I think that, personally, the most important thing about my weekly nature walk is that it gives me a chance to lessen my exposure to the loud bustle and hurried energy of this town (however sleepy it might be compared to other towns.) I live in an apartment that faces Main Street, and it is only recently that I noticed how much noise pollution I hear on a daily basis. Whether I am hanging out at home or just sleeping, there is the constant drone and clatter of cars, motorcycles, skateboards, and those terrible logging trucks (the last being something I have come to equate with Thoreau's train.) On my last walk, I headed back down to the same valley and field where I was last time, and rather than close my eyes and try and zone out for a while, I kept my eyes and ears open. I determined to try experience what remained of the day's waking moments amidst the calm quiet with full concentration. I still had to tune out that always-present drone of traffic, but you'd be surprised at how focused you can get once all you can hear is the wind in the grass. I prefer to go walking near sunset, when I can almost feel the heat being sucked from the ground and the air as the light dies behind the low hills of the valley. I found myself staring at the clouds for a long time, watching them get steadily darker and drift so slowly that it felt as if I were tracing the movement of the hour hand on a clock tower. I thought a lot about the myth of permanence, and of the nature of all human effort, and mostly the things that I had read in Thoreau's Conclusion.
This final chapter seemed to me the culmination of everything Thoreau wanted his audience to hear, almost as if he acknowledges that they might have lost their way, somewhere around his dramatic chronicling of the status of the ice on Walden Pond over the course of an entire New England winter. I like to think that he is rewarding diligent readers with his most condensed, purpose-driven musings. Among these I remembered clearly one of his more proverbial quotes, “The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly from the rich man's abode...I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace” (307). Indeed, this seems like the kind of wisdom that you might get out of any religious text—it's a reminder of the merits of practicality and an encouraging take on how you can best view your own life. Many of these kinds of passages in Conclusion are partly expressions of one of the many major underlying themes in Walden, which is preoccupied with putting a mirror up to the face of his audience's worldview. Once you hear the piercing truths in Thoreau's simple observations, you know instantly that what you've just read is something you should have realized all along, and it is all the more sweet if you are able to retain a fraction of that sensation after having set the book down.
To me, and I think to many other people in generations after Thoreau, what makes these otherwise common proverbs resonate so clearly is that they were written by a man who lived in a time so relatively close to ours, who lived so near us geographically, and who appears to be fighting against the same problem-ridden society that we find ourselves slaves to. Along with his humble admissions of self-contradiction and fallibility, what makes me so willing to take Thoreau's ideas to heart is an underlying tone of earnestness and a concern for the well being of his fellow man. This book is thick with his own voice from beginning to end, and I suppose it would be best to leave you with my most recently-discovered favorite quote: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them” (303). This reassuring quote, I believe, is one of many final calls to Thoreau's neighbors, where his voice is heard with authority and experience. He is commanding his readers in the last sentence, telling them not to throw away the dreams of the life they might have wanted, but instead to forcefully take their lives and build them into the kind of foundation that can meet their dreams from the ground up. It's powerful stuff, and what amazes me is that it is but a small fraction of the optimism that Thoreau has for his world.
Yeah,I can easily agree with Thoreau's Conclusion to Walden. Everything it seems comes full circle and as you put it John, it's like he is reminding us of all the philosophical details that he presented earlier in the boom, but doesn't want us to forget.
ReplyDeleteI also really like how you said that geographically he wants us to feel near him at all times. I think that is an incredibly rare achievement in non-fiction form, where an author is able to create an environment off of incredibly acute observations made in nature (while simultaneously making Walden out to be some strange Neverland that only so few individuals can recognize). The most important aspect of it all is how is literary style is able to be imbue so well with his philosophical believes.
For instance, in the chapter titled House-warming, Thoreau expresses his believe that everyone's houses should be as open and non-secretive as possible. He also stresses throughout the book that because we are so closed off from each other, we naturally miss out on various opportunities to feed our Genius.
I think his book is almost like being inside of Thoreau's home. He is acute because he doesn't want to hide any details of it from his readers. By writing the book in the "open" fashion that he did. I think Thoreau is allowing us to feed our Genius to the best of his ability.