It’s a Small World After All

The recent debate sparked by Megnut’s blog on the essence of blogging and the vehement replies on Jonathan’s site have made me rethink some earlier doubts that blogging could ever be the phenomena apparently advocated by the new prophets of bloggerdom.

Personally, I have always doubted that bloggers could ever adequately replace journalists, though they might, in mass, outweigh editorial writers. Unfortunately, too often blogging has actually seemed to slip to the level of “letters to the editor” where mere rants rule out any kind of rational argument.

As a literature major, neither do I think bloggers have much chance of surviving as storytellers. Though blogs are free, I’d prefer to read my stories from a book. I’d prefer to let editors and professional reviewers waste their time finding what is worth reading than sort through all of the blogs online myself to find the few worth devoting that kind of time to. I haven’t found many Hawthornes or Hemingways online so far despite many hours of reading.

So, why do I spend so much time on line reading blogs? What is the primary appeal of blogging?

It seems to me that the primary appeal is the “personal” ties you feel with other bloggers. By sharing our feelings about events with other bloggers, we establish ties that bind us together. The internet throws a web of personal relationships, often supplemented by emails, over those actively participating in creating a new web space.

When I recently had surgery for throat cancer, I received a number of emails from fellow bloggers wishing me the best. When’s the last time you received such encouragement from your local newspaper reporters?

To me, this “friendship” lies at the heart of whatever we can hope to accomplish as bloggers.

The real question is how we can build on this “friendship” to build a better place for all of us. One thing it could do is add perspective to the news, particularly since bloggers seem to come from many different parts of the world and from different professions. I often discuss news events with friends, and our discussions, whether we agree or not, help me to refine my own thoughts and define my own position. Blogging should simply be an extension of this kind of “friendly” discussion. When it’s an extended discussion by friends we trust from many places and from many different perspectives, this should be a powerful new way of dealing with events in our world.

The real potential of blogging, though, is to go beyond mere journalism. Blogging, as form of journaling, can help us to see our world directly through the eyes of another person. We can see the world through the eyes of an Arkansas writing teacher, a single mother and artist raising two daughters, an emergency nurse, an English poet, a retired librarian, an active one, too, and all those great people I link to from all over the world. What a magical view of a diverse world perceived from a thousand different viewpoints.

Such insights should really begin to give us a better idea of what it means to be human and, perhaps, for the first time, truly teach us that it is a small world, after all . What happens when you feel closer to a Candadian than you do to the man who lives next door to you?

And some people thought they wanted to be mere journalists.

What’s the Sound of Alone

As an INTP, I’m quite familiar with "Solitude," and, like Thoreau, I often seek out solitude to deal with my inner feelings. Some people like to talk out their feelings. Me, I like to walk alone and figure out what I’m really feeling or try to deal with the emotions before I have to deal with people. In fact, I doubt that I would have ever been able to resolve some problems without time alone to contemplate them.

While Thoreau strives to show a connection between solitude and nature, he probably had this desire for solitude long before he moved to Walden Pond:

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert.

Considering that every single English teacher at the school I taught at was an Introvert, one suspects that the desire to read may play a large role in determining whether or not people seek solitude, certainly a larger role than an appreciation of nature.

And if one is more concerned with ideas than with social interaction, it’s not unlikely that everyday social interactions can be seen as a burden rather than as a blessing:

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war.

Only a true introvert, though, would find “etiquette and politeness” a burden.

As if to show that he is not a misanthrope, Thoreau does describe a few people he was happy to have regular contact with while staying at Walden Pond.

An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet.

One suspects, though, it is her “genius of unequalled fertility” that makes her so welcome in Thoreau’s world.

Perhaps it was passages like the following that so made me feel a kinship with Thoreau when I first read him so many years ago:

What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar….

For some of us, there is a need, at least at times, to feel free of others, to stand alone and take in nature itself. It’s the kind of westering feeling that made men in the 1850’s pick up their lives and head west, seeking out their true place in the universe.

Thoreau went to Walden Pond as much for the solitude as he did for the sense of nature:

I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man; unless it were in the spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish for pouts — they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond of their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness — but they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left "the world to darkness and to me," and the black kernel of the night was never profaned by any human neighborhood.

