Thoreau and the Sound of Thinking

I recently turned 50: I can no longer say, like Dante at the beginning of the Inferno, that I am “midway along life’s journey.” I am further than halfway down this path, or at least this stretch of it. Who knows how many parts there are to this whole, how many turns my or anyone’s path will take—and in the end, the trail might prove to have been a loop.

For my birthday, I was given a recent edition of Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” sometimes referred to as “The Wild.”[1] Thoreau wrote this essay as a lecture and first delivered it at the Concord Lyceum on April 23, 1851. He would go on to read this lecture a total of ten times in the next and last decade of his life, more than any of his other lectures. Of course, Thoreau did not know that 1851 marked the start of the last decade of his life, and likely still understood himself as midway along his own life’s journey. On his deathbed, he was revising the lecture for publication; it eventually appeared, posthu- mously, in The Atlantic Monthly in June of 1862.[2] Thoreau died the month before, on May 6.

I’ve read “Walking” several times, but this most recent time I read it with new eyes, eyes more attuned to dusk than to dawn. He speaks near the very end of the essay of a walk that took him to Spaulding’s Farm “the other afternoon”—a casual reference to time, as if, revising this essay from his deathbed, we are to believe that he had taken this walk recently. But to my ears, this
simple phrase suggests something else, something other: that Thoreau had enjoyed another afternoon, had entered some scene with “the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood,” lighting it up otherwise.[3]

In the paragraph just above, Thoreau reports that,

The walker in the familiar woods which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as it were in some far-away field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested.[4]

Earlier in the essay, he muses on what power or energy gently pulls us into this other land:

I believe there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world.[5]

Sometimes, walking a familiar path and pulled along by a subtle magnetism, one enters another land, in another afternoon. If the familiar Concord is “actual,” then this other Concord that Thoreau glimpsed is “interior” and “ideal.” The “actual” Concord is a symbol of the “ideal.” If “the idea” suggested by a place’s name ceases merely to be suggested, it must be because in this other land that very idea is. What only seems to be the case in one, is so in the other.

We are accustomed to thinking that the “actual” Concord is the “real” one, but Thoreau invites us into another reality. In his recent book, Thoreau’s God, Richard Higgins reminds us that Thoreau often distinguished between the “actual” and the “ideal,” which he also termed the “real” and the “spiritual.” Nature could be both fact and fable, depending on the angle at which one beheld it: “On one side of man is the actual, and on the other the ideal,” he wrote in his Journal[6] “We must look on the world with a drowsy and half-shut eye, that it may not be too much in our eye, and rather stand aloof from than within it. When we are awake to the real world, we are asleep to the actual. The sinful drowse to eternity, and the virtuous to time.”[7]

So, what—or rather, who—did Thoreau’s drowsy eye see in this other, but very real, Concord? To whom was his eventide consciousness awakened?

I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the woods as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me—to whom the sun was servant— who had not gone into society
in the village—who had not been called on.[8]

A skeptic will take refuge in the “as if ” here, or the “as it were” above, to preserve a fragile reality wherein such things, such a “shining family,” cannot exist. I do not wish to address myself to such a skeptic. Rather, I invite or even implore you to take Thoreau at his word. He means what he says: he met then and there, on that other, auburn afternoon and in that other Concord, “an ancient and altogether admirable and shining family,” a kin group to whom the sun was servant, whom neither he nor his Concord neighbors knew, and who had not sought out human society. He found a lost or forgotten pocket of luminous more-than-human persons – lost to us, that is, for they seemed to know exactly who and where they were.

What else does he report?

I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. [9]

Our vision struggles to see their realm: it is not “obvious”; there is something “in the way” (ob viam). The actual, like trees, grows through this reality, their ideal house, and to behold that abode we have to see the spaces in between branches. So too with our hearing, we are not certain: did I hear amidst the breeze something like a laugh? They seem to recline on sunbeams (again “seem” is safe harbor for the skeptic): they are beings of light—not, as we might expect them to be, children of the sun, but it is they whom the sun serves. They are a family, generations, and they are “quite well” despite our not knowing them, and their not knowing us. Neither they nor we call upon the other.

The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor—notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house.[10]

Our two worlds overlap, and yet each is ignorant of the other. Thoreau catches a glimpse or a murmur of theirs through the trees, and wonders whether they can ever see ours. Yes, he muses, we are to them like the muddy bottom of a pool which they can see dimly even as they focus their eyes on the water’s surface, reflecting the sky in which they dwell. They seem not to know us, or to care to know us better than they do already. But like a frog whose eyes break the water’s surface, Thoreau rises from the mud for a moment and beholds their reclining forms.

