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CHAPTER NINE

THOREAU'S “CONCORD RIVER”:

LIVING TRANSCENDENTALLY ON CURRENTS OF TIME

As a recent convert to the singularity and soaring

universality of Thoreau's poetic prose, you might think that

I'd plunge straight into Walden; instead I take up Thoreau's

first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. I take up

only the prelude at that, all of eight pages, titled “Concord

River,” and move at a gently rowing pace.1

Thoreau's writing rises from desolation—in the case of A

Week on the Concord, from his brother's death—and aspires to

vibrant serenity. John died writhing from lockjaw in Henry's

arms. Insofar as philosophy, literature, and religion can

express an ache for salvation, release from affliction and

despair, Thoreau's writing belongs to each. He finds release

1 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Ed. Carl F. Hove, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

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through religious communion with rivers, their fish, oaks,

and meadows. And high above rivers, he savors a view from Mt.

Greylock, and then from Mt. Washington, the northernmost

point of his journey. Thoreau's attention to particulars in

his surroundings is a poet's and also an ecologist's. He

seeks a naturalist's view, and also a Biblical, poetic touch

with things, a sort of contact or touch unknown to present

day academic dispassion and specialization.

Thoreau brings our attention from ideas in platonic

heavens down to the ebb and flow of mobile things–mists,

fish, and rivers—finding the poetry, philosophy, and

salvation in particulars just there, in singular occasions.2

This is less “transcendentalism” than what one scholar wryly

calls “descendentalism” (Porte xiii, xiv, 10, 140). To

2 For a story linking “Transcendentalism” to Kant, see below, note 22. Tracing an upward ascent, either toward Plato's Ideal Forms, or toward Kantian regulative (and transcendental) Ideas, or toward Kant's transcenden- tal preconditions of knowing, risks lifting us to clouds of abstraction— whereas Thoreau would have our feet on the ground, or feel askiff slide through the currents of a sustaining river. Consider the linefrom Walden that has God “culminating in the present moment” (95). Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Princeton: Princeton UP. Thoreau had a healthy disrespect for clubs and for programs or trends of thought that congealed anywhere near doctrine. For him, there is nothing useful in disquisitions on so abstract a topic as “transcendentalism.”

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descend to the detail is to escape the prosaic boredom that

masks quiet desperation. A Week and, its prelude, “Concord

River,” provide shifting words, places, prospects, and

radiant bits of creation: a scampering fox, a cranberry

bobbing in a marsh. These singular occasions shine sideways

or transversally, backward and forward in time, up toward

stars and down toward the dark of a river bottom.3 Attention

to flowing, shimmering things in their surround, translates

us out of the routine or mechanical to the touch of a river's

shad and weeds, its waves and winds, its oaks and cranberries

—even its cruel histories.

A Transcendental River

“Compared with the other tributaries of the Merrimack, it

appears to have been properly named Musketaquid, or Meadow

River, by the Indians. For the most part, it creeps through

broad meadows, adorned with scattered oaks, where the

3 Ephesians 3:18 calls us to regard the “breadth, and length, and height, and depth” of the divine. (Thanks here to Marcia Robinson.) We have an attunement to the world-as-divine that reverberates with The Psalms and with the Whirlwind in The Book of Job, as well.

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cranberry is found in abundance, covering the ground like a

mossbed.” (Thoreau A Week 9)

Within the first leaves of the book we learn that the

river is not unto itself alone, but belongs to a larger

waterway, one tributary among others. We can see it, of

course, in a pedestrian way as belonging just to the environs

of Concord, but Thoreau wants to expand our attention. He

leads us elsewhere, down to the Merrimack, an attenuated

stream that stretches north to disappear in the snowy heights

of Agiocochook, Mt. Washington, and then descends many miles

south to be swallowed in the vast Atlantic. Thoreau leads us

also to an attenuated elsewhere in time, even back to the

Nile (as he suggests in “Concord's” first sentence)—not to

mention back in time to those earlier associates of the oak

adorned Meadow River, those dwellers who called it

Musketaquid.

It flows as a network, a reticulation. Part meadow, part

river, its broad marshland forms an amphibious, anomalous

zone, especially in spring floods. There we find birds of the

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air belong also to water, brothers who belong to both land

and water, a dory painted blue above water line and green

below, to mark belonging to sky, water, and marsh. All flow

with and against currents of water and wind.

Anomalous, amphibious zones embrace flow and movement.

They are neither here nor there, both this and that, zones

for outlaws and wanderers. In Thoreau's posthumous Cape Cod,

they are the zones of scampering crabs, half of the sea, half

of the sands, anxiously and side- ways inhabiting that

changeling zone where walking one belongs to the curling,

rippling advancing flood, and also to the wet–dry terra firma

—only momentarily awash, while the beach gently hisses as

waters advance and retreat.4

After a number of poetic invocations, the days of A Week

begin with a short prelude called “Concord River.” Here is

that beginning:

The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the

Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history until

4 For jellyfish and clams as anomalous creatures, see Cape Cod, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1961: Ch. IV, 81.

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the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of

England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of

CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have

been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be Grass-

ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be

Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks. (5)

Thoreau reports that, on the arrival of English

settlers, the river gains a new name transferred from the

name of the village. The town appears, as he says, to have

been “commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony.” But how

peaceable were the English newcomers? Did the town earn its

name? The gentle hint is “No,” for Thoreau immediately adds,

“To an extinct race it was grass-ground, where they hunted

and fished . . . .” The first inhabitants may be extinct, but

Thoreau has them appear as he honors their history and words.

In the first line of his prelude, he gives us not the

Commonwealth's name for this meadowy river, but their name.

The English took over the river and naming rights,

baptizing Musketaquid, “Concord River.” This unconsecrated

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place is settled by English eager to farm, to fish, and to

pray—a people who will push out the long-standing tenants.

The village is baptized “Concord,” and in the same breath,

“The 12th Church of Christ.” Thoreau tells us that he relies

on the records of “old Johnson,” the region's first historian

or bard. This is Christian concord or harmony, not an Indian

peace or serenity. The advance of the Massachusetts

plantation, we're told, is “Wonder Working Providence.”

Thoreau repeats “old Johnson's” deadpan (he doesn't believe

it for an instant).

