The Cosmos in a Drop of Pond Water

As I finished reading Walden, I asked myself in my best school teacher voice, “So, Diane, what did you learn from reading Walden?”

Thoreau had spent two years at Walden Pond, living alone in a cabin, recording his observations which were much more profound than the ice on the pond or the robins of spring.

Thoreau’s philosophy emphasized and completed the thinking of a most interesting man, one certainly who would be welcome at any dinner table in any century.

Certainly Nature was his teacher and in the last chapter Thoreau passes along the lessons he learned, using the imperative for emphasis.

This is what I learned.

Lesson One–Forget seeking knowledge from other people and places. Explore thyself.

Lesson Two– Dare to dream, follow your own path.

Lesson Three–Seek the truth.

Lesson Four–Live your life, no matter how meager it is.

Lesson Five–Live a simple and humble life.

Lesson Six–Understand we cannot know the future nor should we praise ourselves too much for our accomplishments in the past. The present is all we can know. This goes for nations as well as individuals.

Lesson Seven–Life’s lessons and smart people’s advice can be accepted only when we are ready to receive them.

Lesson One–Forget seeking knowledge from other people and places. Explore thyself.

Upon the recommendation of doctors the sick are often advised to seek a change in their surroundings to effect better health.

Thoreau would argue that enlightenment is closer at hand, indeed is within walking distance if one would only recognize the worth of his home place. It is not necessary or even helpful to seek understanding in locations outside the self. The knowledge one seeks can be found within.

Yet we should oftener look over the tarrerel of our craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our voyage is only great circle-sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely.

How many millions of dollars are spent in psychotherapy to learn about the self? Foolish reliance on others to help us permits little progress. In the end we are the ones who must create change. If only we were strong enough to heed Thoreau’s suggestion that we are all capable of exploring our own “streams and oceans.”

Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes,–with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty can sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthy empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice.

One’s own country can lead her away from exploring the self. The individual, not the group or nationality, is the most important. We need to understand and respect ourselves before we support our nation’s causes in the name of patriotism which may be damaging to others. For example, bombing Afghanistan to protect America is not the reasonable action of self-respecting individuals.

Here is a line so apropos for this Fourth of July. Instead of the cheap American flag flying from the windows of the SUVs, I’d like to see the last line of this quotation on a bumper sticker.

Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.

I have traveled my share of the world, ostensibly learning about other cultures and climes so Thoreau’s remonstrance to “Explore thyself” instead has a great impact on me.

If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. Start now on the farthest western way, which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too.

Exploring his own condition, then, Thoreau knew when his experiment should end, and without any sense of defeat, he returned to the village. The lesson had been learned.

Lesson Two– Dare to dream; follow your own path.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advanced confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavored to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws by expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the licenser of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; this is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Why level down ward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense.

Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose?A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Each of us has our own sense of what we need to accomplish. If we create one thing to our satisfaction in our lifetime that is sufficient . Thoreau recalls a story of a man from Kouroo who chose to make the perfect staff even if took his entire life to do so.

Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life.

Lesson Three–Seek the truth

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well…Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Love, fortune, and fame not based on truth will provide little comfort. Just ask Robert Blake, Ken Lay, and OJ Simpson.

Lesson Four–Live your life, no matter how meager it is.

The true sources of happiness are available to everyone, regardless of wealth. We all have access to the warmth of the sun, the love of family, lasting friendship.

However meager your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring.

Lesson Five–Live a simple and humble life.

Living simply was the most fundamental tenet of Thoreau’s thinking. Life ‘near the bone” would free us to take delight in nature, be creative, develop talents most important to us. If we would reduce the acquisition of superfluous goods we then have to take care of, think how much more time we would have to spend doing the things that count. Of course, even Thoreau would advocate providing for basic necessities such as food, warmth, health, and literacy.

Cultivate poverty like a gardener, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. ..the philosopher said: ‘From the army of three divisions one can take away its general, and put it in disorder; from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought.’

Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.

This leads me to my latest rant about the wealthy’s handling of their “disposable income.” Chicago millionaire Steve Fossett has just spent millions of dollars to complete successfully his sixth attempt to circumnavigate the earth in a hot air balloon named “Spirit of Freedom.” How much freedom from hunger, disease, and illiteracy would those millions have provided for the impoverished? How many millions will rock stars pay to fly in the Russian Mir Space Station? Why can’t these people get a clue? Spending money on such selfish foolishness is obscene.