Why should we struggle to see them? What does such an encounter mean, or yield? From our amphibious vantage,

Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the
pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum—as of a distant hive in May—which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed. [11]

Thoreau glimpses their serene life free of politics and toil – two unhandsome human conditions he laments in Walden and elsewhere. If they are not weaving or spinning, that may be because their work does not take such crude forms as ours, in “knots and excrescences embayed.” So too, if they are of no politics, that may be because their polity does not take such crude form as ours. What might our work or polity have to learn from their luminous example? What Thoreau most clearly perceives, what he hears only when “hearing was done away,” is a hum, “as of a distant hive in May.” This sweet music is the sound of thinking—not idle thoughts, but perhaps what Pythagoras heard as the sound of the spheres. Their work is to think. 

That is why we should, with half-shut eye and hearing done away, exert effort to perceive these neighbors: they remind us that beyond the actual there are further layers of the ideal, other altitudes of the real, inhabited by many others, including these beings who sustain themselves and perhaps their world and ours by the work of thinking. Shall we call them “gods,” “spirits,” or perhaps daimones (sg. daimôn), a Greek word that can mean either or both? Higgins and others have remarked that Thoreau, like Emerson, viewed the Spiritualist movement of his day “with a skepticism bordering on contempt.” Spirits rapping on floorboards and tabletops was the purview of “idiots,” he quipped: “Concord is just as idiotic as ever in relation to the spirits and their knockings … The hootings of owls, the croakings of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison. [12] 

I agree: Thoreau did not believe there to be spirits active in Spiritualism. But caution is needed here precisely because we can too easily slip into a comfortable dismissal of spirits along with Spiritualism. We have become too comfortable with this portrait of the skeptical and nearly secular Thoreau: an eminent and immanent naturalist full of wonder and awe at earth’s flora, fauna, and flow. But as Hamlet said: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Thoreau’s nature is wild, and the wild refuses our attempts to settle it and fence it in; it has edges and depths we have yet to explore. Yes, the wild speaks through owls and frogs, ponds and rivers, the sun and stars, but also through voices to which our senses are even less attuned. Thoreau’s God might indeed be supernatural or beyond nature, or it might not. But in any case, between us humans and this singular God, between earth and ether, there are “more things in Heaven and Earth,” more things in and of nature, even more more-than-human persons to know. Rather than supernatural, they are, as both Higgins and Jeffrey J. Kripal attest, super natural, that is, they inhabit parts of the spectrum of nature with which, if ever we had communion and communication, we have now largely lost contact. Encountering them forces us to rewild nature, to admit their existence (both in the sense of acknowledge and allow entry), and to come to know them once again. 

Between us and Thoreau’s God, then, are Thoreau’s gods, what British folklorist Francis Young and others call “small gods,” “land spirits,” or “godlings”—or, as I prefer, augenblickgötter, “gods of the blink of an eye,” and “gods of the indefinite article.” These are gods of nature, intermediary beings for which every culture has not only taxonomies but accumulated wisdom for how to know, navigate, and negotiate with them. In England, as in New England, they are often associated with bodies of water, and indeed Thoreau sensed them along the shores of the ponds, rivers, and ocean he knew so well. They are not of one type, but many. In Spaulding’s Farm, he met one type, a family or kin group, and he heard them doing a particular kind of work: thinking. Others might do other work, just as beavers build dams, and bees hives. They are not quite immaterial; more likely, they are material in ways we do not yet understand. Perhaps, when straining to see or hear them, the very distinction between material and immaterial begins to dissolve. They coexist with owls and frogs, whose wild hootings and croakings Thoreau preferred to spirits’ rapping in parlors; and they probably speak with but also through their plant, animal, and fungi neighbors, just as they speak to us in the language of the sun’s reflection on water, or a constellation of stars. 

Thoreau concludes this episode in “Walking” with these words: 

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord [15] 

I don’t know when exactly Thoreau penned these final words, but knowing that he was revising this essay for publication on his deathbed makes them resonate differently, more powerfully and poignantly. Facing his own dusk, he struggles to remember this family of light, just as he had struggled to see and hear them on that other late afternoon. To recollect them, he must also recollect himself and his own best thoughts. He comes to understand that he is somehow a part of this family; he too, is their kin. His thoughts mingle with theirs, with the sweet musical hum of their thinking, and with long and serious effort, he becomes aware again that they live together, in the present. Thoreau died on May 6, listening, I’d like to think, to the sound of a distant hive in May—perhaps in the end not so distant. Were it not for them, he says, he would have moved out of Concord. He didn’t: he’s buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in the “actual” Concord. Is he, are they, still residents of Concord, seeming or real, actual or ideal? Wherever, whatever, and whoever they are now, I trust that they, and he, are quite well.