The Journals of Henry David Thoreau (Part 1)

In this lecture about Henry David Thoreau - 3 of 4 - Roger Weir discusses the life and legacy of Thoreau.
 
Episode transcript - https://sharedpresencefoundation.org/transcripts/385
 
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Image credit: detail from Pastoral Landscape (1861) by Asher Brown Durand.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The date is March twenty first, nineteen eighty five. This
is a twelfth lecture and a series of lectures by
Roger ware on her Medica America. Tonight's lecture is entitled
The Journals, Part one, New Man in the New World.
Of course, these are Thorough's journals backain.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
The new programs are not out, but xerox one of
the pages so you can see what we're going to do.
We're going to continue, of course, with the United States.
We're not going to give up on this country. We
are going to continue. We're going to inhabit it with
intelligence and conscience. And as they used to say, looking

(00:43):
at the old car refurbished, people will whistle when we
go by with it all refurbished. I want to start
with an entry in There's Thorrough's Journals from September ninth,

(01:10):
eighteen fifty one, two am in the morning. Because this
is the man, this is the inheritor of the Franklin
Jefferson country. You know, Throw almost never mentions them. He
never talks about Franklin and Jefferson. None of the Transandentalists

(01:31):
did Emerson. It's almost as if they didn't exist. It's
almost as if this was completely accepted. Of course we
have a country. Of course we have these nice little townships.
Of course we have this intellectual freedom. By the eighteen thirties,
it's assumed by the American people that it's God's gift

(01:54):
to that, and no one ever had to fight for it,
much less really struggle to conceive the conditions under which
it could manifest. So Franklin and Jefferson end up being
like Himalian peaks, lost in the mists, lost in the background.
But because of the hermetic nature of their activity, there

(02:18):
was a resonance. There was a vibration in the air,
as it were, There was a cultural milieu that was extant,
available like Tesla's electrical energy. It was in the air,
it was available to be drawn upon. And so we
have Thureau, who becomes a very peculiar human being. There

(02:42):
is nobody like Thorau before him in Western civilization. There
just isn't anyone at all. To find someone like Thureau,
you have to go back either to the American Indians,
or you have to go back to the old Chinese dallists,
or further back. And this is what Throw began to recognize.

(03:04):
You have to go back to ancient India, back to
upunishatic times where the wives in life left man's realm
and went back to nature. They went back to nature,
not to go back to nature qua nature, not to

(03:29):
go back to the trees and the mountains and the streams,
but to take themselves back there and open it up.
It's like setting a butterfly free. And nature is transformed
with that kind of an action. When man frees his
spirit to nature, nature transforms and becomes a cosmos, and

(03:56):
it is different. It is different. Here is a man.
By eighteen fifty one, Thoreau was quite far along, had
realized that his relationship, for instance, with Emerson, the closest
relationship of his life, was already beginning to fray. By

(04:18):
eighteen fifty Emerson had completed all of his major writings. Yes,
English Traits would be published just four years later and
would make a tremendous impact. But Emerson, the man had
somehow crested, had somehow matured, had come in the late

(04:39):
eighteen forties early eighteen fifties two the fullness of himself,
and had begun to withdraw in some prime mordial sense
and thorough sensitive to This resents the fact that a
great man is shriveling, resents the the fact that homiletic

(05:03):
confidence is beginning to displace the lightning and thunder of
a free spirit roaming at will in the wildness of
the world. He sends that somehow Emerson had tamed those
inner energies, but had tamed them in terms of the family,

(05:27):
in terms of fame, in terms of the publishing realm,
in terms of his readers who trusted him, in terms
of his family background. Thorow becomes almost like a gnostic
who is suspicious of the demiurgic world and says, we

(05:48):
cannot come to the terms that you have come to.
We cannot agree to live in nature in terms of
the provincial humanness which we have accepted, because all of
this is illusion. All of this is going to pass,

(06:09):
and we need to address ourselves fresh. What are we
in our spirit? In our spirit self, get out of
line from the stores, get out of line from the
railroad stations, get out of line from even the lyceum programs,

(06:30):
get out of even the small athens of America Concord, Massachusetts,
get out into the countryside. And so thorough is looking
at this time trying to find almost like some zen
master a way to make the world transparent to himself.
Here's what he records. Two am in the morning, September ninth,

(06:54):
eighteen fifty one. Melville is working on Moby Dick in
the same state, not very far away, the moon not
quite full. Going to Kannatum via a road, there is
a low vapor in the meadows beyond the depot, dense
and white, though scarcely higher than a man's head, concealing

(07:19):
the stems of the trees. I see that the oaks,
which are so dark and distinctly outlined, are illumined by
the moon on the opposite side. Notice the contrasting in
Thurrough's writing, always a X of the unknown coming in

(07:39):
to contrast, and what is generally known in a familiar
way becomes transposed. It is now known in an unfamiliar way.
This as I go up the back road, a few thin,
ineffectual clouds in the sky. I come out thus into

(08:00):
the moonlit night where men are not, as if into
a scenery anciently deserted by men. The life of men
is like a dream. It is three thousand years since
night has had possession. Go forth and hear the cricket's

(08:22):
chirp at midnight here. If their dynasty is not an
ancient one and well founded, I feel the antiquity of
the night. She surely repossesses herself of her realms, as
if her dynasty were uninterrupted, or she had underlain the day.