I delight to come to my bearings;–not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the Universe, if I may,–not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.

If Thoreau found the Nineteenth Century trivial…

Lesson Six–Understand we cannot know the future nor should we praise ourselves too much for our accomplishments in the past. The present is all we can know. This goes for nations as well as individuals.

We see ourselves as the end of a glorious progression of learned men, invention and discovery only because we are so very short sighted and egomaniacal.

We know not where we are. Besides, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over the human insect.

We know only the present during which we must trust in the beneficence of God.

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We think that we can change our clothes only. It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground? The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats.

Lesson Seven–Life’s lessons and smart people’s advice can be accepted only when we are ready to receive them.

These lessons can be learned only when we are ready to recognize their value. Most of us, being human, have to work through some mistaken thinking to get to the good stuff. Perhaps that is why the wisdom of Walden is so often wasted on the young.

I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis May 6, 1862. He was 44 years old.

Diane McCormick

In “Spring” Thoreau continues the vital job of reconciling science with his poetic vision of the world. He finds “life” even in Walden Pond itself:

Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring. The earth is all alive and covered with papillae. The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube.

What scientists merely refer to as the laws of physics, Thoreau sees as a sign of a life force. In Thoreau’s world everything has a life of its own.

Most of us would surely see sand as inert matter, but he even finds signs of life in the patterns formed in the sand when hit by the sun:

What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank — for the sun acts on one side first — and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me — had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it.

What most of us would probably only see as an interesting pattern, Thoreau sees as a basic principle of the operation of Nature:

Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf. What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards.

These patterns in the earth begin to take forms similar to trees and the veins of leaves, and Thoreau finds in this pattern signs of Nature, signs of the Oversoul.

We tend to think of the physical world as “dead” compared to the world of plants and animals, but not Thoreau:

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit — not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter.

Spoken like a true geologist! Ironically, his view of the world is much closer to the view of modern scientists, at least those who subscribe to the theory of plate tectonics, than his contemporaries would have been. In a very real sense, the earth is “alive” with forces constantly at work shaping and reshaping our planet’s geography.

It’s not surprising that someone who can get so caught up in geology would greet spring even more excitedly:

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. The marsh hawk, sailing low over the meadow, is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes.

One can only suspect that spending a whole Eastern winter in a small cabin heated by a woodstove would make anyone excited about the onset of Spring, an effect not unknown to we who live through the long, cloudy, wet falls and winters of the Pacific Northwest.

And though I live in the Evergreen state and grass probably has a slightly different connotation for those of us foolish enough to plant expansive lawns, I, too, still look forward to the green grass of spring:

The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire — "et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata" — as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame; — the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.

This paean to grass must surely call to mind the equally famous transcendentalist Walt Whitman, does it not? Published nearly a year before Whitman first published Leaves of Grass, it certainly makes us wonder how Whitman was affected by Thoreau’s powerful work or whether his ideas developed independently, especially considering that at various times Emerson considered both of them as potential American Scholars.

Thoreau expands the metaphor, or symbol as it were, to the general sense of rebirth that spring often symbolizes:

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, recreating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how it is exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hill-side echoes to no vulgar jest.

It seems it is in this sense of rebirth that Thoreau’s optimism is founded. It is the Christian concept of forgiveness, and consequent rebirth, recast in a transcendentalist metaphor

This optimism, though, is balanced against the realization that most people never take advantage of this new opportunity to redeem themselves:

A return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature of man, as the sprouts of the forest which has been felled. In like manner the evil which one does in the interval of a day prevents the germs of virtues which began to spring up again from developing themselves and destroys them.

According to this view, virtue and evil cannot coexist. Perhaps that explains why so much of the grass that began so vigorously in spring has often turned yellow by this time of year.

Thoreau’s observation of a graceful hawk again reminds me of Whitman’s barbaric yawp:

On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the river near the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers, when, looking up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a nighthawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the under side of its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell. This sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport. The Merlin it seemed to me it might be called: but I care not for its name. It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe — sporting there alone — and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it. Where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the heavens? The tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the crevice of a crag; — or was its native nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow’s trimmings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its eyry now some cliffy cloud.

