The Journals of Henry David Thoreau (Part 2)

In this lecture about Henry David Thoreau - 4 of 4 - Roger Weir discusses the life and legacy of Thoreau.
 
Episode transcript - https://sharedpresencefoundation.org/transcripts/387
 
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Image credit: detail from Pastoral Landscape (1861) by Asher Brown Durand.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The day is March twenty eighth, nineteen eighty five. This
is the last lecture in a series of lectures by
Roger Ware on her Medical America. Tonight's lecture is on
throw continued the Journals, Part two, The Stage of America.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
The difference between Emerson and Thorough. Emerson organized his expression
and Thorough organized his being. It's a different emphasis. It's
difficult to appreciate Thorough. It's difficult to appreciate the tremendous

(00:42):
distinctive difference of the United States. By the eighteen fifties,
the gap between Europe and the United States that was
initiated in the individual person of Benjamin Franklin, that had

(01:03):
become almost an expressive doctrine by the time of Jefferson,
now reaches epic proportions. By the eighteen fifties, the United
States was a very peculiar place in which to have
human being, and in fact, the perception of this whole

(01:29):
era was unavailable for critical analysis until the late nineteen twenties.
The first individual to understand that something special had happened
was a man named parent Vernon Parrington, and he wrote

(01:52):
a series of books that collected together make a nearly
one thousand page volume, Mainsprings of the American Tradition came
out in nineteen twenty seven, and Perrington is the first
writer to understand that Thureau was not an appendage of Emerson.

(02:19):
But Perrington's insight was lost on the generation of the twenties,
and it wasn't until nineteen forty one that a man
named f ol Matheson wrote a book called American Renaissance,
in which he threw out onto his desk and said,

(02:40):
here we have five or six is the greatest books
ever written in the English language. And they all came
within a five year period in the northeastern cornet of
the United States. Something must have happened there that Moby
Deck and Leaves of Grass, and Representatives, and Walden and

(03:04):
Scarlett Letter, a number of these great works all occurred
at the same time. And when he looked closer, all
these men knew each other. And so he devoted this
is incredible study, which is still in print, American Renaissance,
to examining was this a happenstance or was this in

(03:29):
fact some phase that had matured. Now Perrington and Matheson
are literary ment. They in fact give us the insight
that American literature by eighteen fifty had achieved something very difficult.

(03:54):
It had achieved a very distinctive tone and conscious expression
that did not mirror conditions so much as structure them.
Thureau in this group is the most inscrutable. He's the
most difficult to come by. Even with Melville's reluctance to

(04:22):
be clearer even to himself, he is still more easily
understood stood than Thorau. And we have to review some
of the facts of Threau's life up to the point
of the publishing of Walden in eighteen fifty four in

(04:42):
order to understand this. If you recall Thereau tried to
be a teacher and was unable to tell the line
to discipline his students to apply the rod, and had

(05:07):
resigned his teaching job, one of the first that he had.
He also took up lecturing, much like I am doing here,
and was the head of the Concord Lyceum for some
time that also he resigned. He attempted to make his

(05:33):
way by writing articles, by putting them together to publish books,
and we saw with cape Cod that when the first
half of it was published, he withdrew the rest of it.
From publication from Putnam's magazine. Thoreau was constantly raining himself

(05:53):
in is this a bad habit or is this indicative
of a master strategy which was in danger of being
impaired by the directions that were being developed. Thoreau's observation

(06:18):
in New York City, when will man ever learn? The
value of a man? Is very close to Emerson's great
ideal that the individual is a focus of infinite capacities,

(06:39):
That the individual is not a defined area, limited and
to be colored in by various experiences and contexts, but
that the individual is a focus at prism of infinite capacities,

(07:00):
That the value of an individual human being is transcendental
to the physical occurrence of that human being. That, however
much we may respect, the capacity of the mind to
overflow those physical limitations, those temporal limitations, those geographical limitations,

(07:27):
that even the dimensions of the mind are paltry compared
to that of the human spirit. That the human spirit
cannot be a genie in a bottle. You can't cork it,
you cannot bottle it. The human spirit manifests, but it

(07:52):
manifests in a dynamic way. It must pass through this
for its efficacy in this world, but under no circumstances
does it belong any specific place, any specific time. It

(08:14):
is this what we would call indefiniteness of time and space,
that gives it its great value, its peculiar ability to
have whatever value it will choose for itself, so that

(08:35):
the individual becomes, in Emerson's eyes, in Thorough's life, a
sacrisanct aldar that must be protected against profanity. Man is sacred,

(08:55):
his being, his self is sacred, but he needs to
have an order where he cannot be satisfied with the
form of geography, or of physicality, or of race, or
sex or religion. None of those lines of approach are

(09:22):
capable of sticking, of defining man. But he needs an order,
and his order, as a sacred focus, must come from
a holy source. That holy source, for Threaux was what

(09:44):
we call nature. We say it rather glibly, he would
say it rather specifically. When we find Threau late in
his life, knowing he is go going to die ill,
he still records in his journals towards the end, the

(10:07):
effects of a storm upon gravel, the minute changes that
take place in their exact sequence, the gravel in face
of the approach the arrival and the aftermath of a storm.

