The Adventures of Henry Thoreau by Michael Sims

Author:Michael Sims
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

Henry was interested not only in the act of skating but in the natural history and symbolism of ice itself. He wanted not only to read the language of bird tracks imprinted in snow, which were like a cuneiform tablet of events waiting to be deciphered, but to try to understand the snow itself,9 its varieties and forms, its behavior. He loved water, river and stream and pond, rain and its colder manifestations. He paid as much attention to bubbles in the frozen surface of Walden Pond in February as he did to its reflections of red maples in October.

His interest was scientific, visceral, and symbolic. He read widely in the discoveries of his time. The thrilling revelations of the eighteenth century had ranged from astronomer William Herschel’s catalog of the impossibly vast cosmos above our heads to geologist James Hutton’s theories about the formation of the impossibly ancient earth beneath our feet. The new science of crystallization had linked the growth of the eternal stones to the growth of ephemeral ghosts such as hoarfrost, and glimpses of such creativity and pattern in physics inspired poetic nature lovers from Goethe to Emerson. Even Emmanuel Swedenborg, the controversial Swedish mystic who influenced Emerson and Transcendentalism and thus Henry, had studied crystallization.10 Before his midlife veer into mysticism, during which he claimed that the Second Coming had already taken place but had been apparent only to enlightened souls such as himself, Swedenborg focused considerable attention on analogies in nature. In his first book, in 1721, he argued that the branching and budding of plants is echoed in the hexagonal shapes of ice, from frost to snow, as well as in how salt crystals grow out of water.

This kind of pattern was more than metaphor. It teased Henry with a glimpse of the laws of creation. Mathematical predispositions in matter itself offered what a Transcendentalist would immediately see as evidence of hidden connection and kinship throughout the cosmos. It was like Swedenborg’s use of an ancient Stoic analogy, that nature in general worked much like a spider’s web: “For it consists, as it were,11 of infinite radii proceeding from a centre, and of infinite circles or polygons, such that nothing can happen in one which is not instantly known at the centre, and thus spreads throughout much of the web. Thus through contiguity and connection does nature play her part.”

In the first volume of the journal he opened after Emerson’s prompt in October 1837, Henry had spent considerable time describing the effects of hoarfrost and other icy architecture. It was one of the first topics to which he turned. He painstakingly examined what appeared to be frozen mist on leaves, the rectilinear fissures of frozen mud below ice melting in a roadbed, even crystallized rhubarb in the bottom of a bowl he had left outdoors in the autumn. When he found a mosaic of channels in the ice of Swamp Bridge Brook, which ran behind Farrar’s blacksmith shop on the edge of the

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