Sublimity

Today will have to suffice with not so much a nature walk, as a nature drive-home. I must attribute this to the steady downpour along with my inability to lay claim upon anything resembling a decent coat.

As I was driving home from my expensive educational institution, going seventy miles an hour in my Jeep, eating a sandwich that someone else made for me because I have very little idea how to grow my own sandwiches, paid for with money that someone gave me for making food for those who also are far too lazy to create their own, I realized that nature really does offer a man, at his fingertips, everything he might need.

I very much enjoy berries—berries of all colors and persuasions: Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries and cranberries. It was the last that I was able to savor this afternoon. Falling out of my sandwich. All over me. If ever there existed a situation one might call ‘sticky,’ this was it. Napkin after pure, white napkin failed me as I hurtled through the storm, until I was struck by inspiration. I reached my hand out the window, stretching my fingers toward the heavens. The rain drops bit into my skin, but with every sensation I could feel myself cleansed, thanking nature for her bounty.

Such a pleasant experience with berries confirmed my desire to write about what might be my favorite passage in Walden:

“Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flints’ Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usual lichen hangs in festoons from the white-spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and dog-wood grow, the red alder-berry glows like the eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the wild-holly berries make the beholder forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste.” (189)

These opening lines to Baker Farm move me; ordinary, beautiful descriptions are transformed into an overwhelming, multi-spiritual experience. My imagination and my appetite are as tempted as Thoreau’s.

At many points in my studies, as happens with Transcendentalists or Romantics, I have run headlong into the concept of the sublime. We bandy the term about, and certainly it was always expected that I could spit out some definition of the word—and I could. I could point to a painting, or a passage and scholarly air that “oh yes! That, Sir, is quite sublime.” Content, perhaps, with a pat on the shoulder, or concerned with greater pursuits, it was not until this moment in Walden that I realized what a gulf existed between definition and meaning.

It is with little pride that I claim this revelation. Thoreau certainly presents few—if any—obstacles to it. Here is a place where the natural borders upon the super natural—a place worthy of Celtic worship—worthy of comparison to the mighty Norsemen—a place evoking a modern, Miltonian, Christian view of temptation—where imps abound, and roundtables evoke the English mythology of old. No, Mr. Thoreau pulls no blow when confronting the reader with the ordinary turned extraordinary.

I hope it says less about any density on my part than it does my imagination, the degree to which this passage strikes me, but I am struck. So, I will bid farewell, for now, to this guide of our imaginations and of our souls.