Thoreau’s real masterpiece is not Walden but the 2-million-word journal that he kept until six months before he died. Its continuing relevance lies in the vivid spectacle of a man wrestling with tensions that still confound us. The journal illustrates his almost daily balancing act between recording scrupulous observations of nature and expressing sheer joy at the beauty of it all. Romantic predecessors like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, centuries before that, polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci thrived on the interplay between subjective and objective exploration of the world. For Leonardo, engineering and math infused painting and sculpture; Coleridge said that he attended chemistry lectures to enlarge his “stock of metaphors.”
For Thoreau, along with his fellow Transcendentalists, the by-now familiar dichotomy between the arts and the sciences had begun to hold sway. (The word scientist was coined in 1834, as the sciences were becoming professionalized and specialized.) Thoreau felt the disjunction acutely, and his journal lays bare both his fascinated scrutiny of the most intricate factual details and his fear of losing his grasp of nature or the cosmos as a whole.
Today scientists churn out data-stuffed reports assessing the perils we face—shrinking Arctic ice, rising sea levels, extreme floods and droughts, the acidification of oceans, forest fires. Their daunting graphs, tables, and technical language stir up debates and doubts. Such dry projections, devoid of poetry and imagination, serve as an implicit summons to experts to come up with solutions. Crucial though the data and reports are, they eclipse precisely the sort of immediate, intuitive, sensual experiences of nature that are, in our Anthropocene era, all too rare. For Thoreau, a sense of wonder—of awe toward, but also oneness with, nature—was essential. We will, he understood, protect only what we love.
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A week after that first extended entry, he wrote, “I feel ripe for something; it is seed time with me—I have lain fallow long enough.” Thoreau went on, “My Journal should be the record of my love.” At the same time, his journal was a repository of constant measurements, minute and expansive: of the depth of streams, the wingspan of a moth, the number of bubbles trapped beneath the frozen surface of the pond. “What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more,” Thoreau had written back in 1846, when his journal had still been a source to plunder for other writing projects, not yet a compendium of exhaustive field notes. Now his quest for unifying order became more focused, and he set out to pursue it by counting the petals on a blossom or the rings in the stump of a fallen tree—hoping not to lose a sense of beauty and mystery in the process.
[---]
Thoreau was anxious to get the balance right. “This habit of close observation—in Humboldt—Darwin & others. Is it to be kept up long—this science?” he asked himself. As Walls noted in her previous book about Thoreau’s relationship to 19th-century science, Seeing New Worlds, his reading of Charles Lyell’s revolutionary Principles of Geology in 1840 had given him the insight that small details add up to one bigger truth: Lyell argued that the Earth had been shaped gradually by minute changes, and that these slow forces were still active. Steeped in the sciences, Thoreau emphasized that orderly data needn’t be dead. Carl Linnaeus’s binomial system for classifying plants was “itself poetry,” and in the early 1850s Thoreau jotted in his journal, “Facts fall from the poetic observer as ripe seeds.”
Still, Thoreau felt the limits of disciplined scrutiny. “With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?” he asked in one of his July 1851 entries. In December, when he saw a crimson cloud hanging deep over the horizon on a cold winter day, he wrote, “You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all other rays,” only to lament that this was not a good enough explanation, “for this red vision excites me, stirs my blood.” What kind of science was this, he wanted to know, “which enriches the understanding but robs the imagination?” The following summer he summed up the dilemma. “Every poet has trembled on the verge of science,” he wrote after a long day at the Sudbury River, even as he also noted, “I wanted to know the name of every shrub.” Was his knowledge becoming so fine-grained “that in exchange for views as wide as heaven’s cope I am narrowed down to the field of a microscope”? He saw “details not wholes,” and feared being “dissipated by so many observations.” Or could the sensual be entwined with the scientific? For Thoreau, in a short entry about frogs, that happened: “They express, as it were, the very feeling of the earth or nature. They are perfect thermometers, hygrometers, and barometers.”
