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This is KZSU, Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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2017 marks the bicentennial birthday of Henry David Thoreau.
He was born on July 12, 1817.
So we thought we would offer up an anniversary show on entitled opinions
to go along with the other anniversary show.
We aired just recently about the great musical albums of 1967.
There's a definite connection there because we all know that Henry David Thoreau
was one of the saints of the Summer of Love, which brought us such great music
here in the Bay Area, 50 years ago.
America is celebrating Thoreau's 200th birthday with a number of new books about his life,
legacy and love of the natural world.
I know all about it because in July the New York Review of Books will publish an article
of mine that reviews those publications.
They include two new biographies, one by Kevin Dan, called "Expect New Things",
another by Laura Dassau-Walls, called "Henry David Thoreau" a life.
In addition, Richard Higgins published Thoreau in the language of trees, Robert Thoreson,
the boatman, Audrey Raton, when I came to die.
Jeff Weisner edited a book called Thoreau's Animals.
I'll mention here also Bird relics, grief and the vitalism in Thoreau by Branca Arcyk.
Bill Gibbon has a new edition of Walden that he annotated with a new introduction by the very well-known
American environmentalists and theoretician.
And finally, I'll mention an exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York City,
that's taking place this summer called "This Ever New Self Thoreau and His Journal".
So clearly, America loves Thoreau and many of our fellow Americans consider Wald
and the most important work of literary nonfiction in the American canon.
The same can't be said for the rest of the world, which has taken almost no notice of the bicentennial.
Unlike Emerson, Thoreau hardly makes it onto the index of notable American authors,
his peculiar brand of American nativism has little international appeal.
For as Emerson wrote, "In his funeral eulogy of May 9, 1862, I quote, "No true or American existed than Thoreau."
His preference of his country and condition was genuine, and his avarsation from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt.
Thoreau may have been a true American, but that doesn't mean that he was a patriot.
His relation to his nation was fraught with tension, objection, and dissent.
In Walden, Thoreau writes that it was merely by accident that he went to live at Walden on Independence Day in the year 1845.
There was in the accident no coincidence between the personal and national declarations of independence.
Because as Stanley Cabelle declares in his striking commentary on Walden,
a book called The Senses of Walden, one of the best things ever written on Walden, in my opinion,
"According Cabelle, America's Revolution never happened.
The colonists fought a war against England all right, and they won it.
But it was not a war of independence that was won because we are not free.
Nor was even secession the outcome because we have not departed from the conditions England lives under,
either in our literature or in our political and economic lives."
Who knows? Maybe it's in his knowledge that he could not find in his country's national destiny, the essence of America,
that makes Thoreau quintessentially American.
An American properly speaking is an exception.
In America, freedom lies just beyond the bounds of the institutional order, a mile from any neighbor,
in the adjacent woods of Walden that silence the rumors of Concord,
and allow one to discover America in and for oneself.
Even on the American continent, those who would discover America must reenact the original gesture of departure,
of the Puritans, and seek out the forested shores of Walden Pond.
Here's what Thoreau says about his reasons for going to live in Walden,
for building a house by its pond, and for joining there for two and a half years.
According from Walden, most men it appears to me are in a strange uncertainty about life.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discovered that I had not lived.
I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear,
nor did I wish to practice resignation unless it was quite necessary.
Thoreau's excursion to the woods of Walden, I take it from that passage, sought to reduce life to the eccentricity of its facts,
and Thoreau had an almost mystical estimation of facts.
Elsewhere in Walden he writes, "If you stand right fronting and face-to-face with a fact,
you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces as if it were a cimitar, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow,
and so you will happily conclude your mortal career, be it life or death we crave only reality."
Walden is a written testimony of the craving for reality,
and this craving is one of the themes my guests and I will be discussing during the next hour.
Professor Andrea Nightingale from the Classics Department here at Stanford is a longtime friend of entitled opinions.
I have done shows with her in the past on Epicurus, on Plato, on Moby Dick,
and most recently won on J.A. Baker's book The Para Green.
Andrea teaches Thoreau regularly in a popular course of hers on eco-criticism,
and she kindly agreed to join me today in the summer of 2017 to talk about the book for which Thoreau is most famous.
Namely Walden. Andrea, welcome to the program.
It's nice to be here.