(08:46):
No sounds but the steady creaking of crickets and the
occasional crowing of cocks. I go by the farmers houses
and barns, standing there in the dim light, under the trees,
as if they lay at an immense distance or under
a veil. The farmer and his oxen are all sleep now,

(09:12):
not even a watch dog awake. The human slumbers. There
is less of man in this world. The fog in
the lowlands on the corner road is never still. It
now advances and envelops me as I stand to write
these words, then clears away, and ever noiselessly stemm. It

(09:38):
covers the meadows like a web. I hear the clock
strike three now at the Clayey Bank. The light of
Orion's belt seems to show traces of the blue day
through which it comes to us. The sky at least
is lighter on that side than in the west, even

(09:58):
about the moon, even by night, the sky is blue
and not black, for we see through the veil of
night into the distant atmospheres of day. Thurle becomes very
much a resonance of some ancient tradition that was eclipsed

(10:26):
in Roman times, a tradition that Pindar would have felt
at home men, the tradition where Orpheus still sang with
his nine stringed liar. It was the condition of the
natural underlay of man before the death of Pan. You know.

(10:50):
It was Plutarch who recorded the death of Pan about
one point thirty a d. He recorded in the Moraley
of the the Discovery that Pan was dead, and the
message shouted out to one of the capes of Brindisian.
And there was a great mysterious moan from the forests.

(11:11):
A trustworthy stoic staid old sea captain reported it at
the Roman port. It said that some old mystical Greek
oracle had told him to declare that Pan was dead
to the Woodland hill, and that was the response. A
low moan therell brings it back. It is all back.

(11:34):
She has been there all this while, but she has
never been there since. For European man, she has been
blinded by the glare of his own egotistical thrust, and
only when the veils were beginning to lift a little
bit where their penetrations threw a little bit of Rousseau

(11:57):
rowing himself his lake in Switzerland, a little bit of
novalis looking into the mysteriousness of man. Occasionally we get
the glimpse in Jefferson, of the flaming intuition of the
passing of an age, the ushering end of some new era.

(12:20):
Threau brings this to be, and he writes that it
must manifest with the individual. This is the important point.
It cannot be there for some chimera. It has to
be therefore the person. There be a be many persons,

(12:44):
but it is the man. Remember how he wrote, after
he lived in Staten Island for a few months, trying
to acclimate himself to the New York City environment, He said,
when will man learn that a million men will never
replace one man, one human being? This was what was

(13:06):
important to him in his work. Thereau had taken himself
in eighteen forty five, by the suggestion of a very
dear friend of his ellery channing, the son William eller Chen.

(13:31):
He had been written that he would never amount to
very much in the world until he took himself out
of the condition, out of the society where he had
labored in limbo, and took himself out somewhere to devour himself.
This is the way Elery Channing put it in a letter.

(13:58):
My dear Thereau, The handwriting of your letter is so
miserable that I'm not sure I have made it out.
If I have it, it seems that you are the
same old sixpence you used to be, rather rusty, but
a genuine piece. I see nothing for you in this
earth but that field which I once christened Briars. Go

(14:25):
out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin
the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative,
no other hope for you. Eat yourself up. You will
eat no one else nor anything else. Concord is just

(14:45):
as good a place as any other. There are indeed
more people in the streets of that village than in
the streets of New York. This is a singularly muddy town, muddy, solitary,
and silent. And so the Briar, which was a plot
of many acres forty fifty acres alongside the shores of

(15:07):
Walden Pond, about two miles south of the then Concord
city limits. It was a plot of ground that Emerson
had bought Ralph Waldo Emerson. They had spotted the harvesting
of trees. They were cutting down all the trees alongside

(15:29):
Walden Pond, and so to preserve some of the watershed
in the terrain, Emerson bought some acreaches and later on
would buy more to try to protect the pond. And
they called it the Briars because it was left wild.
So in eighteen forty five, in the spring, Emerson, caring

(15:54):
for the younger Thorough, always puzzled by Thorough. He was
a ambivalent package of dining White. Emerson expected that he
would become the man of Concord. He expected that, in fact,
Thoreau would probably be the genius of his whole lot.

(16:16):
And yet of all the people in Concord, he was
the one that did the least. So he said, take
the opportunity to go out to the land. And so
Thoreau went out, and he built himself a ten foot
by fifteen foot hut. He built it himself. He felled

(16:37):
the trees. The pines there are very much like arrows,
very easy to strip them of their branches, and he
made six inch square beams, leaving on the top side.
The roundness of the bark of the tree makes a
beam stronger. And for the walls he finished only two

(16:59):
sides of it, so that the rough sides would take
the chinking better. And he set this up, built the frames,
as was the tradition then, and when it came time
to raise the frames, well, he had a raising party
out there, and Emerson and all caught Hawthorne living in
Concord at that time. Thorough the whole crowd of them

(17:22):
went out there and one afternoon raised these frames and
laid on the ceiling. And it wasn't until November that
Thorrow got around to putting the chinking in. He loved
to rough it. He had a table which he made,
He had a cot which he made. He had three chairs,

(17:44):
and I think he had some bookcases that he made
out of driftwood. Thorrow was extremely talented with his hands,
whether it was carpentry or machinery or anything. Thorough was
a genius. He seems to be the arch flow of industryalism,
and yet he is a mechanical genius of the first order.