Concord River is well stocked with shad and alewives.

Johnson observes that salmon would be present too, but for

the downstream falls that are too high to leap. Soon the

brothers will encounter the settlers' hand-built falls upon

the Merrimack, made to drive mills. These dams, as Henry

observes, will halt the upward flow of fish in their

transcendence from below—until they too become extinct. Fish

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and non-fish, Europeans and First Peoples, inhabit anomalous

zones between water and rock, death and life.5

The River: Paradise Lost and Regained

In and about Concord, river and town, we might hope for an

eponymous harmony-in-the-making. Some years after writing

“Concord River,” as the Civil War approaches, Thoreau

glimpses a scaled down heaven in a lily rising

inconspicuously from a malodorous swamp. He suffers the

stench of a fugitive slave bill that welcomes slave catchers

to roam his woods, draining them of heaven—but for this

miraculous lily.6 On earlier days, he finds harmony-in-the-

making. In pure fun, he scampers across ice in flow with a

5 I discuss Thoreau's finding John Brown in an anomalous zone, where life and death strangely mix. See “Thoreau's Translations: John Brown, Apples, Lilies,” The Concord Saunterer July 2008, 194–221, reprinted in Mooney, Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophyfrom Thoreau to Cavell, Continuum Books, 2009, Ch. 12.6 See “Thoreau's Translations” (Mooney 194–221).

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fox.7 He has a knack for finding numberless heaven-filled

ecstasies. Thoreau nods toward paradise in A Week, but

acknowledges deep pain, as well.

Writing out of the gentle flow of the river can reveal

the gradual unsettling of the first residents and mask the

unspeakable death of John Thoreau (a story we know from other

sources). That ghost is inscribed in the book's dedication,

where he pleads, or prays, “Be Thou my muse, my Brother.”

Then, there is a horror that is by no means masked or washed

over. We hear in the “Thursday” chapter of A Week of

apocalyptic events not far from the place the Concord flows

into the Merrimack.

Thoreau tells of murders in Haverhill and some miles

north. He knows that the events of 1697 swirling around

Hannah Dustan are as bloodcurdling as Goya's black painting

of Chronos devouring his children. Perhaps, the Concord and

7 “I saw a fox. . .making across to the hills on my left. As the snow lay five inches deep, he made but slow progress, but it was no impedimentto me. So yielding to the instinct of the chase, I . . . bounded away, snuffing the air like a . . . hound.” Henry D. Thoreau, “January 30, 1841.” Journals, Vols. I– VIII. Ed. John C. Broderick, Robert Sattlemeyer, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Princeton UP, 1981–2008.

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Merrimack form an anomalous region where paradise is lost,

and any shred of paradise regained is dark— and our precise

place on the water, somewhere between loss and gain, is to be

questioned at any bend.

By now, brothers John and Henry have reached the

headwaters of the Merrimack, climbed Washington, and are

making their down- stream run. They row and sail swiftly,

wind and current to their advantage, sweeping back toward the

inflow of the Concord. Haverhill is just past the turn west

up to Concord. In 1697, a lifetime after the founding of

Concord and one hundred and thirty years before the brothers'

trip, the town becomes stained in blood. Thoreau evenhandedly

inserts these terrible events, interrupting his account of

homecoming. Hannah Dustan, a settler, is dragged from her

home by a small band of Indians. They lead her out toward the

river, and dash the brains of her nursing infant against an

apple tree—thus, the end of Eden. (Had settlers dashed

Indians to bits?) We inhabit an anxious oscillation between

burdens of guilt and hopes for redemption.

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Dustan is brought several miles up the Merrimack, under

watch— at last, by only a remnant of the group. As they sleep

she kills and scalps them, children included—again, the end

of Eden. She takes their canoe, paddling frantically by

night, to escape down the very Merrimack the brothers are now

plying, the very Merrimack that will welcome the inflow of

the river that will bring them home by way of that marvelous

tributary that spreads out into gentle marsh land, welcoming

“gulls wheeling overhead” and “ducks by the hundreds,”

halfway to heaven (Thoreau, Week 7).

The Meadow River, or Musketaquid, became “Concord” as

the plantation extended its prerogatives. The legacy might

have been honored and in place. Then, scholars and visitors

would gather Thoreau's spirit in the good village of Meadow

or Grass-ground. Instead, we have Concord Village on the

Concord River, well past paradise, the river having more or

less survived, apparently indifferent to names. The reality

of waters transcends the name, though it takes transcendental

poets to whisper that secret. It is they who word the world,

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in ways that show that words are not all, and are never

finished.

A Thoreau-style transcendence or a paradise regained has

ordinary, diurnal things that appear in ways that lets

immanence stride with transcendence and lets transcendence

anchor in everydayness. Walkers on pilgrimage will be knee

deep in the marsh, as well as swamp lilies that do and do not

transcend it. Poets in skiffs facilitate transcendence of

land-bound restraints. Here, the brothers can assume the

rhythms of water (quite other than the beat of plodding of

feet). For Thoreau-style transcendentalism, there must be

poets with oars, and also with wings, affording rhythms and

looks neither land-bound nor water-bound but of the sky.

Thoreau gives us bounteous things here and now that reach

beyond here and now.

The brothers, erstwhile village schoolteachers, take a

river trip to escape the humdrum shackles of weekly business

and the worst of prose, to row and climb free, to abide in

clouds that give prospects of infinite scope. This graceful

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communion among meadows and fish has its cruel underlay:

John's death, extinct peoples, Hannah Dustan and her scalps.

Transcendence is translation into paradise before our eyes

and inescapable descents into hell. We are bi-focal

creatures. The world is anomalous, heaven, and hell.

Translated by Words

In “Concord River,” we find Thoreau's characteristic eye for

singu- lar evidence bringing us instantaneously elsewhere

(though never out of this world):

Many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the

spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving; ducks by the

hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and

now going off with a clatter and a whistling like riggers straight for

Labrador, flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings, or else circling

round first, with all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to

reconnoiter you before they leave these parts; gulls wheeling overhead,

muskrats swimming for dear life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm

them by that you know of, their labored homes rising here and there

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like haystacks; and countless mice and moles and winged titmice along

the sunny, windy shore; cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up

on the beach, their little red skiffs beating about among the alders;—

such healthy natural tumult as proves the last day is not yet at hand.

