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the
Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas,
and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard
the names.47
Perhaps it is enough to say that this is beautiful and to reflect that
most of our lives are niggardly in the allowance they permit to
such moments. The sense that the life of water is an archetype of
life in general rather than a local constituent of it is not safely re-
moved from decadence, but Thoreau knows that. It is a risk of
bad taste he is ready to take. The pure Walden water is not an
171
Walden
irony, given what he has already said of it; it is a conceit ready to
spill over into the sacred water of the Ganges. And the caressing
poetry of names with which the passage ends is a permissible
swoon, not ordinarily to be indulged except this once.
Thoreau did not argue for such poetry. Generally, he claimed
to be writing in the plain style: say what you have to say and finish
with it, don t turn somersaults. Make your words your deeds, as
Raleigh did.48 But this is misleading. At least once, in the Journal,
Thoreau gave a more accurate account of his literary procedures.
Those sentences are good and well discharged, he said, which
are like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our
lives. 49 But he achieved those resiliencies not from life but from
words, and he held himself free to leap to catch any verbal possi-
bility that offered. Most of them arose from the swift transference
of a verb or a noun from one context to another. If mortar on
bricks is said to grow harder with time, the saying can be said to
grow harder with time. If Thoreau doesn t get a stiff neck from
using bricks as his pillow, it is because my stiff neck is of older
date. 50 By leaping from nature to culture and back again, Tho-
reau gained that rapidity of style for which he is admired or,
sometimes, resented. Starobinski has remarked that every orig-
inal aspect of style implies a redundancy that may disturb the
message itself. 51 Even if we think that the message is not de-
tachable from the style, the question of redundancy still arises.
Starobinski mentions that readers of Rousseau and Chateau-
briand often feel that the perfection of their styles contaminates
172
Walden
the report of the events they narrate. Thoreau gets most of his re-
siliencies from sources that some readers deplore, puns and word-
play: pastoral/past; hen-harriers/men-harriers; A man sits as
many risks as he runs ; shore/shorn; grossest/groceries; tripped/
traps; aliment/ailment; parlors/parlaver; It fairly overcame my
Nervii ; frontiers/fronts/fronting; sound/sounding/resounding;
Quoil/coil; Thor/thaw; decent weeds, at least, which widowed
Nature wears. Not all of these are worth the attention they draw
to themselves. I have heard sharper puns from Christopher Ricks
in conversation and read more of them in his book on Beckett.
But the extended pun or conceit is Thoreau s favorite device
for getting from one sentence to the next. He loves the excess of it
because excess is a mark of language itself, never obedient to mere
need; as in the Where I Lived, and What I Lived For chapter of
Walden. In this passage the play is on sleepers, as if he were re-
calling the last sentence of Wuthering Heights, in which Lockwood
wonders how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for
the sleepers in that quiet earth. 52 Sleepers are pieces of timber
on which sections of a railway are laid. They are also people
asleep or, as in Lockwood s mind, people dead. On the railway
each piece of timber is cut exactly to the same length, breadth,
and thickness as the other ones. The spaces between them are the
same and they are laid in parallel lines. Sleepers in bed and the
grave are also prone. In sound sleep the differences between one
person and another are reduced. When you read Whitman s The
Sleepers, you must not think of railways: when you read Walden
173
Walden
you must, and you must also stay awake to be switched from rail-
way to bed or grave and back again. In House-Warming Tho-
reau, roaming the then boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl wyciskamy.pev.pl
the not me to The American Scholar (1837) in which Na-
ture is the world this shadow of the soul, or other me [which] lies
wide around. 42 Such a self is, in Joseph Dunne s description, a
citadel in which a lucid reason is at the service of a naked will. 43
It is not clear that the sovereign self in Thoreau leads to a dis-
tinct philosophy, whether it finds its origin in Descartes or in
Hobbes: its relation to Idealism is as close as it comes to being a
system. Stanley Cavell has argued that Emerson and Thoreau are
philosophers just as Plato and Kant are, but it seems to me better
to think of them as sages loosely affiliated to one philosophic tra-
dition or another, mostly Idealism. In Walden Thoreau defined
philosophy as economy of living. 44 Neither Emerson nor Tho-
169
Walden
reau likes to argue a case or defend a position against opponents.
Their common styles are aphoristic, suggestive, flinging out an
idea and moving on to another one, inspiring or not. The Brah-
man never proposes courageously to assault evil, but patiently to
starve it out. 45 That sentence is typical of Thoreau in one of his
favorite quasi-philosophic styles: it is assertive, it depends on two
oppositions courageously/patiently and assault/starve it out
and it incites further thought about the ways of life it refers to. It
is not self-consciously elegant, but it is elegant. It is sage.