(18:05):
He is the man who figured out the matrix for
making a superior graphite, which they used in the family
pencil works, and they found out that his graphite was
so fine it was a refined product that it was
used when electrotyping first came in, and the Threau family

(18:29):
began to make six to ten thousand dollars per year
in the eighteen forties from selling bulk graphite to printing outfits,
and pretty soon it became known across the country, and
the Thureau family were encouraged to open up branch offices
all over the country, the Midwest, New York, even in Germany.

(18:53):
Thureau had figured out the process, had figured out how
to do this and make it happen. He was that
kind of a talented genius, and he applied himself in
making the Walden cabin, and when he got it fashioned,
it seemed to constellate for the first time the image
of the man in the eyes of everyone else. He

(19:13):
had been a ne'er do well, and all of a sudden,
in the space of a couple of months, because he
had built his hut out in the sticks, Thorrell was
the wise man. People started to go out there to
visit him. They couldn't keep away from him. Hawthorne be

(19:35):
brooding over some of his work, unable to talk to
anyone else, He would go out to Walden and sit
there sometimes in solitude. Thereau was great at leaving you alone.
Were sometimes in that kind of deadly accuracy. Thorough would
bring out fragment by fragment, spark by spark, the real

(19:58):
energy in the issue. Whole droves of school children would
come out to learn about nature. It was found out
that Thorough could talk to animals. He would have a
whole group of school children sitting in the Walden cabin,
on the cots, on the chairs, on the floor, and

(20:20):
he would leave the front door open, just a ten
by fifteen room, and they would go outside the door
and he would start humming deep in his throat, in
his chest, making strange vibratory sounds, and pretty soon the
little woodchucks would come out, the crows would come and

(20:40):
land on his shoulder. All the little woodland animals, just
like in snow White, all gather around him, and he
would talk to them in these vibratory tones, clicking and
humming and so forth, and then feed them, and the
little children all in realizing here's the magician of the woods.

(21:05):
And he would come in then and he would tell
the children stories of the Indians, the human beings who
used to live here, who used to all do this.
Everyone knew how to talk to the animals, everyone knew
how to talk to the trees. The wilderness was a
home for the whole people. And so he would take

(21:25):
them out and they would look for Indian artifacts. You know.
Once an expert ethnologist visited Emerson's house and he was
introduced to Thurrow, and within several hours the Row had
reduced him to silence, because the man didn't know anything
about the Indians. He knew what you could find in books,

(21:48):
but he didn't know the life blood. He didn't know
that an energized wave of reality, which the American Indian
expressed by his life. But Thereaux was affine to that
all the time, and so Walden became a very curious situation.

(22:09):
It was from some hours on certain days solitude to
other hours in the next day. It was the sight
of uh great family picnics, everybody coming out and camping
on the front forest lawn. It was about two hundred
feet up from the pond, and Thereau would be the

(22:32):
focus of the whole town, and he was finally identified.
Somebody who had been nebulous before was suddenly seen to
represent what Emerson said. We should put him on the payroll.
The town needs a professional naturalist, someone who conducts us

(22:52):
hermes like back to the natural order, who brings the
message of the gods Mother Nature. People had criticized their all.
They say, you talk about Mother Nature as she was
your mother in law, as if she's someone, and he
would say, she is. Of course she is. Of course

(23:14):
we are related to her, she is conscious, we are
in every respect her children. This would bother people until
Walden was built in the Walden cabin catapults in the
mind of those who knew him at the time as

(23:36):
someone who was successful. What he used Walden for for
himself was a chance to bring together the disparate experiences
of about ten years and put them into books. He
wrote a week on the Concord and Merrimac rivers. There

(24:00):
wrote the first draft of Walden, all within the space
of about a year and a half year in three quarters.
It was a shaping process. The making of the cabin
Hut was the making of the man, and from the
making of the man coming into manifestation as a being identifiable.

(24:22):
He was able to project that out and create books
which were in the shape of the man. It's almost
like a plotonium emanation. Until the man was there, the
books couldn't be there because the books were a new
literary genre. They were not works of literature from the mind.

(24:47):
They were projections of a pattern of wholeness from the man.
And so Thoreau's works are neither fiction nor nonfiction, and
they're not an amalgam of fiction and non fiction. They
are presentations rather than representations. Nothing is fictionalized, and because

(25:12):
nothing is fictionalized, there is no contrasting non fiction. All
that is possible is presented. It is a literature of
the possible presented completely. And there the man rings clear

(25:32):
in terms of his motion, in terms of his mobility
within nature. Well, you can step back and say, isn't
that a nature's spirit? Yes, if you pronounce both words equally,
then that's what man was for thorough and for a

(25:57):
year and a half or a year and three quarters
was the site of many a fine conversation. And because
he seemed to be identified, the tax people brought him in.
They said, we want to tax you. What do you own?
And he said, I don't own anything. Don't you own

(26:18):
this cabin? No, I don't own this cabin. I build
it with the help of friends, but I don't own it.
Don't you own the land, No, I don't own the land.
What about your uh family business? I don't own that. Well,
what do you own? He said? I think I own
a row boat I made. So they looked it up
in the books and they said, well, we can't really

(26:39):
get you. It isn't really a viable vehicle for the
tax rolls get out and they couldn't tax him. Well,
this bothered their own They began to think about the
fact that they were taxing him. What were they doing
with his money anyway? And he realized that the it

(27:00):
was the government that was taking the money. But what
was the government doing with it? Well, they were building structures.
What kind of structures, political structures. Well, that got under
Thereau's skin because it was those political structures that he resented.
The firmer they became. The more trees were cut down,