(Week 7)

Such words—such things—beckon continually elsewhere or

beyond, plunging us into the evident wonder, risk, and allure

of what their simplicity holds within: the cranberry is a

skiff fitted out for sailing.

We listen to the affective, mobile, and knowing surface

of Thoreau's words. We take up with the world as immanent-

transcendent: poetically, religiously, and philosophically.

The wind is not just disturbing the waters, it is “keeping

nature fresh”; we are allowed to participate in the world's

renewal, “spray blowing in your face.” The muskrats don't

just paddle, but “swim for dear life.” We hear a life that is

dear, bounteous, and dangerous simultaneously, a shape-

shifting flow, for better and worse.

There are ducks, not just sitting or stuffed or bobbing,

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but “ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw

wind, just ready to rise.” They're ready in their uneasiness

to see something elsewhere, and rise toward it. We also, in

beholding, are “uneasy in the surf” and ready to rise. Words

translate us aloft. The ducks are “now going off with a

clatter and a whistling like riggers straight for Labrador,

flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings.” Any gap

between sailors in rigging and ducks wheeling aloft has been

closed. Any gap between my viewing and ducks is closed, too.

There is a single arcing ascent, a kind of union and loss of

self—an ecstasy. The ascending ducks are “like riggers

straight for Labrador,” and we are high up in the yards of a

sailing ship. This is the place, Melville warns, where

Transcendentalism or Platonism becomes tempting.88 It can be

both bracingly ecstatic and mortally imprudent to go aloft,

to scan, and to dream.

The flock of hundreds might “circle round first, with

all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to

8 Moby Dick, many editions, Ch. 35, “The Mast Head.”

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reconnoiter you before they leave these parts.” Or, having

reconsidered, they settle down again on the waters of the

marsh. Gulls don't just fly, but are “wheeling,” even as the

river and its words wheel on and on, the moving waters

holding the image of moving birds.

Thoreau gives us “countless mice and moles and winged

titmice,” letting a repeated “m” hum us forward in

translatability, and with “mice” next to winged “titmice,” it

is we who acquire wings, as both sounds and species fly by in

passing perception. Our muskrats are “wet and cold, with no

fire to warm them by.” Thoreau adds sotto voce “so far as we

know.” Perhaps, this is an offhand, but serious question:

What do we in fact know of the other, of each other? What

cold or fire lies in their homes? Muskrats swim “for dear

life,” haunted by dangers, real or imagined, hurrying to a

familiar haven, “their labored homes rising here and there

like haystacks.” There is a time for safe harbor.

Cranberries are cranberries, of course, but not only

that as the poet's eye, the translator's eye, finds them

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“tossed on the waves and heaving up on the beach, their

little red skiffs beating about among the alders.” They may

sail through the chop as if in heaven—or be tossed up on the

beach as wrecks. Perhaps, other skiffs are “beating about” on

the way to Labrador, or beating their way up the Merrimack

toward Agiocochook, “Home of the Great Spirit.” These skiffs

journey- ing outward are also skiffs seeking safe harbor by

an alder, and also just cranberries rising and falling,

bobbing, on wavelets on the edge of a watery meadow.

Thoreau finds across the wind-swept marshes, in

travelers here and there, “such healthy natural tumult [as]

proves the last day is not yet at hand.” And why not add,

“Let us therefore cast off the hour of dark- ness and put on

the garments of light.”9

Here, we have religion. These images and words tie us

back into an overflowing, unfinished reality, a Creation,

against the ache of loss. Religio is a re-sewing of torn

ligaments, a repair that reanimates what so easily becomes

9 Romans 13:12, KJV: “The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let ustherefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.”

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bare routine and quiet desperation. It aims to suture that

and to staunch inescapable pain. Religion does not tie up a

torn creed or belief. It repairs to let life course through

broken bodies and spirits. Thoreau's writing gives us the

transforming and transformed radiance of things in ongoing

creation. We are transformed as things transform before the

religious poet's attentive eye.

The writing enacts a philosophical, religious, literary-

poetic way of life, walking, seeing, and hearing in

imagination-drenched tactile immersion. We sense a way of

taking up with the world and of being happy to be of it. Yet

seeking life and serenity can miserably fail. Does the

emphasis fall on loss or return, on despair, or exultation?

Reality is difficult and gives us reasons for both.10

Thoreau is startled into life and invites us along. With

Isaiah, he will “go out in joy” where “mountains and hills

will burst into song . . . and all the trees of the field

10 See Cora Diamond on “Difficult Reality,” in Philosophy and Animal Life, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe,New York: Columbia UP, 2008.

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will clap their hands.”1111 This is miles from Galileo and

Newton, who manage to bury nature in a whirl of colorless

atoms and soundless mechanical parts.

Wheeling gulls and red cranberry skiffs assure Thoreau

(and us) that the end of the world is not quite at hand. “The

end of the world is not yet” appears in Thoreau's Journals

(April 2, 1852), in the context of reflections on poetry:

“The sun climbs to the zenith daily high over all literature

and science . . . the sun of poetry and of each new child

born into the planet has never been . . . brought nearer by a

telescope. So it will be to the end of time. The end of the

world is not yet” (qtd. in Walls 5).12

Poetry encompasses all living knowledge and literature;

it delivers worlds as fresh and new as a newborn child.

Worlds are born again in poetry, Thoreau tells us, just as

11 Isaiah 55:12.12 This Journal entry is quoted in Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humbolt and the Shaping of America, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Walls traces an ill-conceived opposition between literature and science that emerges with twentieth- and twenty-first-century professionalization. Also, see Cora Diamond's “Knowing Tornadoes and Other Things,” New Literary History 22, no.4 (1991); she shows science (the meteorologist's tornadoes) and poetry (a writer's evocation of its lived-presence) as affording compatible modes of perception and knowledge.

