LITR
4232: American Renaissance
University
of Houston-Clear Lake, spring 2003
Sample Student Research Project
Dawn E. Dobson
LITR 4232/Spring 2003
Dr. Craig White
Research Essay
The
Significance of Water in Thoreau’s Transcendental Philosophies
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), ardent writer, naturalist, and philosopher, used his keen observations of nature as a tangible springboard for explorations of Transcendentalism. A conceptual belief system that regards the spiritual and intuitive realms of consciousness as valid and essential counterparts to corporeal empiricism, Transcendentalism began in the mid-1830’s, in eastern Massachusetts as a rift between the Unitarian church and a group of free-thinking intellectuals. While Thoreau’s mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, often ensconced himself amidst intellectuals in warm parlors and grand lecture halls, theorizing and speculating on the philosophical implications of the allegorical union between spirit and matter, Thoreau busied himself in the practical application, searching and probing the depths of nature as well as his own mind. “Always he was driven by the pressing need to join naturalistic insight with ethical and aesthetic idealization” (France xv).
Raised in a traditional New England household, Thoreau “learned to hate Sundays because of the Puritan custom that required children to spend the day indoors in meditation on the Bible” (Schneider 2). As an adult he adamantly avoided the stuffy confines of churches preferring to devoutly seek God in the wonders of the outdoor world; “What in other men is religion is in me a love of nature” (France xix). Thoreau often utilized religious symbolism in his writings to underscore the connection of the natural and spiritual worlds. In three of his books, A Week on the Merrimac and Concord Rivers, Walden and Cape Cod, the element of water, as represented by the river, the pond and the ocean, serves as a vehicle for Thoreau’s exploration of his evolving transcendental philosophies.
Water is the great equalizer on earth; all life depends upon it and no society can exist without it. Water is also a key religious symbol in Christianity. Biblical references to its spiritually cleansing powers through baptism and ablution, its capacity for divine blessings and its symbolic representation of God and eternal life are numerous. Christ is depicted as the “living water:” “But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14). The symbolic sanctity of water, a concept readily acknowledged and accepted by Christians, serves as an ideal representation of the Transcendentalist’s conviction that the world of matter and spirit are sublimely interconnected.
Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, was compiled from notes taken during an 1839 journey with his brother, John, in a small boat they had built together in Concord, Massachusetts. Although only five days were spent actually boating down the waterways and the remainder of the trip was spent hiking in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, Thoreau divided the resulting book into a seven-day river passage. Each day of the week became a different chapter in which Thoreau explored his unique vision of transcendental philosophy combined with detailed observations of nature. Written during his inaugural year at the cabin on Walden Pond, A Week has been called “Thoreau’s most thoroughly transcendental book” (Schneider 26).
Throughout the book, Thoreau repeatedly juxtaposes the elements of matter found in the watery environment of the river with the elements of spirit as defined by mankind. An example of this is his descriptions of the various types of fish in the river. Each species is not only described in great detail, but also given human characteristics and personalities: the graceful sunfish expresses “humble happiness,” the trout is “scholarlike,” the pickerel is “greedy and impetuous” and the horned pouts are a “bullying race of rangers”(A Week 27). Thoreau asserts that a detailed analysis of his “finny contemporaries” is warranted because “they are not phenomena confined to certain localities only, but forms and phases of the life in nature universally dispersed” (A Week 22). In another symbolic nod to the duality found in Transcendentalism, the brothers painted their boat with a green bottom and a border of blue above the waterline, the color of sky and water, heaven and earth, “with reference to the two elements in which it was to spend its existence” (A Week 14).
The river acts as a portage in A Week not only through the landscape, but through time and history as well. Thoreau notes at the beginning of the journey that he and John had “embarked on the placid current of our dreams floating from past to future as silently as one wakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts” (A Week 18). He seems to respond directly to the question posed by Emerson in “Nature”: “Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?” (Emerson 1524). Organized around a loose narrative, the structure of the book allows Thoreau to meander across a wide variety of historical themes and esoteric topics ranging from Greek mythology, American Indian culture, Christianity and Hinduism to the works of classic writers such as Homer, Chaucer and Goethe. “We contemplated at our leisure the lapse of the river and of human life;” Thoreau writes, “and as that current, with its floating twigs and leaves, so did all things pass in review before us” (A Week 100). Although Emerson himself found it “a very slender thread for such beads and ingots strung on it” (Schneider 28), the flowing structure of the book mimics the stream of consciousness of the writer. The river provides Thoreau the perfect medium and technique to explore a broad range of continually shifting subjects, echoing the constantly changing panorama of vistas surrounding the waterway.
The random appearance of the different subjects examined in A Week is a common criticism of the work. However, this style upholds a basic concept of Transcendentalism as expounded by Emerson: the thoughts or consciousness of the Transcendentalist establishes his universe and maintains a higher authority than conventions. Concerning the “Idealist” or Transcendentalist, Emerson believed, “His experience inclines him to behold the procession of the facts you call the world, as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded center in himself, center alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid Unknown Centre of him” (“The Transcendentalist”). The many musings of Thoreau are an attempt to bridge the schism between matter and spirit and find a union in time and space; the reader’s “sense of temporal continuity is frequently jarred by sudden, unpredictable shifts from historical anecdotes to current topics to prophecies, suggesting that he (Thoreau) purposefully intends to break down temporal distinctions to emphasize the transcendental present- the mystical union of past, present, and future” (Schneider 31).