(27:23):
the more people were anesthetized by falsity and traditions. And
then Threau remembered that there was an issue that was
bright in his family, and that was slavery. The Thoreau family,
all of them were early members of the Abolitionist Society,

(27:44):
something founded incidentally by Benjamin Franklin near the end of
his life and continued by Jefferson. But by the eighteen
thirties it had become a real issue, almost like a party.
William Lloyd Garrison was the great spokesman for it, and
Nathaniel Rogers also a great spokesman for him. But Thereau's

(28:07):
family were organizers. They were active, militant anti slavery people.
That is to say, they harbored slaves fleeing in their homes,
fed them, gave the money, helped them to get to Canada.
It was the underground railroad, and Thereau's hot at Walden

(28:28):
became one of those centers. And it hit him when
he began thinking about the taxation that they were using
this money eventually to squelch and suppress his fellow men.
And so he went to the sheriff of the town.
He said, I'm not going to pay any taxes, and

(28:48):
the sheriff said, well, you haven't ever paid any taxes,
that's nothing new. He said, no, I want you to understand,
I refuse to recognize your authority to tax me. He
made his point so vociferously that the man said, well, Henry,
we're going to have to put you in the pokey.

(29:10):
And so they stopped thorough and jailed for a knife.
Some cloaked figure came and delivered the money to the sheriff.
As soon as word leaked out that he was in jail,
the sheriff said, I think I'll leave them. Leave him
there for the night now. They jail in Concord was

(29:32):
a huge building. It was the jail for the whole countryside.
It was three stories high, some sixty five feet long.
He had about eighteen cells that were almost as large
as half this room here, twenty six feet by eight
and a half feet, usually two people in a cell.
And as soon as throw got in that jail environment,

(29:53):
he began to do his militant work. He started interviewing
all the prisoners. What are you in here for? What
are conditions like? And he found out that his cellmate
had been there for three months. He'd fallen asleep in
a barn and his pipe had ignited the barn and
it had burnt down, and they weren't sure what to
do with him any way. He had been there for
three months, and so Threall got a history of the

(30:16):
whole jail from him, and he started formulating in his
mind the idea that the government cannot incarcerate individuals on
the basis of illusionary laws. And the more he thought
about this, the more he thought that it is the
right of the individual as a spiritual being to deny
them the reality, to deny them the confirmation of the

(30:39):
reality of their illusion. And so he began to write,
and he worked up a nice little article on this.
It was entitled, variously generally is known as the Essay

(31:02):
and Civil Disobedience, And it first appeared incidentally in a magazine,
or rather part of it appeared in a magazine. Because
of the dynamite nature of some of his observations, they
didn't quite print all of it. He had problem with
several of his essays, and most of these problem essays

(31:25):
were collected together about four years after Thureau's death, and
this is the first edition of it. It's called a
Yankee in Canada and other essays Anti Slavery and Reform papers.
That's what it's called. And it was published in eighteen
sixty six. It was finally able to be published after

(31:50):
the Civil War was over. But Thereaux had written it
in eighteen forty six. Now this was a very touchy time.
The United States had declared war on Mexico. Oh, yes,
we went into Mexico. What's the marine song from the
halls of Montezuma? They were there. So this militancy of

(32:15):
the United States is feeding everybody. Texas had just commended
the Union Allah Sam Houston's bravery, and Americans were getting
a little huffy about the British designs on the Oregon territory,
and they were getting a little feisty about everything. They

(32:35):
didn't want to hear about somebody who wasn't going to
pay his taxes, especially on a philosophic basis. Oh, he
says in here, he writes, I heartily accept the motto
that government is best which governs least. He doesn't give

(32:55):
the attribution. I think Jefferson carved that over his bathroom mirror,
Thoraugh writes, and I should like to see it acted
up to more rapidly and systematically carried out. It finally
amounts to this, which I also believe, that government is

(33:17):
best which governs, not at all, well, that's just for openers.
And the essay on Civil disobedies, which wasn't heard in
the nineteenth century. It was so radical that it was
not heard. The first people that began to hear those

(33:38):
people like h. Salt in England, who then influenced people
like Mahatma Gandhi. But it wasn't really digested even by Gandhi.
The first person to really understand what Thurreau was writing
was Martin Luther King Junior, and he used to pass

(34:01):
around the Southern Christian leadership used to pass around little
xeroxes of portions the essay and civil disobedience, especially for
those who are learning to take the clubs, which it's
very hard to do. It's hard to stand there and
take punishment, and you have to understand that there's a

(34:23):
moral issue at state, and that one's non response is
spiritualizing the process, making sacred the process. And Thau's writing
here becomes exceedingly powerful when understood in that regard. Also

(34:45):
collected with the Essay and Civil Disobedience. Incidentally, here was
his wonderful little essay Paradise to be regained, To be regained,
he writes fellow men I promise to show the means
of creating a paradise within ten years where everything desirable
for human life may be had by every man in superabundance,

(35:09):
without labor and without pay. Now this begins to sound
very much like the French utopianists, Charles Foyer and so forth.
Simon Crudon, this is the kind of language that cracked

(35:29):
Europe open in eighteen forty eight. It's interesting that Thereau
writes these essays in the United States at about the
time that these ideas are also being acted out in Europe,
especially in France, and the revolutionary year of eighteen forty

(35:51):
eight ties in very very closely and very neatly with
a lot of Threau's writings. In fact, one has to
read very carefully and you run across the name of
most of the French utopian writers. Foyer said that there
need to be human communities consciously selected a side, that