I think our friend Zep is going to be jealous that you are approaching his record of the most appearances on this show of its title opinions.
How many did he do?
I kind of remember it being four or five. I think this is your fifth, then.
I think you're at least even if you haven't surpassed him. He'll forgive you.
So, Andrea Walden, which we're going to focus on mostly today rather than talk too much about Thoreau's, either his life or his journal,
this book, Walden, is written in a personal style that makes identification between the reader and author really difficult, if not impossible.
The woods that isolate Thoreau from his neighbors during his sojourn seem also to pervade the enigmatic prose through which this book speaks to us.
Since the reader can never be sure that he or she has actually understood where its words are speaking from and what exactly they're saying.
Somewhere in Walden, Thoreau writes, "It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make that you shall speak so that they can understand you.
I fear chiefly lest my expression not be extravagant enough.
May not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced."
So maybe we could begin with the style of this book, Walden.
Yeah, I mean, you just read the beginning of the programmatic statement that he makes about his writing in Walden.
That passage about extravagance is from the conclusion.
It's worth noting that he is playing on the roots for extravagance extra wagade to wander outside of a boundary.
And so I think that his style, as you say, is very enigmatic.
He is trying to put into words a very, very complex project.
It's sort of ironic that he tells the reader to simplify, simplify, but he only means that at the practical level, right, in terms of what you own and what you eat and so on.
But his project was multifaceted.
It was practical and it was intellectual, obviously spiritual as well.
So there was a lot going on and in particular the thing you just mentioned, his effort to try to put into writing what I would call the kind of language or the many languages of the beings on Earth, and to be their translator.
And I'm using this language actually from the row from the very same passage you were reading.
Just after he talks about this extravagant style, he then, he's playing on the notion of boundaries going outside of the boundaries.
I desire to speak somewhere without bounds, like a man in a waking moment to men in their waking moments.
For I'm convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression.
The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.
The truth is instantly translated.
It's literal monument alone remains.
That passage, first of all, addresses what you were saying a bit earlier about who is even doing the speaking.
The row very often in Walden uses various sort of tropes or he'll say the Earth speaks or Earth is living poetry.
Or the beings speak.
Yeah. Making the yellow soil, express it some earth thoughts and beans instead of grass.
That all sounds like a metaphor, the Earth speaking.
I'm not so sure he'd fully believe this was a metaphorical.
We do need to remember that while the row started out as a trans, I mean he was a transcendentalist,
but he was following the sort of soul body dualism that was linked to God being eternal and incorporeal above the Earth.
But as he developed his thinking, he abandoned that notion and became effectively a pantheist, so God is nature and nature is God.
So I think that when he comes up with these ideas that Earth is speaking or a tree or a plant, it could be anything,
that there really is some sort of speaker or it's almost an infinite number of languages that he was listening to.
So here in this passage, I'd like the fact that he says the volatile truth of our words, it should betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.
The truth is instantly translated and the only thing that remains is a monument.
So it seems as though he's saying that the text that we're holding and reading is some residue of a truth that he's heard or discovered.
But that he has to, he's using the word exaggerate or write in an extravagant way because it's impossible for him to use words that could fully capture this experience.
Human words, yeah.
You're also a Plato scholar.
I had a flashback to Plato's lament about writing that somehow the essence cannot actually effectively be contained within that medium,
but there might be a residue in it, but the thing itself is somehow out of bounds of the linguistic.
So if you take his writing to be this attempt to translate the many voices of nature and of its species and life forms,
and this sort of sublinguistic chorus of voices that he hears in the natural world,
what do you make of the epigraph of Walden, where he declares his intention to brag as lustily as chantily or in the morning,
if only to wake my neighbors up, you do believe that Walden is actually addressed to his neighbors, his human...
Yeah, I do, yeah, it's a passage that uses a very, very common word in this book which is to be awake, right?
And he took this very spiritual sense, and he also had this notion that, I mean, wakefulness is a mode of consciousness that you have to develop,
you have to develop intellectually by reading, by writing, but also by interacting with the natural world.
So this awakeness, this sort of vibrancy, maybe another way of putting this would be this sense of very deep attunement to the natural world around him,
that seems to be what he means by awake. I'll read one quick passage, but I know you have some thoughts on this.