Keeping in mind that Thoreau was never quite as isolated as he seems to suggest, he was after all, a short walk from Concord, many people would still feel cut off and isolated in this kind of environment:

I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant.

For Thoreau, nature seemed to provide a sense of companionship that most people associate with being around other people:

Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.

To me, this sense of oneness with nature seems perfectly normal, and I’m surprised when people say they don’t like to hike alone, that they like to hike in a group. Perhaps that is because, like Thoreau, I often feel a kind of presence in nature:

I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.

You don’t need to be alone to get this kind of feeling. In fact, I sometimes get exactly the same feeling in Portland’s Japanese Gardens surrounded by people who feel exactly the same way I do. However, I do think you’re more likely to be aware of this feeling when you’re alone.

Standing alone in nature is also when one is most apt to make another discovery:

I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

This is precisely the presence that Whitman seems to celebrate in Song of Myself, the sense of “otherness” often describes in meditation books. It is the “out of body experience” some claim to have experienced in near-death experiences. For Thoreau, though, it seems to be the experience of the Oversoul.

Diane’s Photo of Walden Pond

Walden, Chapter five Solitude

Because Thoreau recognized he was living a unique life on Walden Pond, away from the village and by himself, he quiets people’s concerns about loneliness. By the time I finished reading this chapter,I was ready to leave the village myself and find my own Walden Pond.

Thoreau expresses his delight in being part of the natural universe “when the body is one sense…I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature…”

Returning from one of his evening walks, he finds he has had visitors who leave touching calling cards made of leaves and twigs–a bouquet of flowers, a wreath of evergreen on his cabin table. He is pleased someone has come to see him, but he does not feel disappointment that he has missed his callers.

He continues to explain the source of his serenity.

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still…it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they [other people] beyond any deserts that I am conscious of.

Only for only hour did Thoreau feel lonely and that he chalks up to an insanity.

I have never felt lonesome or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but one, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhoods of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery.

For Thoreau it was more important to be near the perennial source of life, rather than to any man or his institutions–the depot, the post-office, or the barroom.

For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to made our occasions.

To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Thoreau argued that we are never alone, really, if we will but recognize how we are a part of nature.

So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone.

Two people visit Thoreau regularly. Their appearances are somewhat mystical, and I’m not convinced they really exist. One visitor is an old settler, the original proprietor who is reported to have dug Walden Pond. “…he is thought to be dead, [but] none can show where he is buried.”

The second visitor is “an elderly dame…invisible to most persons,” who keeps an herb garden Thoreau enjoys. She tells him the origins of myths.

One more statement to convince us Thoreau never felt lonely away from his compatriots.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?

Nature is the healing force.

What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or thy great-grandfather’s, but our great-grandmother Nature’s universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always,,,For my panacea, instead on one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the dead Sea,…let me have a draught of undiluted morning air.

I am convinced Thoreau truly believed he was an integral part of the natural world that surrounded him at Walden Pond, and this belief warded off any loneliness he might have felt living away from the village.

Diane McCormick

Listen to the Sound of …

Although Thoreau describes several sounds in great detail, “Sounds” seems to be more about contemplation and isolation than it does about sounds per se:

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

Books may help you to see reality differently, but the proof is in the actual seeing, not in reading. We cannot waste our entire lives reading or working, at time we just have to live:

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.

When such moments are fully taken advantage of, they become a form of meditation:

I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.

These moments become moments to explore himself, not to “look abroad for amusement:”

I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without an end. If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.

If we follow our “bliss,” we will never be bored, for we will always be closer to our true self.

Into this Edenic world suddenly comes the sound of the train, the same train, one must believe, that Thoreau described thusly, “We don’t ride on the train; it rides upon us.” The railroad is the symbol of commerce, of the industrial world, with its lures and detractions:

The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link. The men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth.

The key idea here seems to be that Thoreau wants to be a “track-repairer,” not a track layer. He wants to help repair the damage that commerce has done to “the orbit of the earth.”

Thoreau is obviously not immune to the attraction of the railroad. “What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery.” Like Carl Sandburg later, Emerson seems to admire the sheer strength and bravado of commerce. But for all this attraction, Emerson distrusts the railroad and all it brings:

If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that which floats over the farmer’s fields, then the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their escort.