[---]
Thoreau’s love for nature sings off his journal pages in spring. His winter writing slices right into the heart. His entries, day after day, are testimony to the power of renewal and rebirth—and to the importance of harnessing the human sense of wonder to better understand and protect the Earth. In our age of the Anthropocene, as we distance ourselves from the cyclical rhythms of nature, we are disconnecting from our planet. Thoreau’s journal is a reminder of what is at stake.
- Walden Wasn’t Thoreau’s Masterpiece
For Thoreau, along with his fellow Transcendentalists, the by-now familiar dichotomy between the arts and the sciences had begun to hold sway. (The word scientist was coined in 1834, as the sciences were becoming professionalized and specialized.) Thoreau felt the disjunction acutely, and his journal lays bare both his fascinated scrutiny of the most intricate factual details and his fear of losing his grasp of nature or the cosmos as a whole.
Today scientists churn out data-stuffed reports assessing the perils we face—shrinking Arctic ice, rising sea levels, extreme floods and droughts, the acidification of oceans, forest fires. Their daunting graphs, tables, and technical language stir up debates and doubts. Such dry projections, devoid of poetry and imagination, serve as an implicit summons to experts to come up with solutions. Crucial though the data and reports are, they eclipse precisely the sort of immediate, intuitive, sensual experiences of nature that are, in our Anthropocene era, all too rare. For Thoreau, a sense of wonder—of awe toward, but also oneness with, nature—was essential. We will, he understood, protect only what we love.
[---]
A week after that first extended entry, he wrote, “I feel ripe for something; it is seed time with me—I have lain fallow long enough.” Thoreau went on, “My Journal should be the record of my love.” At the same time, his journal was a repository of constant measurements, minute and expansive: of the depth of streams, the wingspan of a moth, the number of bubbles trapped beneath the frozen surface of the pond. “What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more,” Thoreau had written back in 1846, when his journal had still been a source to plunder for other writing projects, not yet a compendium of exhaustive field notes. Now his quest for unifying order became more focused, and he set out to pursue it by counting the petals on a blossom or the rings in the stump of a fallen tree—hoping not to lose a sense of beauty and mystery in the process.
[---]
Thoreau was anxious to get the balance right. “This habit of close observation—in Humboldt—Darwin & others. Is it to be kept up long—this science?” he asked himself. As Walls noted in her previous book about Thoreau’s relationship to 19th-century science, Seeing New Worlds, his reading of Charles Lyell’s revolutionary Principles of Geology in 1840 had given him the insight that small details add up to one bigger truth: Lyell argued that the Earth had been shaped gradually by minute changes, and that these slow forces were still active. Steeped in the sciences, Thoreau emphasized that orderly data needn’t be dead. Carl Linnaeus’s binomial system for classifying plants was “itself poetry,” and in the early 1850s Thoreau jotted in his journal, “Facts fall from the poetic observer as ripe seeds.”
Still, Thoreau felt the limits of disciplined scrutiny. “With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?” he asked in one of his July 1851 entries. In December, when he saw a crimson cloud hanging deep over the horizon on a cold winter day, he wrote, “You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all other rays,” only to lament that this was not a good enough explanation, “for this red vision excites me, stirs my blood.” What kind of science was this, he wanted to know, “which enriches the understanding but robs the imagination?” The following summer he summed up the dilemma. “Every poet has trembled on the verge of science,” he wrote after a long day at the Sudbury River, even as he also noted, “I wanted to know the name of every shrub.” Was his knowledge becoming so fine-grained “that in exchange for views as wide as heaven’s cope I am narrowed down to the field of a microscope”? He saw “details not wholes,” and feared being “dissipated by so many observations.” Or could the sensual be entwined with the scientific? For Thoreau, in a short entry about frogs, that happened: “They express, as it were, the very feeling of the earth or nature. They are perfect thermometers, hygrometers, and barometers.”
[---]
Thoreau’s love for nature sings off his journal pages in spring. His winter writing slices right into the heart. His entries, day after day, are testimony to the power of renewal and rebirth—and to the importance of harnessing the human sense of wonder to better understand and protect the Earth. In our age of the Anthropocene, as we distance ourselves from the cyclical rhythms of nature, we are disconnecting from our planet. Thoreau’s journal is a reminder of what is at stake.
- Walden Wasn’t Thoreau’s Masterpiece
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