To be awake is to be alive, I've never yet met a man who was quite awake, how could I have looked at him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
So I think that kind of goes back to this desire to wake up his neighbors.
This infinite expectation of the dawn is quite interesting. I have invoked it before and things that I've written in the past, but when I was working on my piece for the New Yorker view that will be coming out shortly.
In relation to one of the books, one of the titles of a biography called "Expect Great Things," I appreciated in a new way the role that anticipation and expectation plays in Thoreau's theory of actual perception,
because he makes it quite clear, if not involved in it, certainly in his journals, that if you are not anticipating the sight of something or the epiphany of something, you will actually not perceive it.
It's very true.
And that anticipation somehow preconditions perception.
And therefore this infinite expectation of the dawn is a kind of existential modality of perceptive openness to the world.
Yeah, I think that has to be right. It makes it sound as though the expectation of a dawn is about a dawn that hasn't happened.
And in some sense that's true.
But I think that he believed that you could see the dawn as it were all the time every day.
If you had really done all the work you needed to do, Thoreau did read a lot.
He was very widely read in botany and geology.
He loved his Alexander von Humboldt ended up also loving Darwin.
I mean, he was a great reader. Of course he'd read all of the classics and his perfect Greek and Latin and so on.
But I think that learning all about his area, he was very much a localist as we know, helped him to be able to see better and to expand both his openness to what was coming.
And to actually see some kind of a dawn most of the time.
Yeah, it's interesting that he's interested in the moment of the dawning or the moment right before some kind of thing happens.
I don't remember, maybe I'll remember it now, verbatim, but he's somewhere in that same passage that you were quoting from.
He says, "That man who does not believe that every day contains an earlier, more auroral hour than he has yet to have attained has just spared of life."
That's right.
So there's a kind of hopefulness that you can get to an earlier, more auroral hour.
But the way to do this is to be sort of confronting the dawn that is there that you've prepared for.
So let me ask you this, that's a speculative question.
You said earlier that he might have begun as a transcendentalist in following Emerson and the notion of a dis-incarnate deity, transcendent eternal,
and that he then becomes a pantheous of sorts.
Do you think that that earlier dawn that we're never quite reaching, is it because of our situatedness in our phenomenality?
In other words, we have a phenomenological access to the world of nature, and it's very rich and very abundant, but that there's something in there that you can't quite reach because it's the divine itself, but it only shows itself in various manifestations.
I really hadn't thought of that, but I think that that has to be right.
One passage that comes to mind, there's this kind of very long chapter called "reading," and then after reading where he tells you that you should read all of the great classics and so on.
In the original--
You can do that.
It's a great sort of celebration of the classics, but so there you are feeling very good about yourself if you do read the classics,
but he then moves directly to a chapter called "Sounds" from reading to "Sounds," and he opens the chapter by saying,
"But while we're confined to books, though the most selectant classics and read only particular written languages, we are in danger of forgetting the language,
which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard, much is published, but little printed."
I've never heard of it said that line.
What's the moment that--
I love that.
Much is published, but little printed.
I think that the point is that he's really--
It's back to the notion of the volatile, the truth that is volatile.
Phenomena are unfolding rapidly over time, and what's being published as it were are all of these phenomena that he's encountering, but they cannot be fixed.
The whole problem of the writer, again, is that once you fix that experience in words, it has become what he calls a monument, right?
It's too fixed to really capture that unfolding.
So to me, I think he's published, he just means all of the phenomena that are--
Yeah, and by printed he means that everything that publication should be attempting to signify.
Much is published, but little printed because printing, I think, means that it's fixed, right?
Yeah, got it.
But much is-- it's always being published, right?
So I do think it's interesting that he says that it's a non-metaphorical language.
It's copious and standard, and all things in events speak that language without metaphor.
So could he be getting at that notion of a God that is speaking sort of in some non-pre-logical, non-symbolic state?
Yeah.
It's hard to know. I mean, I'm just not sure.
Well, it would go with what you said earlier that as a translator, he would be the one who almost like the Greeks conceived of the poet,
someone who stands somewhere between the world of the mortals and the gods, and brings tidings from another realm to humankind.
Yeah. It's interesting that he uses the word forgetting. I hadn't thought of that until now, but we're in danger of forgetting the language, right?
Which all things in events speak without metaphor. Maybe there was some earlier period.
