A Friendship in Twilight by Jack Miles

Author:Jack Miles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Thoreau’s writings have been romanticized by devotees of the Whole Earth Catalog, members of the Sierra Club, animal rights activists, vegetarians, New Agers, and countless others. Many of his most committed followers seem never to have read a word he wrote. Their rosy view of nature and of human beings’ place in the natural order is more characteristic of his Concord neighbor Emerson than of Thoreau. In his essay “Nature,” Emerson famously wrote, “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part of God.” While Thoreau was overwhelmed by the beauty and even the sublimity of nature, neither he nor the world around him was ever completely transparent. There was always a residual darkness that was, like the navel of Freud’s dream, the point of contact with the unknowable. The irreducible mystery of this dimension is what makes Thoreau’s work so much richer than Emerson’s.

The structure of Walden repeats the seasons of the year and hours of the day. “The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and the fall, and the noon is the summer.” Thoreau concludes with a meditation on spring. By entitling the preceding chapter, “The Pond in Winter,” he makes the trajectory obvious—from night to day, darkness to light, sleep to awakening. It is the familiar story of death and rebirth, though his vision is more Eastern than Western. At the end of his thoughts on winter, he places his experience in a cosmic context. “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta [sic].… I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! There I meet the servant of the Brahmin priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of the tree with his crust and water jug.”

Spring is undeniably the time of renewal when “fresh curls spring from the baldest brow” and, playing the role of a latter-day Champollion, he helps sojourners decipher the message in nature’s hieroglyphics: “There is nothing inorganic.” Even the light of this insight cannot dispel the darkness that not only surrounds but also indwells human life. Indeed, it is not clear whether darkness shadows light, or light shadows darkness. Once again it is a question of the intervolution of parasite and host. “Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness.… We require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough nature.” And then in the closing lines of the book, his vision turns dark as he confronts the fact that the gift of life is inseparable from the gift of death.

We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.