(36:15):
there were so many types of human beings and you
need two people of each type. I think the issue
finally came down to Southeast Pantasocracy Colorages writings, the idea
that we need to have experimental communities of a completely clear,
pure cross section of humanity to see what man looks

(36:38):
like together what mankind looks like, and that for this
you need the integrity of individuals. All of this began
to work at this time in the eighteen forties, and
Threau is about the only individual in this country who
seems to speak up to this. There are also essays

(36:59):
like Herald of Freedom, and for Threau, the middle eighteen
forties becomes a time of consolidation. The writing of a
Week on the Concord in Merrimack Rivers, the writing of Walden,
the building of the cabin, the identifying of himself as

(37:20):
a spiritual naturalist whose messages to reawaken those affinities with
the cosmos which man has somehow long. And it's curious
to notice the surreal displacement here because he's writing this

(37:42):
only twenty years after Jefferson has died. But there's almost
no conscious cognition that all this was planned for, that
all of this was made possible because of fifty years
of incredible revolution and turmoil making possible these insights. In fact,

(38:08):
in Thereau's journal we read quite interesting walking by Night again,
eighteen fifty one. Again, this is from August the twelfth,
one thirty am, and he writes, sitting on the sleepers

(38:39):
of Hubbard's Ridge, which is being repaired. Now three o'clock,
am I hear a cop crow? How admirably adapted to
the dawn? Is that sound, as if made by the
first rays of light rending the darkness. The creaking of
the sun's axle heard already over the eastern hills. Though

(39:02):
man's life is trivial and hand selled, nature is holy
and heroic, with what infinite faith and promise and moderation
begins each new day. It is only a little after
three o'clock, and already there is evidence of mourning in
the sky. He rejoices when the moon comes forth from

(39:25):
the squadrons of the clouds unscathed, and there are no
more obstructions in her path. And the cricket also seems
to express joy in his song. It does concern men
who are asleep in their beds, But it is very
important to the traveler whether the moon shines bright and unobstructed,

(39:47):
or is obscured by clouds. It is not easy to
realize that serene joy of all the earth when the
moon commences to shine unobstructedly, unless you have often been
the traveler by night the traveler represents as it were,

(40:12):
the wind and rustles the leaves, or rustles the water,
increasing the coolness of the night. At such an hour,
a solitary horse in his pasture was scared by the
sudden sight of me, an apparition to him, standing still

(40:33):
in the moonlight, and moving about, inspecting with alarm. But
I spoke, and he heard the sound of my voice,
and at once stood reassured, and expressed his pleasure by
wagging his stump of a tail, though still half a
dozen rods off. How wholesome the taste of huckleberries, when

(40:55):
now by moonlight I feel for them amid the bushes.
The first signs of morning attract the traveler's attention, and
he cannot help rejoicing. And the moon begins gradually to
fade from his recollection. The wind rises and rustles the trees.

(41:15):
The sand is cool on the surface, but warm two
or three inches beneath, and the rocks are quite warm
to the hand, so that he sits on them or
leans against them for warmth, though indeed it is not
cold elsewhere. As I walk along the Ferrishaven Hill, I
see a ripple on the river. And now the moon

(41:38):
is gone behind a huge black mass of clouds. I
realize I may not see her again in her glory
this night. That, perchance, ere she rises from this obscurity,
the sun will have risen, and she will appear, but
as a cloud herself and sink unnoticed in the west.

(42:00):
As yet, no sounds of awakening men, only the more
frequent crowing of cocks still standing on their purchase in
the barns, And so Threau glides fantasmally like some hermetic
messenger of a new kind of day. Man is a
natural spirit moving fantasmally in industrial civilization, beginning to record

(42:28):
the observations of people who haven't even yet been born,
generation that will find in Thorough a great granddaddy, someone
whom they can claim to be part of their family.
I'm going to put into the record a page from
Civil Disobedience. Of course, you can now find it for

(42:54):
yourselves and read the whole thing. If the tax gatherer
or any other public officer asks me, as one is done,
but what shall I do? My answer is, if you
really wish to do anything, resign your office. When the
subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his office,

(43:20):
then the revolution is accomplished. Both sides have to do it.
We have to say that this relation will no longer obtain,
and if we withdraw our consent on both sides of it,

(43:40):
the relation ceases. Was it real in that case it
was unreal? Was it necessary? It was unnecessary? The mind
that sought is real and is necessary was diluted. This,

(44:01):
of course, is basic Buddhism. Emerson used to call him
a uh Spartan Buddhist. He went to uh to London,
and he was gonna be gone for about a year,
and so he made arrangements to have Thorreau take over.

