Noted: Thoreau

From The Journal, July 23, 1851:

The mind is subject to moods, as the shadow of clouds pass over the earth. Pay not too much heed to them. Let not the traveller stop for them. They consist with the fairest weather. By the mood of my mind, I suddenly felt dissuaded from continuing my walk, but I observed at the same instant that the shadow of a cloud was passing over the spot on which I stood, though it was of small extent, which, if it had no connection with my mood, at any rate suggested how transient and little to be regarded that mood was. I kept on, and in a moment the sun shone on my walk within and without.

Noted: Thoreau

From The Journal, an entry from July 25, 1839, when he was 22:

I confess I have no little sympathy with the Indians and hunter men. They seem to me an distinct and equally respectable people, born to wander and to hunt, and not to be inoculated with the twilight civilization of the white man.

[...]

The Indian, perchance, has not made up his mind to some things which the white man has consented to; he has not, in all respect, stooped so low; and hence, though he too loves food and warmth, he draws his tattered blanket about him and follows his fathers, rather than barter his birthright. He dies, and no doubt his Genius judges well for him. But he is not worsted in the fight; he is not destroyed. He only migrates beyond the Pacific to more spacious and happier hunting grounds.

" 't was heels up and head down"

One of Mirah's more charming books is Duck Song, a board book by Kenneth Grahame, pictures by Joung Un Kim [Update: I probably should have already known this, but I just noticed the fine print on the book informing us that the words earlier appeared in Grahame's classic The Wind in the Willows]. Here are the words:

All along the backwater,
Through the brushes tall,
Ducks are a-dabbling,

Up tails all!

Ducks' tails, drakes' tails,
Yellow feet a-quiver,
Yellow bills all out of sight
Busy in the river!

Slushy green undergrowth
Where the fish swim--
Here we keep our larder,
Cool and full and dim.

Everyone for what he likes!
We like to be
Heads down, tails up,
Dabbling free!

High in the blue above
Swifts whirl and call--
We are down a-dabbling

Up tails all!

It's one her recent favorites; we like to read it to her too. Then, just this morning, going through my excellent Christmas book haul, I found in the new NYRB edition of Thoreau's Journal (edited by Damion Searls) the entry from October 29, 1837:

Two ducks, of the summer or wood species, which were merrily dabbling in their favorite basin, struck up a retreat on my approach, and seemed disposed to take French leave, paddling off with swan-like majesty. They are first-rate swimmers, beating me at a round pace, and—what was to me a new trait in the duck character—dove every minute or two and swam several feet under water, in order to escape our attention. Just before immersion they seemed to give each other a significant nod, and then, as if by a common understanding, 't was heels up and head down in the shaking of a duck's wing. When they reappeared, it was amusing to observe with what a self-satisfied, darn-it-how-he-nicks-'em air they paddled off to repeat the experiment.

How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Two quotations from Walden, to begin:

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness.

And one from "Civil Disobedience":

[T]hey who assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property.

As I know was true of most Americans, and possibly still is, when I was in high school we were forced to read excerpts from Walden. I couldn't have been more bored. Is there any writer more out of step with high school students than Thoreau? A writer less likely to appeal to such readers? (Perhaps Hawthorne, whose The Scarlet Letter we were also forced to read, over the course of one interminable month. A month! The novel's not 300 pages long!) I used to make fun of Thoreau--not only was he boring, but he wasn't even what he claimed, was he? He wasn't authentic! He wasn't really out in the wilderness, right? Not that I knew what I was talking about, but I'd heard in passing something to the effect of this or that and certainly I was eager to find some reason to dismiss a writer, to feel as if I needn't bother. But, in any event, of course these concerns were not really the point. (And they were not helped by the fact that all we ever read were short excerpts, pretty much of anything, excerpts or short stories. The only full works of literature of any length I remember us reading were the aforementioned Hawthorne and the ubiquitous The Great Gatsby. Worse, these excerpts were packaged in such a way to almost invite dismissal--Thoreau of course would have been carefully placed in the section helpfully designated "The Transcendentalists"--particularly given how we were expected to relate to these writings, as works with Themes and Meanings and whatnot. I always struggled mightily with this: how was I to know what the right answer was?)

Why is Thoreau out of step, Walden in particular? Here is a guy who writes about nature, about divorcing himself for a period of time from the regular flow of society, about simplicity, about working with nature, not against it, about the flow of the seasons, the battles of ants and songs of birds and and rise and fall and freezing of ponds. Everything else we learn in school is geared towards speed, efficiency, in one way or another, and here is a guy from the ancient past--before the Civil War!--asking not only us but his already impossibly slow contemporaries (from our perspective) to slow down. More precisely, school is designed so that we learn how to fit in, how to be good cogs in the liberal capitalist world, how not to think for ourselves, or really when not to, how to shape ourselves for maximum value in the "real world".

Thoreau, in Walden as much as in "Civil Disobedience" (which if we read it at all in high school would have been framed in such a way so that its true import was necessarily muted), is pitched against all of this. What he offers, frankly, is a necessary rebuke. There are times, to be sure, when he sounds preachy, like a scold, but this is not what I mean. The book is a rebuke in its very essence. And reading Walden I had a feeling I've had often in recent years, the feeling that I am not free.