Talking about this chapter sounds, that is about the sounds of nature to a great extent.
Is there something in those sounds that if you listen closely enough that you are in touch with that other language?
I don't think it just happens in sounds, but I do think that sounds illustrates this well, precisely because I think he's focusing on this idea that Earth has been
its languages or its language, right? And so I do think that listening to sounds, there's obviously the music of the birds and the water and the rain and so on, he was very interested in the wind and the trees.
So I do think that that's one way in which nature is publishing a set of its ideas, but I think it isn't just in sounds.
I mean, he was a very musical person as you know Robert. He played the flu. So he had an excellent ear, but I do want to just point out the obvious that what's being published all the time is you can see, you can taste if you can feel it and so on.
So he was an extraordinary observer with his physical eye, was probably his most developed organ.
Do you think that he was scopophilic? I do. Yeah, so he privileges sight over the others. It wouldn't be like the road to privilege one over the other. They were all part of a deeper unity, I'm sure, but he is about looking.
He really is. And then listening.
I mean, I think this is true for a lot of nature writers at the privilege site and then they struggle to try to put that into words, but yeah, he's very scopophilic for sure.
Although I would also say that there are moments in his certainly in his journals where he seems to speak about the primacy of touching the world.
And let me quote a passage, I'm sure you know well when he's talking about that reality. Remember, I read that passage that for good or real what we really crave his reality.
And he writes in his journal about his trip to Maine and when he went to the mountains. He says, I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound daily to be shown matter to come in contact with it.
Rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks, contact, contact. And I love that passage.
That word of contact seems to evoke for me the you know the tactile senses of touch.
And you could speak here about a tactile transcendence of the wildness that he wants to be touched by it and he wants to touch it.
And that may be that touching is trans linguistic, maybe you can't talk about it in any direct way, only indirectly.
I do think it's trans linguistic, but I mean that passage is so wonderful.
Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you mean by tactile transcendence and I ask this because most people think of the row as a transcendental.
And I'm actually happy to say that he is with some slight discrepancies. But I think you're using the word transcendence differently. Am I right?
Oh yes. I'm not using it in a platonic sense. No, of course not.
It's not transcending the senses, the body on the contrary.
The wild transcendence is a kind of self ecstasy that arises by virtue of being in touch with the real. I mean the material real.
He's very materially he's talking about trees, wind, rocks, touching his cheeks.
So by tactile transcendence I would mean something very different from an intellectual transcendence or spiritual transcendence or any kind of doctrine of the correspondences between a transcendent realm and the earthly realm.
A la Swedenborg or even Emerson to a certain extent. Absolutely no. I just wanted to clarify that because it's such a wonderful idea.
And I think you and I agree that the body itself is the locus of transcendence.
It is. It absolutely is. And this is what makes the road difficult, I think, because of course ever since Plato and then from Augustine and other Catholics who took that plate-nism and all of Christian theology.
He's predicated on the sort of soul body dualism. So even now we have a hard time talking about whether it be mind-body or soul body.
We still use that language which was actually introduced by Plato. So it's interesting to think of what the Greeks were like before.
But I think that the row was really struggling to reintegrate as it were the soul of the body.
And that's why I like your notion of tactile transcendence. I mean if you think about Emerson, his essay called "Nature" or you could take any of his essays.
For him, nature is a symbol of God. And so he has some interesting passages I could maybe just read one where he talks about the fact that he doesn't want to engage in a kind of microscopic view of nature.
Because he actually says the point is to transcend nature and its sword doors and filts. So the sword doors and filts of nature which he specifies to be spiders and snakes and so on.
So he wanted to get away from the earth the earth was a symbol. And of course for the row it wasn't.
So to try to find a language that would sort of put those two things together, difficult to do.
It reminds me of Wordsworth being critical of John Claire, the peasant poet whose poetry, I know the human eye, John Claire, and I consider him far superior to most of the romantic poets in England.
Wordsworth would say there's too much description and not enough sentiment. And even someone like Wordsworth or Colerie, you described to a certain degree but then you move on to the real thing which is the sentiment that's taking place inside the self.
The natural world serves as a stage for our own sentimentality. Whereas for the row the story is in the setting. The setting is not a decor for the thing itself.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, I mean here's a short passage that I like very much where he's trying to wrestle with that notion of the body being the mind and the mind being the body just as indeed God is nature and nature is God.