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the sun rises each day. This truth cannot be made a whit

stronger by appeal to a telescope (or to Newton, or to a

science of the brain). There is ample time, accordingly, for

receiving the world, articulating it for others, enjoying it

(such as we may). Wallace Stevens declares, “The search for

reality is as momentous as the search for God,” and reality

is as wondrous and terrible as the poets foretell (465).13

Transcendentalism as Transformative Practice

“Transcendentalism” is a term of cataloging convenience, and

if Thoreau is tucked in this drawer, it would be in virtue of

his walking and writing practice, each the inside of the

other.14 He evokes lively meanings from an object of

attention (a cranberry), giving them out to birth and

renewal. Then, he brings them back to inhere in the singular

immanence from which we began—a bounteous particular now seen

13 See Joel Porte's discussion of Thoreau's Faith and its affinities with Wallace Steven's poem featuring Professor Eucalyptus, in Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed, New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.14 Walking affords an openness to the world, taking it in; writing (and its cognate, thinking) are ways of making that intake available to otherswho can, in reading, share that walking.

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better, now better seen. Each movement, out and back, is the

inside of the other. Expressive drawing out is expressive

giving back.

Things are the other side of their meanings. Particulars

that are poetically rendered occupy amphibious, anomalous

zones. In their liveliness, they break through regions,

districts, matrixes, and boundaries. A cranberry, a fruit, is

itself and is also a rigged sailing ship—and a little red

skiff. Amphibious, anomalous zones lie where the truncated

meanings of the prosaic lap over the ever extending, ever

transcending meanings each ordinary thing (or congeries of

things) contains.

Birds high above waters and above grasses create a

vertical axis that extends down to reeds and alewives,

riverbed fish, and pebbled bottoms. Singularities radiate

“surface-up and surface-down” (vertically). Concord River

becomes one of many tributaries, as if any given site (a

river) were a nodal point in a skein of unfolding strands.

Singularities radiate “sideways” (transversally). The

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Musketaquid- Concord belongs with the Euphrates and Nile—

timeless rivers attaining a kind of eternity through backward

identities. Singularities move to and fro and radiate back

and forth temporally, back to the Nile and forward to the

openness ahead (“our last hour is yet” [Thoreau, Week

7]).1515 These “things” in temporal and spatial motion form

and inhabit an anomalous reality, as difficult as it is

wondrous.

Thoreau anchors his unique “transcendentalism” in the

diurnal and immanent, even as these radiate otherness, pasts,

futures, heights, or depths. Affinities radiate among things

of land, river, and sky (alders, shad, or gulls) and each

affords the poet's eye more than a bio- logical or Newtonian

presence. They convey bounteousness and lack, fulfillment and15 Laura Walls contrasts “bottom-up,” Thoreauvian empirical holism with “top-down,” non-Thoreauvian rationalist holism: Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and 19th Century Natural Science, Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995: 60–93. The “whole” in such holism is achieved in various glimpses and portraits from here and now. The idea of a single, timeless map of the world is an illusion. The idea of an unending multiplicity of maps, each aiming for a holistic prospect (and sometimes achieving a partial one apt to its aim), is healthy and necessary. We live in a map-littered reality we inherit and become. There is no cause to despair in the knowledge that a single full map, the mother of all maps, is as chimerical as “the view from nowhere.” Living with multiplicity is just maturity.

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despair, skill and terrible flailing. Muskrats swim for dear

life, cranberries beat upwind, and thunder forbiddingly

roars. And Thoreau gives us also the “not yet” of a world. It

is not caged into its present forms. He is free to anticipate

and find the next morning's joys and delights.

Who are the Poets?

The poet's eye—Thoreau's eyes and words—give us John Brown,

the martyr for abolition, who Thoreau calls the only true

transcendentalist. Brown commits to ideals and follows

through. Perhaps, John Brown had a poet's eye for truths not

yet of the world. A traveler constantly encounters things not

yet of his common world. As a writer and traveler, Thoreau

puts himself in the way of things that his poetic eye and ear

can take in. John Brown and Thoreau, despite their

differences, can each harbor poets within. Furthermore,

poetic reception and rendition are not elitist prerogatives.

Thoreau's neighbors are neither near-saints (or wild

insurrectionists), like John Brown, nor by any ordinary

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standard, poets. Nonetheless, they assume the work of poetry

and of living transcendentally.

You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their

castles, or teaming up their summer's wood, or chopping alone in the

woods; men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and

rain, than a chestnut is of meat, who were out not only in ‘75 and 1812,

but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or

Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never

took to the way of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they

might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not

written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and

scratching, and har- rowing, and plowing, and sub soiling, in and in,

and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they

had already written for want of parchment. (A Week 8)

Thoreau had a healthy respect, even love, for men of the

field, and I would not exclude women: think of the alluring

lass on the slopes of Mt. Greylock, with whom he imagines

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spending some days.16 And this reputed curmudgeon could write

on “Friday” of A Week,

I pass along the streets of our village of Concord on the day of our

annual Cattle-Show, when it usually happens that the leaves of the

elms and buttonwoods begin first to strew the ground under the

breath of the October wind, the lively spirits in their sap seem to

mount as high as any plow-boy's let loose that day; This [is an]

autumnal festival, when men are gathered in crowds in the streets as

regularly and by as natural a law as the leaves cluster and rustle by

the wayside. . . . I love these sons of earth, every mother's son of them,

with their great hearty hearts rushing tumultuously in herds from

spectacle to spectacle, as if fearful lest there should not be time

between sun and sun to see them all, and the sun does not wait more

than in hayingtime. (358)

Of Time and the River: Life Lived, Life Dying

16 The role of household women in Thoreau's life, the shock of his losing a marriage bid, and his “domesticity” and “gender blurring” are topics recently under fascinating and overdue discussion. See, for example, Laura Dassow Walls, “Walden as Feminist Manifesto.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 1.1 (1993): 137–44. Reprinted in Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings, 3rd edition, ed. William Rossi. New York: Norton, 2008: 521–27.