Mentally traversing through time as he floats down the river, Thoreau interminably delights in the beauty of the natural setting. “May we not see God?” he asks while floating down the river; “Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol of merely?” (A Week 310). Nature, to the Transcendentalist, has the remarkable capacity to illuminate the essence of spirit through its order, form and transformation. Just as the river current cannot be stopped, so nature and man live in a wondrous, unstable balance where change is the only permanence. The continual sloughing off of the old is reminiscent of a baptism in the river Jordan: the “born again,” man perceives the world in a new light. “A man’s life should be as fresh as the river. It should be the same channel but a new water every instant” (A Week 107). “While I sit here listening to the waves which ripple and break on this shore,” he wrote, “I am absolved from all obligation to the past” (A Week 359).
Thoreau takes the concept of fusing spirit and matter a step further in his second book, Walden, by inventing a life that, in his mind, most resembles the true Transcendentalist’s path. Determined to unite life and art, earth and man, by living as close to nature as possible, he weds himself to the landscape. The property belongs to Emerson and with his permission Thoreau erects a small cabin near Walden Pond and settles in on July 4, 1845. Sequestered from the rush of busy Concord, he will remain there for two years, finish the manuscript for A Week, engage in extensive journaling and develop an experiential framework to explore and chronicle the encompassing environs and seasonal changes. Although the plants and animals of the surrounding woods are important touchstones, it is the pond that continually draws Thoreau.
Walden Pond, in Thoreau’s eyes, is “a perfect forest mirror.” It is more precious to him than real gems, “a field of water” which, in alignment with the transcendental characteristic of duality, “betrays the spirit that is in the air” (Walden 473). “It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh” (Walden 473). “Sky water” he calls it and the pond’s reflecting powers are a searing inspiration to him; “It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature” (Walden 471). As in A Week, Thoreau writes of the heaven/earth dichotomy of the Divine. “Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes the color of both” (Walden 463). One of the most ethereal passages in Walden is Thoreau’s description of fishing on the pond at night:
It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook (Walden 462-463).
The pond symbolically cradles two worlds in equilibrium. Heaven, the author intimates, is not a far-off place, but instead very close at hand.
The path from the cabin to the pond became well worn during Thoreau’s stay. Each morning, he recorded, “I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise and one of the best things that I did” (Walden 393). Again, the allusion to baptism, the opportunity to cleanse the spirit as well as the body through either a mental or physical immersion in natural waters, is a recurring theme: “Renew thyself completely each day; do it again and again and forever again”(Walden 393). Images of spiritual renewal are also portrayed at the water’s edge through the seamless change of the seasons, particularly through the transformation the pond undergoes in winter and again in the spring.
In winter, the surrounding woods lie blanketed and muffled beneath a deep layer of snow and the refreshing fount of daily renewal is also frozen and fixed. Avoiding the high drifts of the forest, Walden Pond became Thoreau’s new front yard and he relished the unfamiliar vantage points of the landscape, sliding and skating across the altered element. Thoreau still visits the pond every morning, but now with an axe and pail to chop the brittle surface, at times more than a foot thick, to reach the life-sustaining water below. Peering through a jagged hole, “into the icy parlor of the fishes,” he finds “the bright sanded floor the same as in summer” and notes, “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads” (Walden 547).
It is in winter on this thick sheet of ice that Thoreau decides to plumb the depths of Walden Pond and find the elusive bottom, laying to rest the local rumor that the small lake was fathomless. “It is remarkable,” he writes with a touch of disdain, “ how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it” (Walden 549). Doggedly pursuing the truth and determined, in some way, to measure the watery “heaven,” Thoreau also metaphorically seeks to measure the depth of man through his pond explorations. Armed with a pencil and notebook, a weighted line, a compass and the exacting skills of a professional surveyor, he methodically sets out across the ice, chopping holes at regular intervals, sounding with his long rope and meticulously recording data. He is proud to discover the depth, a respectable 102 feet, and his accurately drawn map of the pond is included in many editions of Walden.
On the one hand, Thoreau infers that time and carefully sustained effort will allow man to get to the bottom of any natural mystery. This premise- an honest search for the truth, a search “for a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we call reality,” (Walden 400)- is a major component of the Walden experiment. Paradoxically, after he ferrets out the true depth of Walden Pond, he seems hesitant in squelching the imagination of his fellow countrymen and possibly himself: “I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless” (Walden 551). Again, Thoreau reinforces the theme of duality returning to the matter/spirit circular conundrum of Transcendentalism. Contrasting the static nature of many conservative religious establishments, the Transcendentalist is simultaneously pleasantly confounded and naggingly comforted by his infinitely incomplete, yet whole universe. “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable” (Walden, 575).