(10:29):
There is no zen master that can be more ascetic
than this particular approach. Is there humanity here in this?
If so, what scale? What dimension of humanity are we
speaking of? Only that infinitude? So that holy order that

(10:57):
man's sacred nature receives from nature has a very peculiar
form to it. And in appreciating this, it is almost
impossible without a look at a large strategic flow of

(11:19):
human nature. If we put, for instance, on a door
nature as it began, and we move counter clockwise. Nature

(11:42):
presents us, in our very first experience with it consciously
with a capacity to slight.

Speaker 3 (11:51):
Out from nature elements which we recombine in.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
A ritual disposition. This disposition tends to develop an expressive capacity,
which we might label myth, the ability to say what

(12:17):
we are selecting and why, how we have putd together
and why? And by this time nature has become for
man a language, and language has its natural capacity. The

(12:38):
motion of language is to internalize, and this produces the
capacity for symbols. The maturization of language through meaning. The

(12:58):
tendency of the inner integration is to relate back to nature,
to come back. But this does not happen. Instead, the
inner symbolism seeks to re express itself in a very

(13:19):
mysterious process. It becomes transcendental. It changes its form from
symbolization what we would more probly horn.

Speaker 4 (13:32):
Imagine as an expression of imperiorized meaning of language, part
down to the basics and expressed out.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
Again into the world. And this has its career of
seeking an expressive form. We recognize its art, and art deepens.

Speaker 5 (14:00):
Of expensive form to religion, and this comes.

Speaker 3 (14:15):
Back and nature then becomes change and becomes a cosmic.
It is at this point that Thoroughle.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
Is consciously understanding that some great cycle has been completed,
that it is no longer a question of progress, as
in further progress, that this motion has not only brought
man back to nature consciously, so that nature is no

(14:52):
longer an unconscious context within which he must struggle for survival,
but is the very defining order by which his infinite
focus is able to function. And this is different. But

(15:16):
another dimension opens up at this stage, at this phase,
put in this graphic form.

Speaker 6 (15:25):
It becomes easy to see that there is an avenue
that is open that is not in the form.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
For a lot of a better word, we call this
the missing and the mystic dimension is free always to
come and go, and not only come and go, but

(15:59):
makes this whole form of civilized, the civilized psyche permeable
to transmutation, the changes that happened from nature to ritual
to myth, et cetera, and set All these transformation knows
are possible because of the mystic force articulates this for man,

(16:27):
and man's very mobility, being able to transmute himself from
phase to phase towards wholeness, is all greased and carried
on by the mystic capacity, which at last becomes visible
in its own right. When man attains the ability to

(16:49):
see nature as a cosmos, it is then that he
stops his transforming for himself and delivers himself to the openness.
One almost is tempted to objectify and say to the other,

(17:12):
but it's an openness and not another. This is where
Thureau is. He is dressing himself as a defined, articulate,
mobile consciousness to that mystic openness which begins with nature

(17:34):
and which finds its wholesomeness in cosmos, in a cosmic naturalness.
With this in mind, all of Thorough's work becomes intelligible, understandable.
In fact, Thorough becomes for us a harbinger of what

(18:00):
in the late twentieth century we are now almost forced
to understand and accept. I think. In this biography of
Thureau by Walter Harding, who's the head of the Thorough

(18:21):
Thorough Society in Concord, it's interesting some of Thorough's experiments.
He was constantly collecting items and people. After they got
over the idea that Thureau was uh an odd ball

(18:45):
around the town, they began to accept him. They they
brought him things the wing of a falcon, little nests
and eggs, and he lived up in his attic room
and he would carry these collections up there, and later
on they went to a natural history museum in Massachusetts.

(19:07):
He also experimented at one point in his life with
making a wine from tree sap, which is very strange
because the road did not drink. He almost never drank water.
He was a camel like being that he would have
to think and tell you the last time he took
a drink of water. Very peculiar. But he experimented because

(19:35):
he realized that the trees were a go between, like
man is a go between the trees are the indication
of the scale of nature. And it is through the
forest that man has an affinity with mountains, and is

(19:55):
through the mountains that the earth has its affinity with sky.
And so a man, by this translating staging, is able
to comprehend the vastness of the whole. And so trees,
for Thoraw were very interesting. Each tree was an individual,

(20:20):
and he kept minute records. One of the reasons he
stayed in one little area for most of his life
was to keep in daily personal contact with all of
the living entities in that dimension. In that area, he
knew every tree individually. He knew all the rocks, all

(20:42):
the streams, he knew all the wildlife, and so making wine,
distilling the tree sat and making a kind of a meat.
It was out of birch, if you can imagine birch,
which was horrible when you drank it first, and after

(21:04):
it set for a couple months it was sippable, and
towards the end it didn't last long enough because of
the neighbors coming in that he could age it all
the way. He was quite interested in this fact. Fourth,
through this capacity to address nature as a cosmos, kept

(21:31):
him in the one still spot that he could find.
He realized that after he had built the Walden cabin,
that it was no longer a sense of finding a location.
There was no retreat hut that was necessary. Just like
one asked Gandhi was asked, why don't you go and

(21:54):
meditate in a cave if you want to be a
yoga and he said, I carry my cave within me.
Thoreau carried his retreat, his cabin within himself. After the
two years, two months and two days Walden, he had
become capable of re establishing himself so that the earth itself,

(22:23):
the sky itself in his geographic area had become a temple.
This is why he refused to go into a church.
He privately confided to friends that it was blasphemous to
think that man could carve out some space other than
the whole of nature to worship the divine in. That

(22:47):
is the whole of nature, and this is the cosmos.
That is the proper temple for man to worship the
divine in, And that his worshiping the divine takes a
very peculiar form. It has no liturgy, There is no litany.