The intellect is a cleaver. It discerns and riffs its way into the secret of things. My head is hands and feet. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing as some creatures use their snout and four paws.
And with it I would mind and burrow my way through these hills. So the idea that his head is hands and feet that somehow his mind is like this burrowing creature like an actual animal with a snout and so on. I do think he's trying to collapse the boundaries there between mind and body.
I don't know what you think of that passage. Well it's very suggestive. It's more than just reversing the usual hierarchy.
No, I don't think he's reversing. I think he's collapsing. I agree. Yeah. No, there's no reversal here. Yeah. I like the idea that the head is there for burrowing because the road did not live in his head. No.
Not the way Emerson did, for example. No. He lived on his feet and his feet were also treading the earth and he could feel the uneven surface of what he was walking on and that gave him also I think a sense of rhythm and the kind of terrestrial foundations on which.
And we should also notice that you know as a philosopher and I would add that people in the philosophy department do not consider throw a philosopher. They say he does not mount arguments.
But to his mind to be a philosopher you had to engage in manual labor. Now of course then and now intellectual labor was always privileged over manual labor.
But for the row you needed to learn things with your hands. You needed to get your hands dirty and there's really no way to learn about the natural world without digging and trying to grow things and weeding and touching as you say and chopping down wood.
You name it. All of this work and it was hard work. He really did have many many acres of land that he was he plowed by himself with no animals and attended and weeded and harvest.
So I do I think the manual what I'm calling manual labor because that's in fact what it is. That's part of his philosophy in a very significant way.
In fact I wrote I have a chapter in one of my books called What is a House.
And I invoke Heidegger who in the letter on humanism says trying to explain his phrase language is the house of being.
He says but before we can understand what language is the house of being and before we can really understand what the essence of a house is we have to understand the essence of being and therefore we have to think about being and then if we're adequate to the challenge of thinking the essence of being.
Then maybe we might understand what a house is. And then I go on to say that this is not the way to go up the row is the one who has he's the only philosopher who philosophized on the basis of building a house.
It's true.
From the ground up and that if anything is by understanding what the essence of a house is through the act of building one that you can then go on to the question of what is the being and in which way languages it might be the house.
And as Vito, you know Vito says we can only know that which we make.
Verum et factum con vin tum tú.
Yeah.
And you go and build a house and then you know what a house is.
It's right. That's very true.
And that also helps you to figure out and certainly for the row his experiment he calls it an experiment in at Walden a little bit over two years.
But you know building the house was part of a way to learn a whole range of things.
So I do think that making things is a way of learning about the natural world.
And also learning an important lesson of how much do we need in order to be housed in order to be free.
And in built MacKibbins new introduction this book has just come out and it's a reissue of Walden by Beacon Press.
And it was added to my list of books in the last minute.
So I just read the introduction. It's a short one.
But he says that one of the lessons of the row is for us the twenty-first century, especially in America is how much is enough.
Yes. And building the house was a kind of minimalist dwelling or shelter which would show through the experiment how much is actually enough and how much might even be too much before you start compromising your freedom or your openness to nature or what have you.
So it's only in the doing of it that you can establish the matters of fact.
And it's not a lesson that his countryman has learned very well.
Actually the sad thing is you can order a kit with the rose cabin online. It's sort of IKEA like.
And you can, you know, have it arrive in the mail and you can put it together.
And put it in your backyard. That's right. It's a kind of consumer item now which is the row would hate.
But I do think that, you know, he was working on this notion of limits, setting limits which were terrible at in America.
We seem to have this notion that unlimited goods and so on.
But I think that we need to understand that he wasn't just saying, "Okay, let's set limits."
His point, of course, was to learn how to dwell on the earth in this mode of vibrancy.
So he did decide, you know, to give up a whole range of things precisely to free him to do the things that made him feel most alive.
So I do think it's important that he wasn't just saying, "Oh, all you need is a little cabin."
And, you know, sort of a vegetarian diet.
The point was that there is a life to live beyond simply having a job and making a salary and so on.
Yeah, I like the fact that we're concentrating on the thinking of the row which doesn't always take the forefront in a lot of the commentaries or, you know.
But there is this reference to the political reality that he's speaking within which is that of America.
And a nation that, as you said, was far from learning even in his day the lesson about limits, about the wisdom of limits of living within them.