Thoreau is never more at one with himself than when he re-
laxes into the mood he thinks of as Oriental and recommends the
Bhagavad-Gita as a contemplative ideal. In this mood he becomes
not a truculent New Englander but a quietist of Hindu persua-
sion, as if he had long since brought to a standstill the routines of
acrimony, telegrams, and anger. From the Brahmans, Edward
Dahlberg said, Thoreau learned patience, how to sit and wait,
and, so needfully, how to be bored! 46 He is rarely petulant or fret-
ful, even with his boredom. He usually whiles away the boredom
by playing with a word or two, as in this passage he lets his mind
drift upon water:
Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of
Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay
and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe
my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philoso-
phy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition
170
Walden
years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with
which our modern world and its literature seem puny
and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be
referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its
sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and
go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant
of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and
Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading
the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust
and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for
his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in
the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with
the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is
wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis
and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and,
floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the
Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas,
and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard
the names.47
Perhaps it is enough to say that this is beautiful and to reflect that
most of our lives are niggardly in the allowance they permit to
such moments. The sense that the life of water is an archetype of
life in general rather than a local constituent of it is not safely re-
moved from decadence, but Thoreau knows that. It is a risk of
bad taste he is ready to take. The pure Walden water is not an
171
Walden
irony, given what he has already said of it; it is a conceit ready to
spill over into the sacred water of the Ganges. And the caressing
poetry of names with which the passage ends is a permissible
swoon, not ordinarily to be indulged except this once.
Thoreau did not argue for such poetry. Generally, he claimed
to be writing in the plain style: say what you have to say and finish
with it, don t turn somersaults. Make your words your deeds, as
Raleigh did.48 But this is misleading. At least once, in the Journal,
Thoreau gave a more accurate account of his literary procedures.
Those sentences are good and well discharged, he said, which
are like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our
lives. 49 But he achieved those resiliencies not from life but from
words, and he held himself free to leap to catch any verbal possi-
bility that offered. Most of them arose from the swift transference
of a verb or a noun from one context to another. If mortar on
bricks is said to grow harder with time, the saying can be said to
grow harder with time. If Thoreau doesn t get a stiff neck from
using bricks as his pillow, it is because my stiff neck is of older
date. 50 By leaping from nature to culture and back again, Tho-
reau gained that rapidity of style for which he is admired or,
sometimes, resented. Starobinski has remarked that every orig-
inal aspect of style implies a redundancy that may disturb the
message itself. 51 Even if we think that the message is not de-
tachable from the style, the question of redundancy still arises.
Starobinski mentions that readers of Rousseau and Chateau-
briand often feel that the perfection of their styles contaminates
172
Walden
the report of the events they narrate. Thoreau gets most of his re-
siliencies from sources that some readers deplore, puns and word-
play: pastoral/past; hen-harriers/men-harriers; A man sits as
many risks as he runs ; shore/shorn; grossest/groceries; tripped/
traps; aliment/ailment; parlors/parlaver; It fairly overcame my
Nervii ; frontiers/fronts/fronting; sound/sounding/resounding;
Quoil/coil; Thor/thaw; decent weeds, at least, which widowed
Nature wears. Not all of these are worth the attention they draw
to themselves. I have heard sharper puns from Christopher Ricks
in conversation and read more of them in his book on Beckett.
But the extended pun or conceit is Thoreau s favorite device
for getting from one sentence to the next. He loves the excess of it
because excess is a mark of language itself, never obedient to mere
need; as in the Where I Lived, and What I Lived For chapter of
Walden. In this passage the play is on sleepers, as if he were re-
calling the last sentence of Wuthering Heights, in which Lockwood
wonders how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for
the sleepers in that quiet earth. 52 Sleepers are pieces of timber
on which sections of a railway are laid. They are also people
asleep or, as in Lockwood s mind, people dead. On the railway
each piece of timber is cut exactly to the same length, breadth,
and thickness as the other ones. The spaces between them are the
same and they are laid in parallel lines. Sleepers in bed and the
grave are also prone. In sound sleep the differences between one
person and another are reduced. When you read Whitman s The
Sleepers, you must not think of railways: when you read Walden
173
Walden
you must, and you must also stay awake to be switched from rail-
way to bed or grave and back again. In House-Warming Tho-
reau, roaming the then boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]