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To truly sense things of the moment is to sense their

eternity. On “Friday” of A Week, we are given the good news

that “We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses

can furnish . . . ” “May we not see God?” (382).1717 Through

the senses, past, future, and the eternal saturate things of

the moment. In “Concord River,” after giving us muskrats

swimming for dear life, and noting that “the end of the world

is not quite at hand,” Thoreau writes of the divine, “As

yester- day and the historical ages are past, as the work of

to-day is present, so some flitting perspectives and demi-

experiences of the life that is in nature are in time

veritably future, or rather outside to time, perennial,

17 Consider, also, the line (already mentioned) from Ch. 2 in Walden, “God culminates in the present moment.” On Thoreau's view that the sensesare portals to heaven see Mooney, “Wonder and Affliction: Thoreau's Dionysian World,” in Thoreau's Significance for Philosophy, ed. Rick Furtak and Jonathon Ellsbury, New York: Fordham UP, 2011, and Mooney's “Thoreau's Translations,” Lost Intimacy, Ch. 12. For an account of the education of the senses and perception in the never-ending achievements of moral sensibility, see Sabina Lovibond, Ethical Formation, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Also, see Mooney, “Passionate Speech and the Dark Woodsof a Life,” Listening, A Journal of Religion and Culture, Fall (2011). For an account of how close readings can—and should—bypass post-structuralism, see “‘They practice their trades in different worlds’: Concepts in Post-structuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy,” Toril Moi, New Literary History, Volume 40, Number 4, Autumn 2009, 801–24.

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young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die” (Week

8).

His prelude to A Week ends with a meditation on the

river's amble through time, carrying in her easy gait life

lived and life dying:

I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the

current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the

system, with time, and all that is made; the weeds at the bottom gently

bending down the stream, shaken by the watery wind, still planted where

their seeds had sunk, but ere long to die and go down likewise. (Week 12)

These last words—“ere long to die and go down likewise”—close

out his thoughts on moving forward. But the river in flow,

that would-be emblem of progress, slows to a stop well short

of tragedy. Paradoxically, speaking of inescapable death

occurs in tones that resonate as a ringing affirmation of all

life.

There is death. But Thoreau also takes a vantage

“outside to time, perennial, young, divine.” Flow is

anomalously in “the ephemeral here and now” and also in “the

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lastingly out-of-time.” In the last words of “Concord River,”

Thoreau turns to the singular, the particular, as the portal

to meaning in time. He yields himself up to the river, ready

to be carried downstream and elsewhere, in serene being with

time: “the shining pebbles, not yet anxious to better their

condition, the chips and weeds, and occasional logs and stems

of trees that floated past, fulfilling their fate, were

objects of singular interest to me, and at last I resolved to

launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear

me” (Week 713).

Postlude: The Romance of Literature and Philosophy

What have poets to do with philosophers? What do both have to

do with the sort of personal narrative that we find in A

Week? Perhaps, a poet is in the business of challenging a

hardening of words to firm (and too familiar) anchors. Thus,

we find Thoreau loosens our perception of “Concord River ” by

extending the name back toward “Musketaquid,” or in Cape Cod,

loosens the sands back toward their reign as an arm of New

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France. A shift in name can stretch our sense of time and

place, which can be a poetic, philosophical, and

transformative expansion.

Stanley Cavell links philosophy to autobiography, making

its writing an instance of passionate and poetic speech—not

just a series of lawyer-like arguments, or analyses of social

contracts, for instance.18 The models of philosophy he

inherits straddle literature and autobiography: Rousseau's

Reveries; Thoreau's A Week; Kierkegaard's The Point of View;

Montaigne's Essays. To accept this convergence of literature,

philosophy (and, we should add, religiously redemptive

writing) means setting aside a standing cultural anxiety.

Lacking the hoary age of poetry and religion, the younger

philosophy splits off to establish its separate identity. As

part of this forceful splitting, it bears grudges, quarreling

with its sponsors—those “crude,” “irrational” passions

associated with tragedy, myth, music, and poetic

intoxication.

18 See Mooney, “Passionate Speech” and also (on Cavell), Lost Intimacy, Chs. 6 and 7.

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Perhaps, Thoreau's slant toward moments of “meaning in

life,” not to mention his passion and poetry, put him at the

margins of much dry contemporary philosophy. Yet there are

striking moments that are incontestably philosophical, as

when he characterizes our world (in Kantian terms) as

“answering to our conceptions” (Walden 97). Cavell points

this out and hints further that Thoreau can be seen as giving

us a Kant-like “transcendental deduction” of each word he

writes.19 This is to speak of “transcendence” in a Kantian

way, not as a “transcendental experience” and not as a

reference to a realm of Ideas, Categories, or (in Emerson's

terms) Intuitions. To speak of a Kant-like “transcendental

deduction” of a concept or category is to determine what the

conditions for the application of a concept must be. Cavell

hints that Thoreau's poetic improvisations, fantasies, and

innovations give us, in their utterance, their own basis and

validation, their “transcendental deduction,” word by word.

19 Thoreau, Walden, ed. by J. Lyndon Shanley, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971; Cavell, The Senses of Walden, New York: VikingPress, 1972; also “The Division of Talent,” Critical Inquiry, 11.4 (June 1985): 519–38.

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They carry their conditions of applicability in the risk and

success of their utterance, as they conjure the things that

they utter.

If this is Thoreau, he's aiming at considerably more

than Kant, who attempts to give a transcendental grounding

only to categories like “causality.” Thoreau is aiming at

more than Kant does in grounding “a metaphysics of morals,”

and much more than Kant attempts in grounding reason-giving

in a need of reason. If Thoreau wants a grounding of each

word he writes, it would be a grounding of each thing that

words word—each thing in the flow of his writing, a writing

that is adjunct to, or the other side of, a natural unfolding

of things with their words (each being the inside of the

other, each legitimating the other). Can this be believed?

Thoreau “grounds” Concord River (both the mobile site of

life and the words of A Week) by exposing multiple impacts

and surprises, breakthroughs of meaning. The meanings of

Musketaquid and alder are linked to ever-expanding networks—

alders giving refuge to cranberries, the Meadow River flowing

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down to the maw of the sea. Each thing and word is caught up

in living-and-dying, in what Wittgenstein called the “stream

of life” and its “natural history.”

The grounding of words in train with associated

meanings-of- things is linked testimony, the testimony of the

poet linking things and words to their grounds. This brings

philosophy to autobiography. By establishing his concrete

location (or a semblance of this) in the writing of A Week,

Thoreau shows us where he stands (with regard to his words

and the things he words). This gives his testimony the weight

it has, the best justification we can have. If we are

convinced that this grounding is adequate, that should be all

we need. Thoreau gives weight to the translation of a “mere”

muskrat into a muskrat “swimming for dear life,” who aims for

“the warmth of a fire.” Can I give the poet the precise

weight that he means his words to have? Grounding these words

depends on Thoreau's skills as he stands behind them, and

also on my finding them credible, on my standing with them.