(44:25):
His family trusted the man so implicitly did three children
under eight at that time, and Threau tended everything, kept
up the garden which produced food in those days, kept
up the household, took care of the family. And when
the youngest one, three years old, said are you my

(44:47):
new daddy, kay Thorough wrote to Emerson said I think
you better come home. When he came back from Walden
with the manuscript of A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers, he went through the terrible process of trying

(45:10):
to find a publisher, which was then ever as it
has been it's hard to find an honest publisher. I've
never published anything for twenty years because I can't find
an honest publisher. A thorough finally settled with a company
that would produce a thousand copies of the Week, and

(45:36):
they would be paid back through the proceeds of the sale,
and so it came out. Seventy five copies were sent
out to reviewers of all kinds that received some notice,
but it didn't sell, and so it took a throw
four years to work off the debt, and finally when

(45:59):
he had paid it off, he received a wagon load
of seven hundred and six copies of his book. He
recorded in this Jolie said, I have a library now
of nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred I've written myself.
Years later, some man recalled as a young boy being

(46:23):
sent as a messenger over to the Thoreau household, and
they'd heard about this library of one volume. So when
the door was opened and there was Thereau as a
young boy, this man said he kept looking around. Thereau
to look up the stairs and see if he could
get sight of this famous library of one book, many

(46:44):
many times, a whole wall of just one book. I
don't think it was until eighteen sixty eight that the
edition was finally sold out, long after Thorau was gone. Incidentally,
when it was finally printed in a corrected edition in

(47:07):
eighteen sixty eight, it's been in print now for a
hundred and twenty years and has sold adequately every year
since then. This is a classic literature. This is a
literature for the ages. This is a kind of a
person who is making a new scene, a new scene,
a different genre, something I hadn't been seen before. But

(47:30):
we notice after Walden Thorro's emphasis begins to change, he
becomes more and more exacting, He becomes more and more scientific,
sometimes to his own chagrin. He says, what am I doing?
I am not happy until I know the Latin scientific

(47:51):
name of a grass. And when I hear the scientific name,
I suddenly feel akin to it. He is in the
hermetic tradition, where science and mysticism are the same process.
This is what makes it hermetic. What makes it hermetic

(48:14):
is that it comes from a standpoint of unity rather
than a standpoint of multiplicity. It is not a mental structure.
It is a spiritual flow. And it's hermetic because it
is sealed. It's not sealed against something or against anything else.
It is sealed with the Holy Seal of Unity. Has

(48:38):
no moving parts. When it moves, all moves as one.
Nature for thorough is a hermetic horizon wherein consciousness occurs
rather selflessly, because there is no differentiation, particularly to recommend structure.

(49:09):
One of the lost journals from eighteen forty forty one
was found in Our Time Not too long Ago, published
in nineteen fifty eight by Perry Miller. He gave it
the title Consciousness in Concord. Here's an entry interesting for

(49:31):
the tone, Saturday, October third, eighteen forty No man has
imagined what private discourse his members have with surrounding nature,
or how much the tenor of that intercourse affects his
own health and sickness. While the head goes stargazing, the

(49:53):
legs are not necessarily astronomers too, but are acquiring an
independent experience in strata of nature. How much do they
feel when they do not which they do not impart?
How much rumor dies between the knees and the ears.
Surely instinct uses this experience of the dumb members. I

(50:18):
am no more a free man of my own members
than of universal nature. After all, the body takes care
of itself. It saves itself from a fall. It eats, drinks, sleeps, perspires, digests,
drows dies, And the best economy is to let it
alone in all these, Why need I to travel to

(50:42):
seek a sight and consult the points of the compass.
My eyes are south windows, and out of them I
command a southern prospect. Now, when man is unified, wherever
he looks, that's the coordinate. Whatever he is, that is
the state of the universe. That the edge, the palpable

(51:05):
threshold of consciousness is the physical world. And if man
is unified, all nature sings to him is one song.
And so he writes, But pray, what has seem to
do with the soul? That she must always sit at
a window? For I find myself always in the rear

(51:28):
of my eye. However I look, my looking is me.
However I compose as I see, That composition is myself
consciousness in concord, Notice how the contrast. Thirteen years later,

(51:52):
the same journalists, the journals of Thorough run to twenty volumes. Volumes. Incidentally,
this experiment of Thureau will become picked up by Walt
Whitman and Whitman will work with it, not in terms

(52:16):
of landscape, but in terms of people. Leaves of grass
is a visionary unity in terms of people humanity, Threau
in terms of nature. And it won't be until our
time and a great American poet will put it all
together and take people in nature as an integral And

(52:38):
of course, because we live in such a degenerate age
with no taste at all, that the poet is almost unknown.
His name is Theodore Rethke, and in the library of
the University of Washington there are twelve feet of Rathke's
notebooks at every instant for years and years and years

(52:58):
and end integrating. And he wrote his poems out of
these notebooks, sometimes taking images from dozens of separate years
and putting them together and drawing universal poems out of
a substratum of a life flow which was chronicled indefinitely
in detail in terms of both landscape and personage. Sometime

(53:24):
in the twenty first century, Why there'll be a poetry again,
and Reffie will be high on the list. Roe Thhke.
It was his sister that taught me to write when
I was twelve and fourteen years old. Here is Thorou
now eighteen fifty three, thirteen years later from the Consciousness

(53:48):
and Concord Journal, Evening draws on, While I am gathering
bundles of Pennyroyal on the further connotum height, it's a
hill hillock. I find it amid the stubble, mixed with
blue curls, and as fast as I get my hands full,

(54:09):
tie it into a fragrant bundle. Evening draws on smoothing
the waters and lengthening the shadows. Now half an hour
or more before sundown. What constitutes the charm of this
hour of the day? Is it the condensing dews of
the air just beginning, or the grateful increase of shadows

(54:34):
in the landscape. This is August. Some fiat has gone
forth and stilled the repels of the lake. Each sound
at each sight has acquired inappable beauty, how agreeable when
the sun shines at this angle. To stand on one
side and look down on flourishing sprout lands or forests

(54:59):
where the shade is mingled in greater proportion than before
With the light, broad shallow lakes of shadow stretch over
the lower portions. At the top of the woods. A
thousand little cavities are filling with coolness. Hills and the
least inequalities in the ground begin to cast an obvious shadow.