(23:07):
There is the ongoing accurate apperception of the continuity of
the whole of how every element in each element flows
continuously from one to another, with this mystic penetration of
the mobility of transformation consonant with the scale of a

(23:35):
single unity, and that man abides there in that condition,
his at one moment with nature is hermetically sealed, sealed
tighter than a vacuum seal could seal. It is sealed

(23:58):
in the recognition of unity. That the seeming multiplicity comes
from a profane view of man, because he has let
his mind, his preoccupation with his life, his desire for things,

(24:21):
his greed for capacities, to obscure and interrupt the recognition
of the unity of all. And it was this profaning
that bothered Thoroaugh tremendously. When he would take trips, Thoreau

(24:45):
would bring himself to the kinds of conditions that I
wished to give you here from the journal, And I
think I think this will do here. I'm going to

(25:06):
give you a selection of about three paragraphs here where
Thereau gives us the blending of man consciously into the
unity of nature by natural process, not by some arcane
alchemical transformation, but by the most natural of all transformations,

(25:34):
and this is how it reads. This is from January first,
New Year's Day, eighteen fifty three. It was a Saturday.
This morning we have something between ice and frost, and
the trees. The whole earth as last night, but much

(25:56):
more is encased in ice, which on the plowed fields
makes a singular icy coat about a quarter of an
inch thick. About nine o'clock a m. I go to
Lee's via Hubbard's wood and hold in swamp and the
riverside for the middle is open everywhere without alluding to it,

(26:24):
without metaphor with acridness. Throw is talking mystically and yet
naturally at the same time, because he has a cosmic eye.
The stones and cow dung, and the walls too are
all cased in ice. On the north side, the latter

(26:49):
look like alam rocks. He's sang. The cow dung, with
the ice over it begins to look like alam monks.
This not frozen mist or frost, but frozen drizzle collected
around the slightest cores, gives prominence to the least withered
herbs and grasses. Where yesterday was a plain smooth field

(27:15):
appears now a teeming crop of fat, icy herbage. The
stems of the herbs on their north sides are enlarged
from ten to one hundred times. Everything points north, Everything
shows a direction, a seasonal direction, a magnetic direction. Everything

(27:42):
is correlated, and there allays being absorbed by this unity.
You'll see it. The addition is so universally on the
north side that a traveler could not lose the points
of compass to the end. You can't get lost in
the universe of one where you're going to get lost.

(28:10):
Though it should never be so dark, for every blade
of grass would serve to guide him. Remember whitman sprays
now leaves of grass. These straight stems of grasses stand
up like white batons or scepters, and make conspicuous foregrounds
of the landscape from six inches to three feet high.

(28:36):
Chatting thought that these fat, icy branches on the withered
grass and herbs had no nucleus, But looking closer, I
showed him the fine, black, wiry threads on which they
were impinged, which made him laugh with surprise. The very

(28:56):
cow dung is encrusted, and the clover and sorrow send
up a dull green gleam through their icy coat. Like
strange plants, the pebbles in the plowed land are seen
as through a transparent coating of gum. Some weeds bear
the ice in masses, some like the trumpet weed, and

(29:17):
tansy in balls. For each dried flower, what a crash
of jewels. As you walk, you see how easy it
is to slip into the mundane. And yet one could
read very advanced Mahaya doctrines like the jewel matrix of

(29:40):
Gampo Pond. You find the same description of the universe
as a field of jewel. Like nexties, the most careless walker,
who never dined to look at these humble weeds before,
cannot help observing them now. This is why the herbage

(30:01):
is left to stand dry in the fields all winter.
Upon a solid foundation of ice stand out pointing in
all directions between northwest and northeast, or within the limits
of ninety degrees. Little spicula or crystallized points half an
inch or more in length upon the dark glazed plowed ground,

(30:26):
where a mere wiry stem rises, its north side is
thickly clad with these snow white spears like some Indians
head dress, as if it had attacked all the frost.
I saw a pinos bush full of large berries by
the wall and Hubbard's field. Standing on the west side.
The contrast of the red berries with their white incrustation

(30:50):
or prolongation on the north was admirable, and skipping over
to here. But finer than all is the red oak,

(31:10):
its leaves encrusted like shields, a quarter of an inch thick,
and a thousand fine spicula like long serrations at right angles,
with their planes upon their edges. It has an indescribably
rich effect, with color of the leaf coming softened through
the ice, a delicate fawn color of many shades. Where

(31:34):
the plumes of the pitch pine are short and spreading
close upon the trunk, sometimes perfect cups or rays are formed.
Pitch pines present rough, massy grenadier plumes, with each a
darker spot or cavity in the end where you look in,

(31:57):
there are the buds. I listen to the booming of
the pond as if it were a reasonable creature. I
return at last in a rain and am coated with
a fine glaze like the fields. This is the essence

(32:24):
of thorough in the Journals, the capacity to effortlessly not
only describe the world of nature, but he describes the
cosmos where man and nature are unified and inseparable. Where
nature has reabsorbed man back to her cell, and in

(32:48):
reabsorbing man back to herself, his consciousness has been added
to nature, and all of it is alive and alert
and understand it. Threau used to amaze people. They would
be after him to take students through the woods, and

(33:09):
he would go through, and he would stop, and he
would start whistling little tunes and tell the children, this
is the tune of such and such a bird. Then
he would whistle another one, this is the tune of
another bird. And he would pick out all the individual
tunes of the birds in that section of the forest

(33:31):
that would be chirping, and the children, hearing each one individually,
would then begin to recognize that all these tunes were
going on at the same time, always had been going on.
They had never heard the tunes. They had always just
heard birds. They had always paid attention only to the
blur of the background. The birds is singing in the trees.