Though he has never claims it as his own symbol, it seems that this falcon could well serve as a symbol of Thoreau himself coming near the end of Walden. One could almost imagine Thoreau his “eyry now some cliffy cloud” looking down at we mortals wondering why we have yet learned to fly, still clinging to our possessions here on earth, weighted down, unable to even get off the ground.

Strangely enough we, too, can experience this exhilaration:

Ah! I have penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality. All things must live in such a light. O Death, where was thy sting? O Grave, where was thy victory, then?

But first we have to escape the confines of our offices and our homes to experience the light directly and not merely in a book or on a CRT screen, where life itself seems virtual.

Thoreau even instructs us on how to recapture this joy:

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, 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 of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Little wonder environmental activists have adopted Thoreau as the head of their movement, for he, better than any other writer, seems able to articulate the spiritual basis for the environmental movement while capturing the joy that all of us who have trekked the wilderness have felt at one moment or another and relating it to our spiritual growth.

Loren

Winter provides time for reflection and Thoreau continues to spend his days, making careful notes about his experiment, living on Walden Pond. He is entertained by the animals who visit; he concentrates on his waking thoughts, the fishermen and the mystery of the depth of the lake. Workers come to harvest ice to preserve for the summer months; hints of unrequited love and thoughts on the waters of Walden Pond appear on the pages.

The Critters of Concord

Geese, the whooping of the ice in the pond, “the foxes as they ranged over the snow crust,” attract Thoreau’s attention.

I threw out half a bushed of ears of sweet-corn, which had not got ripe, on to the snow crust by my door, and was amused by watching the motions of the various animals which were baited by it.

Red squirrels, jays, chickadees in flocks, sparrows, partridges, a pack of hounds, mice, and hares roam the fields. A fox nearly escapes the hunter and his dogs.

For a moment compassion restrained the latter’s arm; but that was a short-lived mood, and as quick as thought can follow thought his piece was levelled, and whang! –the fox rolling over the rock lay dead on the ground….At length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock; buy spying the dead fox she suddenly ceased her hounding, as if struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in silence…

Larger animals once inhabited the wilderness of Concord, providing hunters their raison d’etre.

…could remember one Sam Nutting, who used to hunt bears on Fair-Haven Ledges, and exchange their skins for rum in Concord village; who told him even, that he had seen a moose there.

Credit is given for deerskins also, and they were daily sold.

The hunters were formerly a numerous and merry crew here.

Concord Massachusetts was hardly the frontier for the West had been open for 40 years. My great grandfather traveled the Oregon Trail to homestead in Oregon the same year Thoreau wrote Walden, but still Concord was more wilderness than settlement.

What is a country without rabbits and partridges?

It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves.

Reflections at Dawn

Thoreau returns as philosopher in a reflection upon waking one winter morning.

After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, …But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight. Forward! nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. ‘O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether.’

The Fishermen

Philosophy soon must make way for the necessities of life–the acceptance and performance of his ”morning work”–picking up his axe and pail to retrieve water from the pond.

Thoreau never tires of the pond and often reminisces about the fishermen who come.

… men come with fishing reels and slender lunch, …to take pickerel and perch.

One such man he remembers well and comments as he has earlier that men who live outdoors are more knowledgeable than the so called experts.

His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist.

What follows is a poetic summary of the food chain.

The perch swallows the grubworm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

A Mystery Solved

Scientific curiosity leads Thoreau to plumb the lake. A myth has been created by the stories the natives tell that the lake is bottomless. Thoreau strikes out to prove the myth wrong.

As I was desirous to recover the long-lost bottom of Walden Pond,…the undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Regions from these parts….but I can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth.

The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven…While man believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.

When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch, and put down the soundings, more than a hundred in all,…

Inspired by his ability to determine and plot the lake’s bottom, Thoreau transfers his methods, speculating that his math could be used to determine the bottom of the sea or the heights of the mountains.

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to these instances which we detect;

Again transferring information from one subject to another, certainly the mark of an intelligent man, Thoreau suggests one can apply his methods of determining the depth of the lake to determining the depth of a man’s character.

What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man; but draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character.

Even after much study, however, Walden Pond seems completely contained.