The force of words grasps us and alters who we are and

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our perceptions. The “bottom line” is not a stock, standard-

issue literal attachment of timeless name to unwavering

thing. This is a fantasy of a one-to-one correspondence or

perfect fit. The bottom line is whether and how we buy into

the force of our words and accept our immersions in words and

worlds. It is whether and to what extent we acknowledge their

felt-weight and find it altered and settled down in ongoing

conversational negotiations of their weight. We are

conversational creatures with bottom-line capacities for

communicative mutuality. We talk out our credibility with

each other, talk out our contacts with the world, and with

ourselves (and suffer our lost credibility and contacts,

too). Making sense, feeling our weight, and getting

confidence in the weight of our words, is a shared venture, a

community trust.

The experienced force or weight of words can lead us to

words commonly called “literal,” and others called “figural.”

When our culture (or conversation) gets too obsessed with

“the literal,” perhaps, our weight should shift to honor “the

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figural.”

Of course no word, or string of them, is either literal

or figural “in itself.” Yet Rousseau, in On the Origin of

Language, was surely right that in some sense figurative

meaning precedes the literal, and that our first utterances

are inevitably analogical, or signs of what William Day calls

“a sudden aspectual vision” (212).20 To say that the

figurative is first is to break free from the presumption

that it is an ornament clinging to a more basic literality.

It is to say that anything that presents itself presents

itself under an aspect, and no aspect is in itself literal

(or for that matter, figural). We negotiate, case by case,

how to take the proposed contrast, or whether to grant it at

all.

Being struck by a non-wooden, poetic aspect to things,

and articulating this aspect, can be a notable

20 See William Day, “On Wanting to Say Something: Aspect Blindness and Language,” in William Day and Victor Krebs, Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010, 204–24.

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accomplishment. Words like death, love, attachment,

adventure, and friend can become hardened. Discovering their

poetry is discovering their life (and the life in the world

for which the words are happy adjuncts). More complicated

word-strings, like “the freedom of rivers,” or “an ache for

salvation,” may need release from encasement as well. Reading

in the humanities, reading Thoreau, is a communal,

communicative venture that we trust will end, on good days,

in a release of both words and cognate ranges of experience.

We fight to save language and our perceptions and ourselves

from cold storage.

The literal is not “the natural,” but its loss. We start

as children with a naturally anomalous shifting surround, and

as we grow, the poetic edges and centers of experience retain

that anomalous surround. We begin with an unfolding world

that is just too shifting, and our verbal tracking of it just

too improvisatory, to yield anything like a stable and all-

purpose center.

We begin life exercising prodigious translation and

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decoding abilities. Some of us live on to decipher worlds far

beyond the child's. We happen on a poem of Emily Dickinson,

or a page from Finnegan's Wake, or Thoreau's A Week. We live to

decipher the weight and meaning of words and things that bud

and burgeon in ever-more-intricate, enticing, and terrifying

figurations—and all too often, we fall back into fine phrases

and chatter, not worth hearing, cold, like jokes gone stale.

Of course, the literal and prosaic flourish usefully in

stretches of scientific, bureaucratic, and practical

discourse. They are of immeasurable help in getting on in the

prosaic world. But in a full life neither the prosaic nor the

figural are dispensable.

What about criticism—literary or philosophical? My

writing on “Concord River” will succeed if the words I write

and the associated things worded are “grounded.” This happens

in part holistically. One word-set overlaps others, in a

mutual network of reinforcement and support. Words gain

weight through holistic inter-animations and also gain force

as I stand by each strand (or aspect) of interweaving

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meanings. I stand by things inhabiting something like an

anomalous zone (a cranberry becoming a skiff ). Or perhaps I

don't stand by them, dis- missing them as humor or “mere

metaphor” or “a pretty turn of phrase” (Ha! Cranberries

becoming skiffs!). Words stand or fall as my credibility in

wording them stands or falls—as my (or Thoreau's)

intelligibility stands or falls in writing of muskrats

swimming for dear life toward a hut with no warming fire.

Authority does not rest in any book of rules or congress

of priests. It rests in mutual trust, as I offer an image or

thing as possessed of great import, and you take that

offering in good faith (or not), and you weigh the image,

thing, or word collaboratively with me (and with others) in

extended dialogs tending toward embrace, and acknowledgment

(or disdain and dismissal).

Do we enter different terrain when we think of meshing

words, not with “mere things, objects,” but with things of

importance, that matter, like ideals or aspirations? The

quick answer is “No.” Thoreau's hopes, convictions, and

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despairs ebb and flow in force or weight as we do or do not

find his words credible, say those in praise of John Brown.

He offers John Brown as a martyr, marking his death as a

break through to glory. Unlike Washington or Franklin, Brown

died for something; Franklin and Washington merely “went

missing.”21 The effort of grounding his words of praise,

fixing them to glorious ideals, resembles the exertion in

reading Thoreau's remark that only a few have learned “the

art of walking,” that “Concord River” is perhaps only a

temporary replacement of the name “Musketaquid”—“Concord”

will be withdrawn when we recognize that concord, harmony,

has disappeared. Will we find it credible that Cape Cod's

marriage to New England dissolves a previous marriage to

France? Should we acknowledge that it was once New France?

Knowledge swept by tidal currents is not always

despairingly uncertain. It carries its certitude with the

same flair as my knowledge that crabs belong to the sea and

21 See Mooney, “Thoreau's Translations”.

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to the land, or that my back door threshold belongs to the

inside and to the outside of the house. Aspectual knowledge

can shift, but it is no more at risk in a debilitat- ing

sense than my footing is at risk as I stand amidst the

advance and retreat of the tide. Nothing about being caught

in its anomalous ebb and flow necessarily destabilizes my

footing. Balance is maintained. Knowing that crabs inhabit

land-and-sea increases their intelligibility. Recognizing

lawless zones is a net gain. Stability is negotiated in the

flow of conversation, of reading and writing, of walking

meditations that release poetic imagination. This grounding

of the poetic is not chimerical or “just a brand of

relativism.” It is robustly relational, negotiable, and

improvisational—as when I know I am on terra firma (or not)

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as waves rush at my shins.22

A Romantic Take on Kant's “Thing in Itself”

Kant says we cannot have knowledge of “the thing in itself.”