(33:54):
Now it was this kind of bird sings this kind
of song, and that kind of bird sings that kind
of song. The differentiateness of nature is consciousness. One does
not analyze to take a part, but one differentiates two

(34:16):
enrich It is this enrichment of nature by consciousness that
makes it a cosmos. And for Thureau, it is man's
responsibility to make sure that this continues to happen. And

(34:38):
the travail of modern man, for Thorough, is that he
is forgetting this responsibility, that it no longer even occurs
to him that he has a necessary place in nature.
That without this concombatant, nature begins to lose its consciousness,

(35:02):
it begins to lose its cosmic capacity. And when that happens,
the very foundations of reality begin to ebb and fade.
This irresponsibility with something that Thorough refused to let happen,

(35:27):
refuse to allow this to happen his writing. And then
we'll take a short break. Here is June June seventeenth,
which is a Saturday, eighteen fifty four, five am in

(35:49):
the morning. Remember Thorrow was up at all hours. He
surveyed the entire terrain in every hour of the twenty
four hour day over many years. We read a couple
weeks ago a passage were at three in the morning,
he was standing still for several hours on a rise

(36:12):
outside of Concord, surveying all the sleeping farms, and all
the sleeping animals being carrying consciousness and humanity to that
most unconscious hour of the night, to regenerate nature, to

(36:33):
bring its cosmic capacity back in to operation, for it
was in danger of losing it. In his journal on
June seventeenth, he writes, a cold fog these mornings. Those
who walk in grass are thoroughly wetted. Above mid leg,

(36:57):
all the earth is dripping wet. I'm surprised to feel
how warm the water is by contrast with the cold,
foggy air. The frogs seem glad to bury themselves in it.
The cobwebs are very thick this morning. Little napkins of
the fairies spread on the grass world altricular areas a

(37:23):
photogematon off dods with fine grassy threadlike leaves and stems,
somewhat flattish and small globular spikes, maybe sometime rinunculars may
be a day or more. A duck, probably wood duck,
which is breeding here from the hill. I am reminded

(37:46):
of more youthful mornings, seeing the dark forms of the
trees eastward in the low grounds, partly within and against
the shining white fog. The sun just rising over it. Now,
this is a very traditional image of meditation. This is
from Yupanashatic India. This is how the discipline was given

(38:14):
in ancient India. Just these kinds of images, the myst
rolling away eastward from them their tops, at last streaking
the mist and driving it into the vales. All beyond
them a submerged and unknown country, as if they grew
on the seashore. Why does the fog go off towards

(38:36):
the sun. This is a cause and is seen in
the east when it has disappeared from the west. It
surprises most people that this actually occurs, and is mysterious.
The waves of the foggy ocean divide and flow back.

(38:59):
For us israel lites of a day to march through.
I hear the half suppressed guttural sounds of a red
squirrel on a tree. A lengthy breaks out into a
sharp bark. Slavery has produced no sweet scented flower like
the water lily, For its flower must smell like itself.

(39:22):
It will produce a carrion blossom. Slavery will. This meditational
use of nature is not for self aggrandizement. It is

(39:44):
just the opposite flow. For this flow towards interiorizing, meaning
in symbolic vision, has a reversed flow leading back to nature.
And that's how cosmos is produced, by man giving his
expressive forms back if he stops anywhere along the way.

(40:12):
This is where the little stagnant pools breeds selfishness. It
is the on flowing back to a completion, a completion
which ends not with a completed circle, but with the
perception that a universal openness is essential to man's completed form,

(40:38):
that the mobility of his transformations requires this mystic openness,
and without it nothing will exist. He took his wonderful
friend Daniel Rickittson once out to the eastern part of

(41:04):
Massachusetts to Mount Monadnock, and they climbed it at four
o'clock in the morning to get up there before sunrise.
Recitson saying why are we having to get up here
at this time? Through I was saying, you'll see, you'll see.
And they got up to the top, and at the
top of Mount Monadnock when the sun came up, the

(41:28):
early morning shadow of the mountain when it first came
was spread all across the whole state of Massachusetts into
the distance, and as the sun came up, the shadow
came racing toward them, and it was a perceptible image

(41:49):
of the way in which reality begins to occur more
and more here where we are, and this ancient meditation
discipline occurred to thorough in a natural way. He didn't
have to go to India, he didn't have to go

(42:11):
to China, he didn't have to go to the Holy Land.
His point, I think was well taken, and perhaps after
the break we can fill in a few of the
little chinks still remain. I guess I should announce that
I'm lecturing also on Sunday here at Paris. It's not

(42:33):
in the program, but uh, this Sunday, since sis here
at Paris, in that auditorium right across the way, it
was chosen. I haven't had a chance to choose a
Sunday lecture for myself for some time. So I'm pitch
h pinch, hitting from the left side of the plate

(42:58):
from Mary, uh, Sister Mary sect and she chose the topic, uh,
Dante's Paradiso and a world peace. So I need to
give that lecture, which is hard. Have you ever chosen?