Not because you want to be Spartan or be deprived, but only because within limits can the fulfillment of this other being in the world really take place.
Yeah, I mean, I wonder whether this is sort of the experiment has something to do with human desire.
It's kind of the infinity of human desires.
And at least in terms of religions, your metaphysical desire can have an infinite object which is God.
And I think that if you kind of let go of that, your infinite desire is just want more and more and more.
And I think that the row really did find in nature an infinite manifestation of something so deep and fulfilling and it kept expanding and getting more interesting and more vibrant.
So it would always work as it were.
And that's why addressing his book to those who are said to live in New England, that's how he says it.
You who are said to live in New England, that's interesting because New England is not old England and it's not even intended by the row as of the most recent version, younger version of England.
It means new in the theological sense of the new man, of conversional newness, that the death of the old Adam and the birth of the new Adam.
Absolutely.
So it's a Vita Nova in the sense of the new life. It's baptismal.
It actually is.
And Walden is his pond of water which the Puritans understood the original pilgrims understood their crossing of the Atlantic as a crossing in a baptismal ritual to be re-formed.
On the shores of this new world, this new England, not where the kingdom of God would be right here on earth.
And I think Stanley Cabel's argument in the sense of Walden is very convincing to me that within a decade or two, those original wild expectations of the Puritans were disappointed.
They were.
They felt that they had come to not an Eden on earth.
But they come to a harsh wild place where it was anything but a terrestrial paradise.
And they had quickly gave up on the promise of America.
And I can't but believe that part of Walden's testament is to tell his fellow Americans that they gave up on the promise of America way too early.
And that he's going to set out and try to discover that new, what Emerson called that new, yet unapproachable America.
Absolutely.
And that I think that he presumed to find it in the natural world of America.
And he says we occupy the heavens of the gods without knowing it.
Exactly.
That's a direct quote.
This idea that we are already there in paradise insofar as we are on this continent, this new continent.
That's what you have to wake up to.
That's what the America has to do with that.
And I've talked a little bit about that.
How do you anticipate the dawn, Robert?
What would you say?
For Thoreau?
Yeah.
I think Walden is, as I said, it's a testament for what he did for two and a half years, not just building the house, but building the house in such a way that once it was done, he could sit there.
At a certain point he says he sat in his doorway from sunrise to nightfall.
Without moving, just in the midst of the trees, the birds flying in and out of his cabin, listening to the sounds on the pond, that he was just sitting in Eden.
So how do you do that?
You open yourself to the prospect of it.
And somehow it's the nature of America that holds its promise.
And not its constitution, not its material prosperity, not its press.
Yeah.
I mean, I think he likes to play with the word "improvements," which was very much part of the American ideology of plowing your land and owning more acreage and so on.
And he says, "I'd like to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick."
The idea that you need to keep controlling more nature and having more crops and so on seemed to be completely missing the boat.
I don't know whether this was just sort of to do with modern technology or some kind of the capitalistic spirit, a whole range of things, I think.
Well, I'm glad you raised that issue of capitalism because it seems that it's exactly against what we understand as the capitalist drive of more and more accumulation and profiting and what improvement in a different mode, no?
Yeah.
That there's a different kind of accumulation that the road understands in his economy when the first chapter of Walden is called the economy and that accumulation, it would be too easy to just call it spiritual.
But it's a daily constant relation to the natural world which has come to know the natural world in its phenomenological detail to identify species, flowers, trees, birds, waters, and with this intimate daily accumulation of greater and greater knowledge, you are creating a reservoir of vitality that does not deplete itself.
And you cannot spend it, it's a constant accumulation of a surplus of vitality, not a capital in that in the other two.
Yeah, I mean he talks in the chapter called the Beanfield.
He talks, it's so interesting that he talks in terms of intimacy, he says that he came to love his crops.
And here's just a short passage, it was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting and hoeing and harvesting and threshing and picking over and selling them.
And I might add eating them for I did taste, I was determined to know beans.
And this notion of knowing beans as though you could have a knowledge of beans at some really deep level, I love that, I think he meant that very seriously.
Yeah, well incorporation through eating.
Yeah.
Well I mean I actually think of this as carnal knowledge, quite literally, I mean if you read the chapter there's a lot of erotic language around the beans and so I think when he says you know for I did taste, something's going on here.