The most enlightened age

Suppose someone wanting to learn to dance said: 'For hundreds of years now one generation after another has been learning dance steps, it's high time I took advantage of this and began straight off with a set of quadrilles.' One would surely laugh a little at him; but in the world of spirit such an attitude is considered utterly plausible. What then is education? I had thought it was the curriculum the individual ran through in order to catch up with himself; and anyone who does not want to go through this curriculum will be little helped by being born into the most enlightened age.--Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

This generation reclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction. -- Thoreau, Walden

We congratulate ourselves on living in an enlightened age, within the Enlightenment tradition (though we are besieged, oh yes, let us never forget), and yet collectively we take so little advantage of gained knowledge. And, believing in progress, we like to think that what we know now--or rather, what is known now, not what we know--is necessarily an advancement on what used to be known, but has been forgotten. Earlier ages are by definition more benighted than our own.

Recently Andrew Seal reported, with disappointment, on some lectures he attended given by Marilynne Robinson. I still haven't had the time to sample the lectures for myself, but apparently she was exercised about what she calls "parascience", presumably the extra-scientific writings from the likes of Richard Dawkins. Is she precisely anti-science? I don't know. I'm not sure it matters. Whether she is or isn't, I think she's saying, and has been saying, something important. (And unlike comrade Shelley at Read Red, I hardly think Robinson's wonderful novel Gilead is "deadly dull"; nor do I understand how one could have read the book and been able to conclude that it's little more than a "religious tract". On the contrary, I think the novel has much to say to us, with potentially deep implications for the Left.)

I employed another lecture given by Robinson in a post I wrote a year ago, in which I discussed conceptions of democracy held by the (American) revolutionary generation, conceptions all but lost now, conceptions I believe we would do well to revive. There is science, and then there is institutional Science, necessarily in thrall to Capital, and the diffusion and acceptance of bad science as general knowledge. In that lecture, she notes how Social Darwinism, which of course was accepted as Scientific Truth for some time and still has not been fully eradicated, scuttled what had been promising movements in the pursuit of equality. The problem, if anything, has only gotten worse. Naturally, this ties in with some of my recent themes here. With the global economy and, far more importantly, the environment in increasingly uncertain state, it seems clear to me that we're going to need to know the kinds of things that people once knew, that we're going to need to know how to do what people once knew how to do. A call for a true popular science, if you will.

Noted: Henry David Thoreau

From the "Higher Laws" section of Walden:

John Farmer sat at his door one Septemeber evening, after a hard day's work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. It was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard someone playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him,--Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.--But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.

Noted: Henry David Thoreau

From the section titled "The Ponds", in Walden (italics in original):

Flints' Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like;--so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that he had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show not title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him,--him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed all the shore; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow,--there was nothing to redeem, forsooth, in his eyes,--and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where every thing has its price; who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get any thing for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose tree no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.

An axe to the head

In this fascinating interview (via This Space), Jill Marsden talks about coming across Nietzsche as an undergraduate, having a strong reaction from the opening pages of Beyond Good and Evil. For interviewer Christoper Bransen, also in his undergraduate years, "It was On the Genealogy of Morals, and within about two pages it felt like somebody had hit my head with an axe and opened up a new world of possibilities." At his Object-Oriented Philosophy blog, Graham Harman says of Nietzsche (by way of explaining Nietzsche's high ranking in his informal top-25 philosophers list):

Many consider him a sort of juvenile pastime that one has to move beyond, and this attitude is understandable, but just think of how your brain is on fire after reading Nietzsche. There aren’t many philosophers who can do that.

I don't mean to counter Marsden and Bransen with Harman. On the previous, now deleted, version of his blog, Harman wrote about spending his 20s reading through all of Heidegger. All of Heidegger! And now he is a published philosopher, able to engage with its history, agree, disagree, argue with it, make his own contribution, for whatever it might be worth. But again, neither is the point Graham Harman at all; I read his blog, one of many that I look at that are over my head, but I don't have a position on his positions, nor can I.

No, the point is youth and lost time. The luxuriousness of youth! It seems you're supposed to encounter philosophy when you're young. Meanwhile, I can tell you nothing of interest about my 20s--what could I possibly have been doing? not much, I assure you--and recently aged 39, I have yet to read more than a page or two of Nietzsche and have just in the last year or so been intermittently struggling with Heidegger. It strikes me that some of the difficulty I've had in reading this stuff, apart from the actual difficulty of the work itself, has to do with my habits of reading for information, for knowledge. Now that approach seems insufficient, but the reading itself seems to me more urgent than ever--for example, what I've been able to get out of Heidegger so far seems very important to me, without having to be consumed by whether what I'm getting is properly "Heideggerian" or not--it seems more urgent than ever, because of the loss of time, because of the political situation, the economic situation, the ecological situation, because of my recent fatherhood, it seems necessary to think, to think this through, to say what needs saying. So grandiose, and yet personally vital.

And I'd like to say something, perhaps in a later post, about why I feel this need right now to be reading the Greeks--didn't what Nietzsche and Heidegger had to say have a great deal to do with their readings of the Greeks? But it's not just because of them that the Greeks beckon. And yet I am not reading the Greeks, I am currently reading Thoreau. Thoreau, who some quote in support of the standard apolitical message; i.e., the writer who engages in politics is inevitably made a fool of. As if there weren't deep political implications in Thoreau, in Walden. But then this sort of stance--the extreme apolitical stance--is born, it seems to me, of a reduction of politics to pronouncements on elections, on this or that dreary politician, which is of course the reduction desired and achieved by liberal capitalism. Remove the political, reduce people to individual units, divided, but voting! And ignoring how things work, ignoring the political space. And here lately I find I am allied with Blanchot here too, and his conception of communism, and I am off running, with still more to read, more to do, more to come. . . always more to come.