Locating the depth of Walden Pond also propels Thoreau to venture an allegorical connection to the qualitative analysis of an individual’s character: “What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics” (Walden 554). Success in measuring the natural world of matter leads to a whimsical assumption that a system of moral measurement could be developed: “but draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character” (Walden 554). However, it is possible to change a man’s character, Thoreau avows, through the renewal of spirit that is the promise of spring.
The arrival of spring to the woods of Walden is announced with the thunderous
cracking of the ice on Walden Pond. As the sun’s warmth melts the thick sheet, Thoreau is joyous; “It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth” (Walden 570). “Walden,” he pronounces, “was dead and is alive again.” The transforming powers of spring are not for nature and the material world only. “In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven” (Walden 573). Spring has restored the pond and in turn is able to heal the spirit of man:
You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, recreating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten (Walden 573).
Thoreau “sees” the eternal hope for the rejuvenation and redemption of man ‘s spirit in the reflecting “eye” of nature’s reality. Like a double helix, the two worlds of matter and spirit, nature and man, appear inextricable in Thoreau’s mind. Although the fresh waters of the river and pond were suitable metaphors for the inquisitive thoughts of a determined Transcendentalist, the briny ocean would prove to be a much more unsettling medium.
Published three years after his death, Thoreau’s last book, Cape Cod, is a collection of essays garnered from four journeys to the coast. Thoreau’s first trip to experience the ocean environment was marked by a horrible tragedy. In the fall of 1849, as he waited out a storm that had delayed his steamer from Boston to Provincetown, the news of a shipwreck during the same storm near Cohasset, Massachusetts, spurred him to witness the aftermath of the deadly accident that claimed 145 lives. He traveled by stage to Cohasset accompanied by his dear friend Ellery Channing, a fellow Transcendentalist and prolific poet. After nonchalantly detailing the gruesome appearances of many of the twisted and swollen corpses, Thoreau impassively summarizes the surrealistic and grotesque scene on the beach in Cape Cod:
On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected. If I have found one lonely body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. I sympathize rather with the wind and the waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day. If this was the law of Nature, why waste time in awe or pity? (Cape Cod 856).
This incident, recorded in the first chapter of the book, and Thoreau’s reaction to it sets a disturbing tone. The words simply do not have the ring of truth; “the reader senses that Thoreau does not really believe what his persona says, and the rest of the book supports that impression” (Schneider 94). The reflection of nature in harmony with a benevolent God is shattered at the shoreline and Thoreau’s transcendental framework- seeking and chronicling order and form in nature to exemplify spirit- must shift in the face of the “savage” and omnipotent ocean.
A sense of helplessness permeates Thoreau’s descriptions of the Atlantic in Cape Cod. The intrepid explorer of the microcosm, who sought to make natural environments as familiar as his home, has met his match.
“As we looked off, and saw the water growing darker and darker and deeper and deeper the farther we looked, till it was awful to consider, and it appeared to have no relation to the friendly land, either as shore or bottom, - of what use is the bottom if it is out of sight, if it is two or three miles from the surface, and you are to be drowned so long before you get to it, though it be made of the same stuff with your native soil? I felt that I was a land animal” (Cape Cod 935).
However, even the shore confounded Thoreau. The shrouding mists and thick fog were disorienting. Forms on the beach were distorted; “a rugged cliff” half a mile away and seemingly fifteen feet high becomes nothing more than a pile of rags scarcely twelve inches tall upon closer inspection. In the lighter moments of the book, Thoreau intersperses details of the flora and fauna of Cape Cod with humorous caricatures of the human inhabitants. But when he surveys the ocean, the pervasive feeling of inferiority prevails. “Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squawl and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime” (Cape Cod 979).
In the end, Thoreau’s impression of the ocean “does not inspire reverence and unity with God; rather it puts the two at odds” (Schneider 105). There are relatively few references to God in Cape Cod and no positive comparisons of the spiritual nature of man with the vast and immeasurable sea. Instead of the harmonious, life-sustaining and spirit-renewing waters of the river and pond, Thoreau encounters a desolate wilderness- awesome, threatening, foreboding.
There must be something monstrous, methinks, in a vision of the sea bottom from over some bank a thousand miles from shore, more awful than its imagined bottomlessness; a drowned continent, all livid and frothing at the nostrils, like the body of a drowned man, which is better sunk deep than near the surface (Cape Cod 935).
Although disconcerting, the ocean offered a deeper perception to the Transcendentalist- the imperfect reflection of the unsolvable conundrum of the universe. At the edge of the first and lasting American wilderness, Thoreau had found his “mysterious and unexplorable,” “the infinitely wild, unsurveyed,” and “unfathomable.”
Works Cited:
Emerson, Ralph, W., “Nature.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.
“The Transcendentalist.” American Transcendentalism Web. Martin Bickman. University of Colorado, Boulder. 1999
<http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/ideas/definitionbickman.html>
France, Robert L., ed. Thoreau on Water, Reflecting Heaven. By Thoreau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.
Schneider, Richard, J., Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987.
The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1952.
Thoreau,
Henry, D., A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, Walden, The