It sounds biblical, it does, it very much does, yeah.
So I do think that it's so easy to flatten it out, especially in our culture where people talk about having a, quote, you know, wilderness experience, which is I don't even know what that is, as opposed to being a kind of localist as the row was and going to the same place every day and exploring it through the year and really coming to know that region.
And it just as you say it keeps expanding in terms of what it's giving and your openness expands as well.
So there is something, it's hard to get words for that he's coming to know things, there's obviously some sort of spiritual expansion but also intellectual, practical.
Very hard, I mean I would go back to my notion that he wanted to hear the language of the earth and that that or learn the language of the earth.
To me I don't know maybe that metaphor is I'm trying to capture the complexity of what he was experiencing in the natural world, what was revealing itself to him.
And again, I know there are many outdoorsy people who I can't say what's revealing itself to them, but I do want to urge readers to be very careful not to limit this project when you read this book.
It's difficult to figure out exactly what was revealing itself to the row.
Well certainly he was not someone who was keen on going out to the Grand Canyon or the Great Ocean and all the remote areas with the sublime landscape and he stayed at home and uncovered the miracles in the ordinary, in the everyday, in the world that he knew best.
I think a lot of people who consider themselves heirs of the row as you invoking these nature excursions to the most spectacular panoramas of the continent, Yellowstone Park or other John Muir, I admire him a lot for everything that you did, but there is kind of an American consumerist attitude of how much you can go into America and how much you can get through your exposure to the sublime.
And you come home nowadays with all these pictures and then you look at what I've been looking at what I've seen, look at how much I've been able to look how important I am.
I who did the trip, I mean it is very...
But he was not consumers.
I don't think he wanted it not to be all about look what I did, there's a kind of humility in this sense.
You asked what was he doing there? Well he wasn't consuming the surrounding world through his eyes or his sense of touch or hearing.
It was some other mode of relation.
Even though tasting the beans, even though he's incorporating, consuming literally when he says that he ate them.
But I mean it's a different...
You did, you did tell the soil and grow them.
It's a bit different when they're your own take my point.
On this program we speak about the bread of angels, our affair and eating that bread is a different thing.
Well I mean I think that of course the row was well aware that as a human he was not going to dwell in nature.
He could only really dwell in relation to nature but he wanted that relationship to be a very, very intimate relationship.
There's a lovely passage about getting lost in the woods. He's again using some biblical ideas here.
Not till we're completely lost or turned round, do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature?
Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world.
Do we begin to find ourselves and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations?
So nature is strange and alien but at the same time we have this kind of infinite set of relations.
I like the way you link infinity with limits to because it's not infinite in the sense that you can always add more.
And here the famous scene in Walden where he actually measures the depth of the pond where he sounds Walden pond because people had been saying that it was bottomless limit,
but he actually very scientifically goes out there and discovers that it's precisely I don't know how many feet now.
It's very deep but it has a bottom.
It does.
So the fact that it's not infinite in that sense makes it all the more infinite in the other sense.
So within the limits of things that the infinity that he's covered.
Actually that's very nicely put because I think certainly transcendental is like Emerson for them, the kind of infinity or the infinite was something that didn't have all of these forms and these issues.
These forms and these shapes the bottoms and so on the bottom of the pond it would have to be limitless as God is.
Here the idea is that no everything has a limit but that's what makes it.
It has an infinite mode of manifestations over the year.
He's examining that lake and when it's starting to thaw he's examining the bubbles and the lake.
It's just something is always there that's new and unfolding.
It's infinite in its fullness not in its serial extension.
At the end of that passage I don't have it at hand but he says that once he's found out exactly how deep it is he and he says not one
inch of it could be spared by the imagination because every inch of it is crucial to it being what it is.
It's a lovely idea.
So Andrea Walden has a bunch of chapters.
There's economy where I lived, what I live for reading sounds, solitude visitors of being field, the village, the pond,
spaker farm, higher laws, brute neighbors, house warming, foreburn,
inhabitants and winter visitors, winter animals, the pond and winter spring and then conclusion.
I wanted to just ask you about one of them briefly which is higher laws because that is a chapter which if one is going to understand the row as a transcendentalist.
That's probably the one that you would want to point to where he does seem to evoke an order of higher laws that has a certain transcendentalist resonance to it.