This makes it an excess or superfluity—or, in a different 22 A group of Concord intellectuals called themselves “transcendental- ists” in tribute to what they knew of Kant's “transcendental philosophy.”But the banner meant many things. When Thoreau calls John Brown a “true transcendentalist,” he means a man who lives high ideals, someone who transcends moral mediocrity. On the other hand, “The Transcendental Club”of Boston saw itself following the spirit of German Philosophy—Kant, but also his Romantic and idealistic successors. Frederick Hedge returned from Germany afire with Kant, Herder, Fichte, Schiller, Kant, Coleridge, and others, who offered, it seemed, a lofty moral philosophy. It stressed, in Kant's phrase, the enlightenment of “mankind's coming into its maturity” or an “exit from its self-incurred immaturity.” This liberation would occur through a critical reason set to undermine illiberal, authoritarian, and clerical abuse. (This essential sense of ‘enlightenment’ is lost on many of its recent critics.) Allied with imagination, reason could provide intuitions (notions not derived directly from worldly experience)—for instance, with Kant, “intuitions” about the role of regulative ideals like Morality and Freedom. Many transcendentalists were Ex-Unitarian Ministers who endorsed the new biblical criticism from Germany: the search for the historical Jesus yielded a fully human moral exem- plar who transcended the moral mediocrity. They endorsed an active, world- shaping mind, energized by the productive imagination, closely linked to Kant's idea of artistic genius. Kant had denied cognitive access to the thing-in-itself. Decoupled from accountability to it, imagination and poetry were set free. See Phillip Gura, American Transcendentalism: a History, New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. Thoreau writes, “The boundaries of the actual are nomore fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imagination.” (Journals, Vol. 203). The imagination stretches our apprehension of ‘the actual’, permitting transformation—for ‘the actual’ is not fixed through time and place, but changes, ahead and behind our perceptions of it. And the actual is not immune to our articulations of it. Consider Buber: “Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them; by being spoken they establish a mode of existence.” [I and Thou, 73] In Cavell'smoral perfectionism, imagination clears a path to the less imperfect persons we can be. The boundaries of my actuality are elastic. Persons

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register, a guarantor of finitude in knowing. We know we are

finite because we know there is always something further we

cannot know. (I may know today that hurricane Isabel began

forming five thousand miles south of the equator, but I could

not know that two years ago.) But what if we have access to

the thing in itself through some modality other than

knowledge. After all, knowledge regulated by determinate

concepts (the sort Kant had in mind) is not our sole access

to the world. If I am struck by the wonder of sunset, being

impressed by it is not a matter of knowing it.

This encounter can be strictly observational. There is

something I know (the sun descends to the left of that pine).

But what of an encounter that entrances or strikes or

afflicts me? If I wince at the piercing light, or am

continually transcend their latest version of their worlds and the selvesthey can be: imagination reveals that morally we are never beyond reproach; so we need to imagine an improved self (to make actual). See Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008, and Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. Thoreau took philosophy to be as unfinished and non-systematic as the self, and thought philosophy should be devoted to the care of the unfinished self. His imagination takes him to Concord's jail; his transfiguring experience travels transcendentally to suffuse the imaginations Gandhi and King, thus remaking the actual world.

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entranced by its wonder, an aspect of sunset arrives in a way

other than having it as an object for observational knowing

only. I am struck by its wondrousness, or take it as a fiery

descent to the underworld, or a reminder that departure is

both invigorating and depressing. Can I get you to see that

it is not just the thing to the left of the pine?

If “the thing in itself” is not superfluous or an

illusion, it reminds us that knowledge is limited (there is

always more to know). And it also reminds us that, behind a

happening, say of the sun going down (which may be only of

meteorological interest), there is also available, as an

aspect of its going down, the sun as a locus of the beauty of

sunset (for example). We might say that beauty resides hidden

but waiting to appear from a reservoir of unanticipated

meanings that we clumsily call “the thing in itself.” The sun

holds meteorological interest, available as knowledge, and

holds endless other aspects, a wide and deepening associative

aspectual field—for example, the sunset can strike us as a

wonder. Any number of aspects are available in ways other

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than observational knowing. Hence, we do not know the thing-

in-itself, but we can be struck, overtaken, or enchanted, by

emanations from it.

A moment of awe (or terror) is not a failure to secure

knowledge of a “thing” in itself. That moment makes me regard

something as presenting an aspect above or beyond what can be

measured or observed by just anyone. A “power to convey awe”

is not a Newtonian aspect of the object now hovering on the

horizon; yet it is an aspect of the self- same sun I had

identified as worthy of observation—now available under a

different aspect. The sun that Newton triangulates is the sun

full of enchantments.

Let's say that Thoreau's writing grounds something like

Kant's “thing-in-itself.” This means that we take a “double

aspect” (rather than a “two object”) view of Kant's notion.

There are not two objects, one in appearance, the other

unknowable and “behind” it. There is one object that holds a

number of aspects, available sequentially or simultaneously.

First is the aspect that affords (let's call it)

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observational knowledge: the sun sets just to the left of the

oak. However, a sun known observationally or meteorologically

is partially eclipsed when the same sun gives me something

else, more, or other. It might lose its aspect of

“thinghood,” appearing as an indistinct blur of orange. Or it

may become a force that sweeps me away in wonder or deflates

my hopes for an unchanging serenity. In any case, the

wondrous or deflationary force, or its capacity to blur, are

aspects that belong as much to the sun as its meteorological

aspects do. A storm's fury, a desert's quiet, a wind's roar

are aspects of storms, deserts, or winds—aspects as real as

their meteorological features.