(55:23):
The shadow of an elm stretches cright across the meadow.
I see pigeons and numbers fly up from the stubble.
I hear some young bluebirds plaintive warble near me, and
some young hawks utter a pulsing screen from time to
try and across the pond, to whom life is yet
so novel, far over the pond and woods. I also

(55:47):
hear a farmer calling loudly to his cows in the
still air. What shall we name this season? This very
late afternoon or very early evening, This severe and placid
season of the day, most favorable for reflection, after the

(56:10):
insufferable heats and bustles of the day are over, and
before the dampness and twilight of evening, the serene hour,
the muses hour, the season of reflection. It is commonly
desecrated by being made tea time. It begins, perhaps with
the very earliest condensation of moisture in the air, when

(56:35):
the shadows of hills are first observed, and the breeze
begins to go down, and birds begin again to sing
the pensive season. It is earlier than the chaste eve
of the poet. Bats have not come forth. It is
not twilight. There is no dew yet on the grass,
and still less any early star in the heavens. It

(56:58):
is the turning point between afternoon and evening. The few
sounds now heard far or nearer, are delicious. It is
not more dusky and obscurer, but clearer than before. The
clearing of the air by condensation of mists more than
balances the increase of shadows. Chaste eve is merely preparing

(57:23):
to draw over all, it is a season somewhat earlier,
that is than that celebrated by poets. There is not
such a sense of lateness in approaching night as they describe.
The poet arouses himself and collects his thoughts. He postpones

(57:45):
tea indefinitely thought, now takes her siesta. Each sound is
a broad and deep relief of silence, as a mature consciousness.

(58:09):
Thereau's journal grew constantly as he was working on it,
But he was attempting at this time to bring books
into being, to give them a shape. He began to
take journeys. He took a journey to Canada. He went

(58:32):
by rail, went to Montreal, went to Quebec. Finally would
walk as far down the Saint Lawrence of Saint Anne's.
He was appalled by the presence of armed and uniformed
troops in the streets of the Canadian cities. How unlike America,

(58:56):
how unlike the New England, where the civilian held sway,
the citizen was the population. There was a definite military presence,
and they were so used to walking across land. And
he would come across fences constantly. And when evening came.

(59:20):
In New England, you could knock at anyone's door and
they would rent you a sleeping space for the knife
in the house of the barn. It was the open
courtesy of a free land. And in Canada, when they
knocked to find a place for the evening, they were
told to go away their robbers. They're under suspicion. He said,

(59:42):
this is the underside of the military presence. The militarization
produces this skittishness. And finally he would lay the blame
for it all at the door of the church. He says,
the church, with the false religion, has led man astray
from himself. And when A Yankee in Canada was finally

(01:00:08):
put into magazine serial form, the magazine editors began to
delete all the toothed passages and Thorough withdrew it from publication.
Was half published, and he said no more. And it
was never published again in his lifetime. And people say, well,

(01:00:29):
it's such a boring, boring work. It really is a minor.
There's nothing boring that comes forth from an awakened consciousness.
It is he who is the guiding star, who points
to our presence, not his alone, our presence. And this

(01:00:51):
is what makes Thorough valuable, valuable to us. He constellates
the tremendous energy feel that was engendered consciously by Franklin
and Jefferson and brings it home to some human heart,
someone you could talk to. He would begin taking travels

(01:01:17):
then in various spots, and again and again he would
notice the contrast between the life vision that he was
enjoying daily momentarily and the tremendous sense of confusion rising
in society within the cities, within his other population. He

(01:01:39):
went with his friend ellery Channing to see the ocean.
He wanted to see the ocean, experience the ocean, so
they went to Cape Cod. And he went back to
Cape Cod some ten or eleven months later by himself,
because had gone there in between, and brought back some

(01:02:03):
berries he hadn't seen. And there was upset with himself
because he had not paid attention, he had not done
his work, he had not recorded the fine detail of
reality properly, and so he sent himself back, go back
to Cape God, go back and see that. He went alone.
And he came back to the lighthouse where he had stayed,

(01:02:23):
and the keeper said, you know, the soldiers men and
the police were looking for you. There'd been a robbery
in Providence, and I thought that you had done it,
you and your friend. Why else would people go to
all the trouble to walk along the Cape CODs stretch
of beach, out of sight of other people. You were

(01:02:45):
looking for a way to get off Cape Cod and
get away with the stolen goods. Already of the eighteen
fifties the sense of corruption, of suspicion was coming in.
Where is it coming from. It's coming obviously from some
kind of militarization of life, which is not yet visible

(01:03:07):
in concord, but must be there in the air. And
of course as soon as he looked at the papers.
The Mexican War was proof enough, of course, Oh yes,
throw so sensitive to events that when the John Brown

(01:03:30):
the events occurred, he became physically ill, almost into a coma.
He could not stand the fact that man on this
vergein this threshold of being real, for the first time
in three thousand years to himself, was going to corrupt
it all over again with the delusions that always smear

(01:03:52):
and always blur not only the real, but the sense
of the individual who is the threshold of the real.
This became a real problem for him, and so he
began returning, at least once more to various places that

(01:04:12):
he would visit. And so he fell into a pattern
of visiting a place, taking notes on the way, bringing
them back, writing out his memories and his imaginations, then
several months or a year or so later, going back
to the same place and reconnoitering and comparing what has
he seen. He did this when he went to Maine