(43:20):
Most likely.

Speaker 6 (43:22):
Job, she remember one other occasion when you didn't.

Speaker 2 (43:28):
Share that your well that was on immortality is se
moron science. They haven't sold a single cassette of that lecture.
You know, they have to down there, They have to
sell twelve cassettes before they give me a single royalty.

Speaker 5 (43:46):
Prove that you have.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
The best selling lecture down there is UH the one
I did years ago, calling UH called King Arthur's Christmas.
And every Christmas it sells enough that I get enough
to get myself a dinner. Well, I can't complain. I

(44:17):
voluntarily gave up lucrative careers three times. So if I'm out,
it's because I didn't swing. In November of nineteen of

(44:39):
eighteen fifty six, Throw was in Brooklyn with his friend
UH Bronson all Kind, and he went to visit Walt Whitman.

(44:59):
And when they got there late in the evening, Walt
wasn't home, but his mother was, and his mother had
just baked some fresh bread, and so she feted the
two transcendentalists with her fresh bread and said, why don't
you come back tomorrow morning. I'm sure that must Son

(45:21):
will be home, and he was when they went back.
And this is UH Walter Harding's beginning description of UH.
The wonderful meeting of Walt Whitman and of Henry David.
In the morning, Alcott and Thorough returned to Myrtle Avenue,

(45:42):
accompanied by Missus Tyndale, and found Whitman awaiting them. He
led them up two narrow flights of stairs to his
bed chamber, which he shared with the feeble minded brother,
where they found the bed unmade, the chamber pot plainly visible,

(46:03):
books strewn on the mantelpiece, and unframed pictures of Hercules,
Bacchus and a satyr pin to the wall. What was
a New Yorker remember? Whitmen informed them of his bathing daily,
even in mid winter, of his riding on top of

(46:26):
an omnibus up and down Broadway from morning till night
beside the driver, and dining afterwards with the Whopsters, of
frequenting the opera in its season, of his editing the
New Orleans Crescent for a time, and of his living
to make his poems because nothing else really mattered. He

(46:54):
said that he devoted his mornings to reading and writing,
in his afternoons to walking to see Threaux was walking
in the woods and Whitman was walking in the city.
Thoreau got to know the plants, especially the trees, and

(47:16):
Whitman got to know people. When Alcott, looking at the
pictures on the wall, asked which now of the three
particularly is the new poet here, this Hercules, this Bacchus,

(47:37):
or this Satyr, Whitman begged him not to question too closely,
and Alcott inferred that he probably wished to take the
virtues of all three unreservedly. Whitman was very curious about
criticism of himself and his books. The Leaves of Grass

(48:02):
first edition had come out in eighteen fifty five, and
not only had Thureau gotten a copy right away, but
he had sent several copies of Leaves of Grass off
to friends. But Whitman was always curious about what other
people thought of him, not so much for fame or pride,

(48:24):
but because it was another aspect of human nature that
he wished to explore. He was as accurate as Thorough
in every detail, which is why some of the later
sections of Leaves of Grass are truly cosmic in human terms.

(48:48):
When they descended to the living room below to continue
their talk, Allcott tried his hand at starting a conversation
between Thorough and Whitman. Both acted reserved. Now you have
to imagine, here are these two cosmos minded individuals, and

(49:10):
they're used to looking upon rather static objects, and they're
seeing in each other these whole, whirling, mysterious rebuses of
the whole. It's like the famous story of the two
zen masters meeting, that it was like two open doors

(49:32):
facing each other. Nothing happened. But Alcott was the perfect
referee for this sort of thing. He uh recalled later
on in Alcott described it, it was like two beasts,

(49:54):
each wondering what the other would do, whether to snap
or run, each of them thinking of the other, well,
you're almost as great as I am. But after a
while they did fall into a pleasant talk. Thorough, thinking

(50:19):
he had noticed signs of an Oriental influence in leaves
of grass, ask Whitman if he were familiar with the
great books of the East, and Whitman coyly said, no,
tell me about them. A British shid gentleman, very fine gentleman,

(50:46):
named Thomas Chumley. You spell it Cholmondeley, and the Brits
pronounce it. Chumley had sent Thorough a huge box, a
pack full are forty four books of selected wisdom of India.
It had the translations of all the classics, the Laws

(51:10):
of Manu, the place of Kalidasa, the Piranhas, the bagavad Gita,
the rig Veda, the Upanishads, the Buddhist material, all of
it was there Thereau in his journal recounts how he
put them all out and rearranged them in rows in

(51:33):
different ways. And because he had heard via the posts
that they were coming, he had done what he usually
did with books. He had collected driftwood along the streams
outside of Concord and had fashioned the driftwood into beautiful
rustic bookshelves. And so he put them all finally into

(51:56):
this bookshelf, with their glistening spines out, and then he
went to sleep, and he said in the morning he
almost dared not look him. When he peeped out, he said,
he felt like a a triumph that there they were.
They were still there. It was all real. So Whitman

