Thoreau and the Future of the Senses

By Charles M. Stang

I have come to believe that Thoreau should be understood as part of a long lineage of seers and visionaries, going back, in the West, to Thales, who is often remembered as the first philosopher among the Greeks, and who declared that “everything is full of gods.”[1] It is said that what really distinguished Thales—why he possessed wisdom and why other early philosophers only the name “wisdom”—was his practice of seeing, or theôria in Greek.[2] Theôria is often translated as “contemplation” or “theory.” But what if theôria means just that, seeing? Thoreau asks, “Why not see, – use our eyes?”[3] Have we lost the art of seeing? Did we ever have it? What are we failing to see, or to sense more broadly?

In his essay, Russell Powell asks, “Why Transcendentalism? And why now?” and he finds unique resources in Transcendentalism for addressing our contemporary crisis of attention. He highlights Thoreau’s withdrawal to Walden Pond, in Russ’s words, “to test what could be seen, heard, and thought when life was pared to its essentials.” I agree with Russ: Thoreau is witness to a different way of attending to the world around us, a different way of seeing and sensing that in fact renders the world plural— there are many worlds, or as Thoreau prefers, there are many “Earths” yet to be seen, heard, and thought. 

Thoreau was acutely aware of the narrowing and degradation of our senses, anticipating our contemporary crisis. At the end of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau laments that “the ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out.”[4] And he writes this in the nineteenth century! 

One can only imagine how Thoreau might react to our weary, screen-struck eyes, and how he might marvel at how we divert any moment’s precious attention scrolling through some endless feed; or at how we distract ourselves with a nearly infinite choice of voices to pipe privately into our ears and images to flash before our faces. 

“Our present senses,” Thoreau writes, “are but rudiments of what they are destined to become.”[5] Take note that he does not pine for some sensory past. This is not a project of mere recovery or restoration. The life of the senses is both a deepening attention to the present and a means of growing into our future. “What is it, then, to educate, but to develop these divine germs called the senses?”[6] We are accustomed to thinking of “germs” as microscopic organisms that cause disease, but the word “germ” comes from the Latin germen, meaning a shoot, sprout, or bud; a germ, seed, or origin; or an embryo, or fetus. Our senses are destined to grow into something else, of which they are only “rudiments” or “germs,” fresh buds on their way to flower, a fragile fetus on its way to being born. “We are still being born,” Thoreau writes, “and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars.”[7]

To educate is to foster this future of the senses, to brighten this dim vision. Thoreau was certain that the Harvard of his day failed in that mission, and I’m just as certain that the Harvard of our day fails too. And probably Harvard must fail because fostering the future of the senses is decidedly not its aim. Like every other school, our school aims to cultivate common sense— the consensual and conventional senses. However, what is urgently needed, Thoreau claims, is the “uncommon sense,” “a sense which is not common.”[8] “But where is the instructed teacher?” Thoreau asks. 

We know where Thoreau found his: outdoors. He found it in what he called “the wild.” And in that school, he found plenty of instructed teachers, those sufficiently instructed in the uncommon sense to qualify as a teacher. Some of them were humans; most were not. The imperative “go outside” has become a cliché. But try it. Test it, as Thoreau liked to say. 

Thoreau says that “we need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life.”[9] Local Concord resident and writer Richard Higgins is surely right in his most recent book, Thoreau’s God: “Purely” here does not mean “only,” but rather means “cleansed and purified to behold the unseen and the unheard.”[10] Our senses are polluted. You probably already know intuitively that is true, and how to start your diet or detox: Take leave of cheap sights and sounds. You needn’t go very far to find the wild: “Go within one fold of this (world) which we appear to know so well.”[11] Emerson liked Almira Barlow’s definition of Transcendentalism as 'a little beyond'.”[12] To go into this world is its own kind of transcendence, what Thomas Berry prefers to call “inscendence.”[13]

In Greek, the Lord’s Prayer begins with “Our Father in the heavens,” or translated differently, “in the skies.” Thoreau tells us that the seer, senses purified, “will in the same sense speak of ‘the Earths,’ and his Father who is in them.”[14] To “live yet a natural life” is not to turn our eyes away from spirit, from sky to soil, to abhor the vertical in favor of the horizontal, to collapse the sphere into the plane.[15] To live a properly natural life is to begin to sense “a nature beyond the ordinary,” a super nature, a realm of spirit and of spirits, porous to the realm of nature.[16] “We live on the verge of another and purer realm,” Thoreau writes, “we live on the outskirts of that region.”[17] “This world has many rings, like Saturn, and we live now on the outmost of them all.”[18] “Earths” are just a walk away, but you first have to take a step in the right direction, plant a foot on the nearest inward ring. It can bear your weight. In fact, it wants to.

The uncommon is near to us and is common to us all. You need only find the nearest fold in the fabric of this world we think we know so well, and step gently but confidently through it. These folds are, in fact, our “common things,” our res publica, the true republic of which our politics, then and now, are but a sad reflection. There is another polity within reach, what the seventeenth-century Scottish folklorist Robert Kirk called “The Secret Commonwealth.”[19] What wealth we have in common, if only we could learn to sense it, if only we did not secret it from ourselves.

Today, hope seems in short supply. The worst among us are filling our skies with their blinking trinkets and trash and dreaming of leaving earth and the rest of us behind for the moon, for Mars, for the stars. Good riddance: The stars they reach for are but dead light. They will get no closer to their desired heaven because, like the “pathetic” travelers in search of ancient Troy in Thoreau’s day, “it is not near where they think it is.”[20] Yet, Thoreau writes, “I am not without hope that we may, even here and now obtain some accurate information concerning that other world which the instinct of mankind has so long predicted.”[21] His hope was fulfilled, as ours can be. That other world is waiting. Like Saturn with its rings, it has many skies and earths, all of them a step or a glance away. 

[1] André Laks and Glenn W. Most (eds. and trans.), Early Greek Philosophy: Beginnings and Early Ionian Thinkers, Part I (Harvard University Press, 2016), Thales §D10, pg. 237.

[2] Ibid., Thales §R3, pg. 241.

[3] Henry David Thoreau, Letters to a Spiritual Seeker (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 36.

[4] Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (The Library of America, 1985), 310.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 312.

[8] Ibid., 314.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Richard Higgins, Thoreau’s God (University of Chicago Press, 2024), 93.

[11] Thoreau, A Week, 310.

[12]Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 151.

[13]Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (Sierra Club Books, 1988), 207-8.

[14] Thoreau, A Week, 310.

[15] Ibid., 307.

[16] Ibid., 311. On the concept of the “super natural,” rather than the “supernatural,” see Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016). See also Higgins, Thoreau’s God, 64.

[17] Thoreau, A Week, 309, 311.

[18] Ibid., 312.

[19] Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth, of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies (New York Review Books, 2019). Philip Pullman borrowed Kirk’s title for the second volume of his trilogy, “The Book of Dust,” The Secret Commonwealth (David Fickling Books, 2019).

[20] Thoreau, A Week, 312.

[21] Ibid., 313.