As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not discovered any but rain and snow and evaporation…

The Icemen Cometh

Then come the icemen and a wonderful account of man’s desire to regulate the temperature of his world.

While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick and solid, the prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to cool his summer drink; impressively, even pathetically wise, to foresee the heat and thirst of July now in January…It may be that he lays up no treasures in this world which will cool his summer drink in the next.

In the winter of ‘46-47 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many car-loads of ungainly-looking farming tools, sleds, ploughs, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in the New England Farmer or the Cultivator.

…A hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice.

I cannot imagine a stack of ice blocks as high as a three story building. Is Thoreau exaggerating? How was the ice stacked that high?

They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down.

This heap, made in the winter of ‘46-7 and estimated to contain ten thousand tons, was finally covered with hay and boards; and though it was unroofed the following July, and a part of it carried off, the rest remaining exposed to the sun, it stood over that summer and the next winter, and was not quite melted till September, 1848. Thus the pond recovered the greater part.

A Lost Love

A hint of Thoreau’s feelings about emotion compared to the mind is told in the following passage.

They told me that they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever. It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect.

Thoreau knew something of affection. In his journals he wrote of his first love for Ellen Sewall whom he had met in 1839. five days after meeting Miss Sewall Thoreau wrote “There is no remedy for love but to love more.” A little over a year later he continued:

I thought that the sun of our love should have risen as noiselessly as the sun out of the sea, and we sailors have found ourselves steering between the tropics as if the broad day had lasted forever. You know how the sun comes up from the sea when you stand on the cliff, and doesn’t startle you, but everything, and you too are helping it.

Thoreau proposed marriage, but Miss Sewall said no. Biographers report other loves in Thoreau’s life, but shortly before he died in 1862, Thoreau said to his sister, Sophia, “I have always loved her.” What a difference marriage would have made for him.

A World of Water

Still a bachelor, Thoreau at Walden Pond expands upon the significance of the waters of the pond.

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial;

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 a tree with his crust and water jug.

The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.

Diane McCormick

Thoreau’s ability as a naturalist emerges more in the chapters entitled “Winter Animals” and “The Pond in Winter” than it has in previous chapters. “Winter Animals” describes in some detail the hooting owls, foxes, red squirrels, blue jays, chickadees, partridges, squirrels, wild mice, and hares that he observed during the winter. I suspect that these might have been more interesting to a generation who hadn’t been raised on nature specials on PBS.

“The Pond in Winter” focuses on Thoreau’s attempts to measure Walden Pond using his considerable surveying skills. What seems most remarkable in the chapter, though, are Thoreau’s attempts to unite his scientific interests with his transcendental beliefs, a difficult, if not impossible, task. Perhaps this attempt is mirrored by the opening lines of the chapter where Scientific questions like “what — how — when — where?” are met by the morning light:

After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what — how — when — where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight.

Thoreau’s love of nature transcends any scientific answers that may be offered, though the two are not necessarily exclusive. In fact, one would hope that environmental scientists’ attempts to understand nature would be driven by just such a love of nature, just as you would hope that a psychologist’s attempts to understand human nature would be driven by a love of people.

While studying the depth of Walden Pond, Thoreau cuts a hole in the ice to take measurements:

Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet is well as over our heads.

Thoreau may be attempting a scientific measurement, but he does so with an awareness that transcends any measurement of time or place.

Even when he does take an exact, scientific measurement he extrapolate from it:

The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.

Walden Pond may, indeed, only be one hundred and seven feet deep, but because of Thoreau’s book it has symbolic depth that belies its actual depth.

Thoreau seems to sound a little like Einstein in the following passage:

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveller, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.

This idea of a “unified theory” seems to be the driving force behind science, the attempt to “know all,” just as it has been the driving force of philosophers and poets, though it takes very different forms in different hands.

It’s clear that for Thoreau this unified theory will encompass a vision of Nature:

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, 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 a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.

This vision of Nature and its “holy water” almost seems to look forward to those outer space shots of Earth where we are most clearly revealed as the “Water Planet,” because water is the great unifying force that ties us all together. Indeed, water is the essence of life itself, making up 65% of our bodies, and covering 70% of the earth. What better symbol, then, of life’s unity and universality than water?

Perhaps waterfalls inspire us so because they, like the surge of ocean waves, make us feel the full force of the life running through us.

Loren