(52:17):
and Thureau talking about the wisdom of India, but not
talking about it as professors or students would talk about it,
but from an insider's point, no, I haven't heard about it,

(52:39):
Tell me about it. And the conversation didn't go any
further than that then, according to Bronson, Whitman defended his
controversial publication of Emerson's personal letter to him, greeting him

(53:03):
at the beginning of a great career. Thorough thought, in
his apologizing account of the matter, he had made the
printing of Emerson's letter seem a simple thing, and to
some extent throws the burden of it, if there is
any on the writer. Thorough told Whitman that he thought
the book something to be reckoned with, and then said,

(53:25):
there is much in you to which I cannot accommodate myself.
The defect may be mine, but the objections are there.
But he added quickly, Whitman, do you have any idea
that you are rather bigger and outside the average, may

(53:46):
perhaps have immense significance. And Whitman, of course just nodded,
said nothing. They talked then of masses of men, and
this was a problem. By eighteen fifty six it was
already visible as a problem. Masses of men, the mass

(54:10):
mind of man, not brought together in a form, a
purposeful form, but just aggregated together in the dumb millions. This,
of course, is not just a happenstance. That is to say,

(54:32):
masses of human beings, millions of human beings without any
particular development together still have all those capacities. But what
comes into expressiveness, as Thoreau was constantly pointing out, are
all of the dangerous, lowest common denominators. Man cannot help

(54:58):
but being an expressive And the symbol I put on
the board is the Navajo symbol for the journey of
the whole self, which I put in Western words before
at the beginning of election. It doesn't need words. The

(55:19):
expressive form says that the center is there, not because
it is made by any defining outside, but the center
is there of its own accord, and is expressive in
terms of its own accord. If man's reluctance to live

(55:44):
a cosmic presence interferes with that expression, then you get
something else. Then you change to get a kind of
years life structure. Man becomes ragged like a saw edge,

(56:12):
and from the outside needs the imposition of form to
round off his.

Speaker 3 (56:17):
Every and make himself amenable to sitting in with.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
Others, and they with others, and so mankind becomes an intermeshing,
geared structure, and there is no openness. There is no
chance for cosmos, there's no chance for individuality. And it

(56:45):
was this that Thorough I said, well, I think we
have a problem here. The problem, for Threau focused poignantly
on the question of slavery. The whole Thorough family, remember,

(57:07):
were all early members of the abolitionist movement in Concord, Massachusetts.
The Abolitionist meetings were held in Thureau's family's household. They
took up money for various traveling people. One of the
people they took money for was John Brown. And Thorough

(57:37):
records in his journals, and these are from the dover
two volume edition of the Journalists. He records in eighteen
fifty nine, perhaps the only time in his journal where

(57:58):
he finally first open and the sociological thorough comes through.
October nineteenth, eighteen fifty nine was when John Brown led
his famous Harper's Ferry raid. Their question was there the

(58:22):
slavery states are trying to enforce slavery on new Western areas,
the Missouri border. Ruffians are coming into Kansas to try
to force people to accept slavery and make Kansas a
slave state. But then it goes farther than that that
slavery is a disease. Slavery is the perfect gearing up

(58:49):
of individual man to purposes outside of his natural openness,
outside of his individuality, outside of his cosmic yes. And
after the terrible debacle of the Harper's Ferry on October nineteenth,

(59:11):
we find in October twenty first in his journal thorough
lashing out for the first time in his life. Lashing out.
I speak to the stupid and timid chattels of the north,
pretending to read history and their Bibles, desecrating every house

(59:34):
and every day they breathe in true like the clods
of the valley, they are incapable of preceding the light.
But I would fain arouse them by any stimulus to
an intelligent life throughout the land. They not of equal magnetimity,
talk of vengeance and insanity. Away with your broad and

(59:58):
flat churches and your tall and narrow churches. Take a
step forward and invent a new style of outhousers. Invent
assault that will save you and defend our nostrils. The
slave ship is on her way, crowded with its dying hundreds.
A small crew of slaveholders is smothering four millions under

(01:00:21):
the hatches. And yet the politician asserts that the only
proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained is
by the quiet disfusion of sentiments of humanity, without any outbreak.
And in the same breath they tell us that all
is quiet now at Harper's ferry. What is that that

(01:00:45):
I hear cast overboard the bodies of the dead who
had found deliverance. That is the way we are diffusing
humanity and all its sentiments with it. And he goes
on for many, many pages, and for the first time

(01:01:05):
we find October twenty first, and October twenty second, again
October twenty third, Thuau finally having his say, the cosmic
man finally having his say, And in referring to his movement,

(01:01:30):
it is, in my opinion, the greatest service a man
can render to God. I pity the poor in bondage
that have none to help them. That is why I
am here, not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge, or
vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and
the wrong, that they are as good as you and
as precious in the sight of God. I want you

(01:01:53):
to understand that I respect the rights of the poorest
and weakest of colored people oppressed by the slave system,
just as much as I do those of the most
wealthy and powerful, and he goes on to speak about

(01:02:14):
they are continually shocked by slavery, and have some right
to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder,
but no others such will be more shocked by his
life than by his death. Talking about John Brown, he says,
we we talk about a representative government, But what a

(01:02:38):
monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties
of the mind and the whole heart are not represented.
A semi human tiger or ox stalking over the earth
with its heart taken out and the top of its
brain shot away. And he goes on in this light,