To give a “transcendental deduction” of “the thing in

itself” can mean to explicate a region of possibility

correlative to an object of observation. Whatever focuses my

meteorological interest can also focus my wonder, dread of

passing, or pure delight. To give an elaboration of being

struck by a sunset's wonder is to offer the conditions for

that occasion, as it were. It is to offer for your

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consideration a “deduction of the thing in itself.” Can I

convince an interlocutor that I am struck by an aspectual

reality just as weighty as the aspectual reality amenable to

meteorological knowing?

In wonder, the mind does not stop at information (of

this or that) but goes further. It will travel beyond our

familiar itch to explain (this or that). Wonder (or

devastation, or delight) are not there to be explained, or to

ground practical interests or instrumental appropriations.

Here is Emily Dickinson:

And then a plank in reason, broke,

And I dropped down and down

—And hit a world at every plunge,

And finished knowing—then— (“280” lines 17-20)

When we “hit a world at every plunge” and find we've

“finished knowing then,” the mind and heart leave off prying

for more data, for explanations, or more knowing. They are

patient with rain or a slant of sun, are stopped here and

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now, not in knowing, or knowing why, but in wonder.

Dickinson finds “a plank in reason break”—she falls and

falls. But having finished knowing, gripped in the fearful

immediacy of an utter absence of “grounds of reason,” or

knowing why, she nevertheless finds worlds remain. Worlds

without justifying grounds, we might say. One can “finish

knowing” and still fall in love, plunge into dread, or slip

into grief or delight. Each “fall” or “plunge” or “slip” can

eventuate in the revelation of things in a world. Each

interruption of her fall, each world-encounter, shows up as a

way of being in the world, a way of being that begins despite

groundlessness, despite the death of knowing.23 She “hit a

world at every plunge / and finished knowing— then—” (lines

19-20).

Thoreau remarks in his essay “Walking” that “The highest23 A philosophy like Thoreau's is upbeat, but not unaware of desolation.He doesn't need to seek an unassailable knowledge because he is not writing to demonstrate certainties, but to brace the soul. His thinking is open toward an intimate, tentative knowledge, knowing as a Biblical, poetic, figural touch with things, and so is not finished when a plank ofreason (“strict knowledge”) breaks. And the sort of ‘grounding’ we can effect (when we do) through conversations with others, ‘trying out’ our intuitions and convictions in a Cavell-like enterprise relying on trust and acknowledgments, occurs at a different moment than the experience of giddy or desperate ‘falling’ as Dickinson’s ‘plank of reason breaks.’

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we can attain to is not Knowledge but Sympathy with

Intelligence” (Essays 172). Perhaps, he means that our

highest, most fulfilling attunement to the world comes when

we are alert for news, for local “Intelligence,” as the world

gives its news under the aspects of love, dread, grief, or

delight, and as that news comes from this alder or that rock,

or comes from the surround given in grand vistas. We have

sympathy with, that is, openness toward, intelligence

secreted our way in pouches others will miss. Only an

attentive sympathy and affinity with such news can deliver us

to sustaining worlds, when knowledge-as-data, or knowledge-

as-explanation, run out (as they must), and new life

begins.24

24 Thoreau does not hold the hyper-Romantic view that scientific (twentieth-century style) knowledge kills poetic evocation, or necessarily leads to an objectified self empty of life. Although our universities in the past fifty years have shifted financial resources away from humanities and toward vocational–professional training and scientific enterprise—threatening the survival of poetry and the humanities—Thoreau (and so many others) attest to the mutuality of the worlds, on the one hand, that science unveils, and on the other, the wonders and poetic celebrations of those worlds. Nevertheless, it's disheartening to see not only the academy but a wide swath of high- and middle-brow culture, and the bureaucratic business social order, tilt thoughtlessly toward the primacy of the scientifically factual and dispassionate theoretical, oblivious to the silencing of the poetic. Poetic and figural speech and writing become marginalia, consigned to theside-street of entertainment or cocktail party polish.

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The retrieval of the poetic, as I envisage it, is not a

nostalgic or sentimental wish for a different, enchanted

time. It embodies a realism of the locally poetic that

resists the ever-encroaching claims to Empire by regimens of

value-deaf science and technology, or cold common sense. It

is resistance, in the academic world, to a dominance of just-

the-facts research, critical unmasking, or varieties of

vanguard theory that leave behind the felt-weight of words

and our experiences with them. The emergence of a

disenchanted world is familiar enough. It is chilling but

also heartening (I think of advances in medical technology).

But accepting the neo-Galilean world as a given does not rule

out an adjunct world of enchantments. My alders can be

thirsty and yearn for spring while I unstintingly know their

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cellular biology. There is no problem loving a lily while

loving its fit in an ecological niche. Thoreau knew both

loves, both ways of seeing, and saw no need to choose one

over the other, but relished their convergence. Knowing the

meteorology of tornadoes does not preclude being awed by

their power. Dickinson has us stopped (in wonder, in

surprise) by a world after knowledge is finished, and Thoreau

has us relish naming fish while longing to become them in

their liquid darting.25

25 In the body of “Concord River” I display the transformative mobile ebb and flow of the river in a way a poetic naturalist might, unaware of Laura Walls' book length studies of Thoreau's lively observation-based and poetic natural science: Seeing New Worlds, and of her recent The Passage to Cosmos. She speaks of a congeries of vital facts implicating awhole—a bottom-up empirical holism, as she dubs it (Cosmos 331). By different routes, and by different lexical schemata, we converge on the same Thoreau—indistinguishably poet- naturalist, naturalist-poet, poet-prophet-seer, and scientist-philosopher.

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WORKS CITED

Cavell, Stanley. Cities of Words, Pedagogical Letters on a

Register of the Moral Life. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008.

Print.

———. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1990. Print.

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———. “The Division of Talent.” Critical Inquiry 11.4 (June

1985): 519–38. Print.

———. The Senses of Walden. New York: Viking Press, 1972.

Print.

Cavell, Stanley, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking,

and Cary Wolfe. Philosophy and Animal Life. New York:

Columbia UP, 2008. Print.

Day, William, “Aspect Blindness and Language,” Seeing

Wittgenstein Anew: New Essays on Aspect-Seeing. Ed. William

Day and Victor J. Krebs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 204–

24. Print.

Diamond, Cora. “Knowing Tornadoes and Other Things.” New

Literary History 22.4 (Autumn, 1991): 1001–15. Print.

Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed.

Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1960.

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