“If” is the key word here. “If” implies that the opposite is true. In other words, men don’t make the elements their servants for noble ends, but rather for ignoble ends. Later he says, “If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early” and, again, “If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied! Commerce is not “innocent,” not “heroic and commanding,” at least not according to Thoreau.

The very idea that things must be done “railroad fashion” is the final warning:

To do things "railroad fashion" is now the byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track. There is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside. (Let that be the name of your engine.)

According to Microsoft’s dictionary, Atropos, the Inexorable, is one of the Fates who carried shears used to cut the thread of life, an ironic image when you consider the railroad tracks that tied Thoreau’s world together.

Thoreau seems reconciled to the fact that he cannot convince most people of the dangers of the railroad:

I confess, that practically speaking, when I have learned a man’s real disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse in this state of existence.

Modern man will be seduced by the power of the railroad and the commerce it brings with it, and there is little anyone can do about it.

But that does not mean that the individual has to be seduced by its power and attraction:

… but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing. Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway.

For Thoreau, the commercial world is only a temporary distraction. He acknowledges that that world exists, but he resists its temptations and remains true to himself.

When one retreats from this commercial world, from the world of Concord, one gets an entirely new perspective on it:

All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.

Given the proper distance, Nature seems to moderate our view and allows us to see things in their proper perspective.

Away from the city, Thoreau revels in the sounds of cows, whip-poor-wills, owls and even roosters, for these are the sounds of nature. Finally, sounding a little like a Zen monk, Thoreau ends:

Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow — no gate — no front-yard — and no path to the civilized world.

Only the path to eternity. Listening to that great, resounding OM, only pausing long enough to bring that message back to his fellow men, those of us caught in the glare of the railroad’s bright light, transfixed.

Chapter 4 Sound


Just like the rest of us, Thoreau found he had other duties and desires besides reading the classics he described in chapter three.

What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans.

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life.

Sometimes,…I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds
sang around or flitted noiseless through the house,…

…my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel…Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.

Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.

Thoreau seemed to find pleasure in everything he did at Walden Pond. He devoted some time describing “a pleasant pastime,” which was cleaning his cabin.

When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it…It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass…

Thoreau’s advantage was his ability to be in the present moment which allowed him to enjoy even the most mundane tasks. Psychologists now call this the flow theory wherein one concentrates so completely in the current activity that he seems to flow into the action, blocking out all thought of past and future or desire to be someplace else.

The detailing of the plants, birds and small animals Thoreau observed is a pleasure to read.


In my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and and goldenrod, shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and ground-nut.

Hawks, pigeons, reed-birds and a mink kept him company.

The next few pages are surprising to me in that they describe Thoreau’s reaction to the rail road that passed near his cabin. One would think he would find the train a terrible intrusion, but he actually was very impressed with “the whistle of the locomotive” and what it brought to his village.

Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay.

The Fitchburg Railroad touched Walden Pond and Thoreau accepted the intrusion. He called it the “iron horse,” a fiery steed exchanging goods for the villagers. The railroad was a huge expansion of commerce and communication during Thoreau’s time. Such a phenomenal period of growth we can understand only if we equate it to own advancement in technology.

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery…On this morning of the Great Snow…I hear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming …

I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattle past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails.

The preceding quotation may contain the reason for Thoreau’s acceptance of the railroad–it brought goods and ideas from distant places into Concord, a village Thoreau feared was too provincial. The citizens could learn first hand about other parts of the country and not have to settle for merely reading about them. The railroad allowed his compatriots to live life, not just study it.

The train passes.

Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever.

I detect a note of loneliness in the above quote, but I may be reading too much into it. Surely Thoreau could not be lonesome…

He listens to the sounds of the village…the bells–”a vibration of the universal lyre…” the “natural music of the cow” which he mistakes at first as singing youths. The “whippoorwills chant their vespers;” he is serenaded by a hooting owl. The baying of dogs, a disconsolate cow, bullfrogs break the silence. “Wild cockerels crow on the trees…”

I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, or hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, not the hissing of the urn, nor children crying to comfort one…No yard! but unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills.

Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow,–no gate–no front-yard,–and no path to the civilized world!

Thus Thoreau was content to listen to the sounds near Walden Pond.

Diane McCormick