(01:02:58):
and for page after age Thereau's journale begins to bring
out an incredible revulsion. And remember, now this is the
beginning of the Civil War. This is just the very beginning.
The John Brown affair was the was the FEUs that

(01:03:20):
started the inevitable movement of the Civil War. If we
take Threau's journal entries for October of eighteen fifty nine
and read them through, it takes no shift of emphasis

(01:03:42):
whatsoever to read Walt Whitman's drum taps. They flow just
as perfectly, almost in the same movement But whereas Threau
is having this tremendous revulsion of the incredible humanity in

(01:04:03):
humanity that slavery has produced, Whitman's drum taps are the
silent reign of infinite tears for the Civil War dead.
Because he became a nurse in the army, caring for
the thousands of wounded and dying, Whitman spent month after month,

(01:04:25):
no breaks, no days off, tending the Civil War wounded,
until he was numbed into revelation, much like Tolstoin the
slums of Moscow. When one sees enough inhumanity, long enough unbroken,

(01:04:49):
the tears dry up, and a stable sense of dedication
to truth remains alone, as if, as if all of
the liquid mobility possibilities of life evaporates away, and it
leaves there the salt of determination. Not that this should

(01:05:10):
not happen, not that this will not happen again, but
that this shall have meaning, and that reinstates it, that
brings us both throw in his journal records in eighteen

(01:05:36):
sixty February. Just a few months later, I see directly
in front of the depot Lee House, on the only
piece of bareground I see hereabouts a large flock of
lesser red poles feeding. They must be picking up earth, sand,

(01:05:57):
or the withered grass. They are so intense on it
that they allow me to come quite near. This, then,
is the one use for the drifting of snow, which
lays bare some spots, however deep it may be elsewhere,
so that the birds can come at the earth. I

(01:06:19):
never thought of this use before. First the snow fell
deep and level on the eighteenth. Then the nineteenth came
high wind and plowed it out here and there to sphinxes, satyrs, manticora, etc.
Could only imagine more than existed, while the moderns cannot
imagine so much as exists. In describing brutes as in

(01:06:45):
describing men, we shall naturally dwell most on those particulars
in which they are most like ourselves, in which we
have the most sympathy with them. We are as often
injured as benefited by our systems. For to speak the truth,
no human system is a true one, and a name

(01:07:06):
is at most a mere convenience and carries no information
with it. As soon as I begin to be aware
of the life of any creature, I at once forget
its name. The preoccupation with learning the exact scientific name,

(01:07:29):
which is usually a Latin name of every individual natural
object is to learn the limits of man's mind, and
having seen them, let it go. What is the collection
of the dictionaries of all the Latin names of these

(01:07:50):
entities which actually exist in a unity? It is but
coming up consciously against the threshol holds of our capacity.
They exist beyond our naming, and they exist together in
a unity which gently absorbs all of the names, all

(01:08:17):
of the language that we might exercise. The naming is
for our benefit. The birds do not answer to the
names we give them. The trees do not stop growing

(01:08:37):
when we cry enough. It is a matter of humility,
of recognizing that the defining consciousness has no purpose other

(01:08:58):
than convenience. What then, shall man call himself? What names
shall he apply to his own nature? We are forever asleep,
and illusion cannot wake until language verges back finally in

(01:09:22):
its meaningfulness to a mystic vision. And only from that
high hill, from that pointed risen temple, can we understand
and see this unity. He writes, to know the names

(01:09:54):
of creatures is only a convenience to us at first,
But so soon as we have learned to distinguished them.
The sooner we forget their names, the better, so far
as any true appreciation of them is concerned. I think therefore,
that the best and most harmless names are those which
are an imitation of the voice or note of an animal,

(01:10:15):
or the most poetic ones. But the name adheres only
to the accepted and conventional bird or quadrabed, never an
instant to the real one. There is always something ridiculous
in the name of a great man, as if he
were named John Smith. The name is convenient in communicating

(01:10:35):
with others, but it is not to be remembered when
I communicate with myself. If you look over a list
of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how
foolish and useless they are seen to be. And yet
we use equally observed ones with faith to day. And

(01:11:00):
he goes on in this vein. Threau is reminding us
here of that most primordial duty that we have to
ourselves to be real, and to carry our intelligent reality
back to the wholesomeness of life in its comprehensive movement.

(01:11:29):
Thorough will die and May sixth, eighteen sixty one. Towards
the end, he was disturbed because he couldn't even look
out of a window anymore. He could no longer go
out and walk around, but he couldn't even get up
the look out of a window, and it began to

(01:11:49):
disturb him until he settled down, quieted down, and the
end came. It's difficult for us to appreciate our own legacy,
and I think we've seen in this series so far

(01:12:10):
how difficult it is even for the best of us
to keep pace and continuity was just the most superficial
of discussions of him. Much more the incredible genius of
Franklin and Jefferson and Thurreau, and how the movement from

(01:12:30):
the birth of Franklin in seventeen oh six to the
death of Thurreau in eighteen sixty one is a tremendous
leap forward into a new dimension of individuality. It is
almost truly the first time that the individual quality of

(01:12:54):
a human being had been appreciated for almost two thousand years.
Value of the individual, the capacity of the individual not
to reflect some egotistical bag of definition reached virtues or vices,