(01:04:35):
the Main Woods, as a record of his desire to
go and climb Mount Catan, the highest point in Maine,
which at that time was beyond the edge of civilization.
One had to go some eighty miles in from the coast,
and then one went by canoe another fifteen or twenty miles,

(01:04:56):
and then one hike from there. For Threau was a
tremendous realization that the only people that still lived there
were the Indians. There was still alive, still there, and
we got and you can read for it in the
main woods. When he got to the top, the talk
was not a point, but was a plateau land, and

(01:05:20):
it was all shrouded in clouds, and there was nothing
but glistening wet boulders and rocks, and the clouds and
Threau walking in them, and these intuitions of man being
caught in this nightmare all over again, of the faults,
the demi urgic world of delusion. And he records how

(01:05:44):
he was glad to come down off the mountaintop. There
was something there inside that he was not ready to
make conscious for himself. It was before his time. He
wasn't ready to face that's scale of disappointment. For weeks afterwards,

(01:06:06):
thorough extremely depressed, one finds a kind of almost irritability.
He had his journal against everyone. He had glimpsed something
which was there in nature, which we call evil, which

(01:06:26):
still circulates for man, and that it was not going
to be easy. It is difficult because the path to
the top of the mountain leads to this kind of
morales where you need an inner coordination, because the external
coordinates do not work. The textbooks are no good, the

(01:06:52):
systems of orientation don't work, and if one is not
real and free from within, then you are lost. Thorough
in writing, the main Woods, in writing, Keith cod writing,
Walden writing a Week, The Concord, and Merrimac gave a

(01:07:14):
shape to limited excursions, trips, travelers books, naturalist books, which,
when you read them as naturalist books, dissolve back into
a portrait of some consciousness seeking to objectify itself. Redgate

(01:07:38):
writes in one of his notebooks, to love the object
is to love life. Life requires that it being manifest,
requires that it be there. The urge to materialize, the
urge to matter as a natural direction, a natural vectoring

(01:07:58):
of life energies it of itself comes into being, and
the objectification is not an illusion or delusion, but is
a natural occurrence. And forth through. These works were excursions

(01:08:23):
into the materializing, but the work that was not published
except in excerpts throughout his lifetime were the journals, and
that was where he was recording in the largest possible scale,
that flow that he was beginning to recognize as himself.

(01:08:46):
He entered into a wonderful correspondence with a man named
Harrison Otis Gray. Blake saved a number of his letters,
some forty nine of his letters, and they were published

(01:09:06):
later on in his life, and we see the philosophic
threau coming out in those, but hear from the journals
eighteen fifty one, Christmas Day, eighteen fifty one. It would

(01:09:27):
be a truer discipline for the writer to take the
least film of thought that floats in the twilight sky
of his mind for his theme, about which he has
scarcely one idea. That would be teaching his ideas how
to shoot faintest intimations, shadowiest subjects. Make a lecture on

(01:09:51):
this by assiduousy, assiduosity and attention, get perchance to views
of the same increase a little, the stock of knowledge
clear a new field, instead of manuring the old, instead
of making a lecture out of obvious truths hackneyed to

(01:10:12):
the minds of all thinkers. We seek, too soon to
ally the perceptions of the mind, to the experience of
the hand, to prove our gossamer truths practical, to show
their connection with our everyday life, better, show their distance
from our everyday life, to regulate them to the cider

(01:10:35):
mill and the banking institution. Ah, give me pure mind,
purer thought. Let me not be in haste to detect
the universal law. Let me see more clearly a particular
instance of it. Much finer themes I aspire to, which

(01:10:56):
will yield no satisfaction to the vulgar mind, Not one
sentence for them. Perchance it may convince such that there
are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamed
of in their philosophy. Dissolve one nebula, and so destroy
the nebular system and hypotheses. Do not seek expressions, seek

(01:11:19):
thoughts to be expressed. By perseverance, you get two views
of the same rare truth, that way of viewing things
you know of least insisted on by you, however least remembered.
Take that view, adhere to that insist in that see
all things from that point of view. Will you let

(01:11:41):
these intimations go untended to and watch the bell or
door or knocker that is your text? Do not speak
four other men speak for yourself. They show you, as
in a vision, the kingdoms of the world and all
the worlds, But you prefer to look in upon a

(01:12:03):
puppet show. Though you only speak to one kindred mind
in all time, Though you speak not to one, but
only utter aloud, that which you the more completely realize
and live in the idea which contains the reason of
your life. That you may build yourself up to the

(01:12:23):
height of your conceptions, that you may remember your creator
in the days of your youth and justify his ways
to man, that the end of life may not be
its amusement. Speak through your though your thought presupposes the
non existence of your hearers. Speak thoughts that transcend life

(01:12:46):
and death. What through mortal ears are not fitted to
hear absolute truth. Thoughts that blot out the earth are
best conceived in the night, when dark this has already
blotted it out from sight. We then look for inspiration,

(01:13:08):
and so thereau At the same time as Melville writing,
Moby Dick says, Americans have come to a specialty. They're
going to be at home in the unknown. They're going
to be free to be themselves without any identity they

(01:13:28):
had cut loose from the shores of recognition and had
gone out on the oceans of presentation. Well, we'll see more,
because Thereau lived another twelve years and developed an incredible capacity,
and we'll see next week how he manages to waken

(01:13:51):
in Walt Whitman's mind in New York, a glimmer of possibility,