No, I agree. It is certainly the one chapter that has a number of passages that sound like classic transcendentalism.
I think it's worth though noticing that at the beginning of that chapter he says I caught a glimpse of a wood chucks stealing across my path and felt a strange thrill of savage delight and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw,
that I was hungry them except for that wildness which he represented.
And then also later says I was not squeamish, I could sometimes eat a fried rat with good rows.
So there is something kind of earthy going on at the beginning and then he moves in the middle to this very transcendental discourse about trying to depart from this kind of larval sensual state reptilian state.
But it is interesting that he ends that chapter with this question about chastity which kind of takes you by surprise.
Although I suppose chastity would be part of transcendentalism on a certain level, I suppose purity.
But then he says how shall a man know if he is chased, we've heard about this virtue but we don't really understand it and so on.
And he says from exertion, calm wisdom and purity from sloth, ignorance and sensuality, if you would avoid uncleanness, work earnestly though it'd be at cleaning a stable.
And I do think that when you clean a stable you're really dealing with a lot of animal manure and so on.
So to me it sort of starts earthy and then moves upwards but then towards the end is coming back down with this notion of okay, you chased person, get in that stall and here's a pitchfork and do some cleaning.
I'm not sure.
I mean it's a complex chapter that sort of oscillates.
I think he raised a really important aspect of Thoros philosophy which is the search for purity.
I don't know how to put it.
I think Siemann Vay somewhere says that there's a big difference that the modern world is always after intensity.
Yeah.
Pacha is that.
But that she wanted to direct her energies towards a search for purity rather than intensity.
And I think Thoros in that same vein that it was not the intensity in the sense of getting this hot constant, you know, high, higher.
But rather the experience of a certain kind of purification.
It's funny.
It would be the higher law that there.
Maybe.
It is true that he was a very austere man and I think purity was important for him.
But because it's so associated with a kind of Christian set of renunciations which he himself would announce is he's very explicit.
You would have to take the certain traditional associations away from the notion of purity.
That's right.
In order to read the image because it's not purification from the body and matter and all those platonic where platinus was ashamed to be in his body.
That's not.
There's a purity of the body.
There's a purity of matter.
And it's not untouched.
It's not uncontaminated in the natural sense.
It's just something about the purifying.
I suppose your whole sensory apparatus by which you relate to the world.
Of course, the transcendentalists were completely anti-conformist.
That was very, and their idea was that every human being is naturally good but is corrupted by society and by traditional religions.
So part of that purity has to do with turning away from these human institutions and going and becoming awake outside of that.
So to conclude our own show, can you say just a word about the conclusion of Walden?
I find it very moving and extremely suggestive where he turns to the universe and he seems to posit some definite correspondence between one's inner soul and the cosmos and that one hears and relates to the other.
And if you ask, the cosmos will answer.
It's a very interesting ending.
He has all these sort of inspirational things to say that yes, the cosmos will respond.
At the end he has this story about a bug that emerged from a table that had been built 60 years before and so on.
And there were people sitting around the table and had put some hot urn on the table and out from the table comes a bug.
And for him, this is the end of the whole book, this notion of a bug, and he says it's a noble and beautiful bug, but he doesn't call it a butterfly, right?
It's not something that's been in a cocoon and has lovely wings. It's just a bug that comes out of the dead dry leaf of society.
So the human bug as it were has to come out of the dead dry leaf of society as he calls it and enjoy its perfect summer life at last.
So I do think that the fact that he ends it with a bug as though, you know, our goal is to be that bug coming out of the table.
It's very, again, a humble sort of image.
Yeah, I couldn't have done it any better.
Well, Andrea, thanks a lot for coming back on for the fifth time. I want to remind our listeners, we've been speaking with Professor Andrea Nightingale from the Department of Classics here at Stanford about an author very dear to her heart, which is Henry David Thoreau.
Oh, she teaches on an almost yearly basis that right, Andrea?
More like every two years.
Well, every two years.
Well, maybe even every three, but I've been teaching it since 1993.
Yeah. So thanks again for coming on. I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
We thank again, Victoria Mollow, who keeps it all going on the technical level.
And we'll be looking forward to the sixth one, Andrea.
We sure will, but I'm sure Zep will want to.
We can get him on to.
Don't worry. Take care.
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