(01:13:18):
but to be a focus for the infinite all those capacities.
With the death of Thureau came the death of the
Republic In a very real way, the Civil War tore
apart the fabric of the country. The Civil War itself

(01:13:44):
was but an outward projection, an outward playing out of
the moving off center of that hermetic focus that had
been brought into being by Franklin and Jefferson, and so
suddenly placed in open aspect that by Thorough's generation, they

(01:14:11):
were no longer even concerned or conscious of the fact
that it had been made, that had been striven. For
one of the few times that Thorough writes of Jefferson,
he writes of him off the cup, as if he
were somebody who had helped make doctrinaire approaches. The Civil

(01:14:35):
War saw this country move from unity, from a hermetic
conception of unity to a polarity where all the tensions
were let loose. And in that polarity, all those tensions,
just like magnetic lines of force, scrambled by the movement

(01:14:58):
of blind, geared masses of people, produced countless chimeras and
phantoms that began to haunt the scene. Our next series
for three months is going to be very difficult to
appreciate because it seems so ordinary. How could there be

(01:15:22):
anything as a terry in it? How could there be
anything that's of interest to us in children's writers like
Mark Twain or James fennermore Cooper or people that they
make statues of, And sure we like them, but what
did they have to say? After all? Like Lincoln? And

(01:15:45):
whoever heard of Henry Adams? But this is the most
difficult of all the series because the movement from Cooper
to Twain is the development of the critical acumen of
the American mind, which is quite different and quite distinct.

(01:16:13):
And with Cooper, and we go to Cooper and not
to Whitman right away, we go to Cooper. We go
back to Cooper because Cooper was born into the Republic.
He was born in seventeen eighty nine. He grew up
in the Franklin Jefferson in America. And the first thing

(01:16:36):
that Cooper begins to write about are his visionary capacities
of seeing the American frontier developed when he was a boy,
it was still within healing distance of the Atlantic Ocean,
and when he would die in eighteen fifty one, it

(01:16:57):
was all the way to the goldfields of California. A
very great American historian named Frederick Jackson Turner developed in
the fifties the interesting thesis that it was the developing
frontier that was the driving force of the expansion of

(01:17:19):
American consciousness. It was the motion of the American frontier
across the land that opened the consciousness of Americans so
that they began to think of the entire continent in
terms of what the textbooks called manifest destiny. What does

(01:17:41):
that mean? In this scene, and then after Cooper comes
the tremendous debacle of the Civil War, and almost as
if placed there by synchronistic capacity, Abraham Lincoln becomes like

(01:18:05):
a giant thorough committed to the integrity of the whole,
that there's nothing doctrinaire at all in a government, that
it's reality is not in the rules, but in the
people themselves, in their capacities to be the people of

(01:18:33):
the people, for the people, by the people. It's almost
like the beginning of Launce's Dowter Jing, where he's talking
about doao. If you can name it, that's not it.
The people are the Tao of the country of the Republic.

(01:18:56):
And it is this vision of the original integratti, the
original hermetic unity, that makes Lincoln like a guardian angel
for the vision. And after the Civil War and the
death of Lincoln, that brief spurt of genius seems to

(01:19:20):
die out and is lost again in the welter. The
prize becomes tarnished and lost by the welter of reconstruction,
and mass industrialism rises. And in all this, the earliest

(01:19:40):
individual trying to piece together what has happened, will discovers
Henry Adams, whose great grandfather had been a president, whose
grandfather had been a president, whose father had been the
American ambassador to England during the Civil War, and who'll

(01:20:01):
discover that there are phases to history, that there is
such a thing as a science of history. Oh, Henry
Adams is much more profound than the European thinkers on
the structure of history. And we'll see all that. And

(01:20:22):
we'll come at last to Mark Twain, who will be
that frontier individual just past the Mississippi River, born in Hannimal, Missouri,
which is just the first bank west on the Mississippi River.
And we'll see his genesis from a boy on that

(01:20:44):
bank to a young man coming down that river to
the gulf, being able to move on that mobility, and
then beginning to see that the whole world needs to
be taken in to the conception and then self refer
flexibly towards the end of his life will see Twain
become a reinstator of the great Hermitic tradition in America.

(01:21:08):
Works of his which were not published until the late
nineteen sixties. As you can imagine the old argument, they
won't sell. Who's going to read them? Who wants to read?
Or whoever heard of Mark Twain's Fables of Man? But

(01:21:33):
they're there and the vision is there, so I hope
you'll be able to come and take that in. And
then after that series we'll get on to Whitman and
some of the others William James, but this next series
will be hard to follow it first, but the first
lecture should be entertained. It's about the making of a

(01:21:53):
first white Indian. And that's what Cooper saw as is
the archetype of our particular savior image, the man who
becomes an Indian. You know Thereaux is always interested in
learning Indian languages. You want to know the Indian names
for things, and Jefferson had that large collection of fifty

(01:22:16):
dictionaries of American Indian words and languages. But for Cooper
it wasn't the language. So much. It was the experience
of the wilderness because he realized that the Indian has
different faculties. As Thereau said, the Indian sensitivity to nature

(01:22:37):
begins where we leave off and develops channels that we
hadn't even imagined existed before. One of the characteristics of
the young white Indian deerslayer when he laughs. He laughs silently.
There is no sound that's so as not to disturb

(01:22:58):
the foughts.