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Truth in the Water: Walden Pond as Analogy to Thoreau’s Concept of the Mind
What is the value of nature? This simple question was put before the Phi Beta Kappa members of Harvard University in 1837 by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who offered it as the most important issue that American scholars had to resolve in their own minds (American 45). It is the question which motivates countless debates, from Capitol Hill to local town-hall meetings. One of American Transcendentalism’s defining traits, both as a philosophy and as a social movement, was its immersion in nature. Transcendentalists looked to the natural world, still so immense and threatening to the early nineteenth century mind, as a model for, and a reflection of, the human soul (Transcendentalist 82-3, Writings 12:201). Henry David Thoreau embraced the idealistic philosophies of Emerson, but also, more than any of his friends, embraced the materialistic philosophies of the empirical scientific method as well. Throughout his life and writing, Thoreau struggled to find balance and connection between these two spheres: the Ideal and the Material. He was able to find a balance between the two and in no other place can this balance be better seen than in his work while living on the banks of Walden Pond. Thoreau used his observations and descriptions of Walden Pond itself to exemplify his own epistemological beliefs. In Thoreau’s skillful hands the water of Walden Pond becomes a symbol for his understanding of the human mind.
Thoreau’s epistemology is complex and layered, which will come as no surprise to any careful reader of Thoreau. It is far beyond the scope of this essay to attempt a full explanation of his philosophical grounding; however there are three major aspects of Thoreau’s epistemological thought that should be kept in mind while analyzing Walden. First is his Transcendental understanding of human perception itself, second is his recognition of the shifting nature of mediums of perception, and third is his attempt to break down the culturally created schemata that Thoreau understood as the mediator of human perception.
The Romanticist’s epistemology, which incorporates the Transcendentalist’s, can be seen as a reaction to the professional scientific-empiricism which dominated the intellectual circles of his day (Newman 111; Tauber 20; Walls 17). The empirical positivist, or Materialist, as Emerson calls them, attempts to separate absolutely the subject from the object it observes, so that the observation made by the subject is not in any way tainted by the subject (Emerson 82; Tauber 20). The Romanticists saw that not only did this philosophy of separation promise a meaningless existence for mankind, it was also impossible to completely separate the subject from the object. As Laura Walls points out in Seeing New Worlds, the European Romanticists and the American Transcendentalists both sought for an understanding, “which encouraged the subject to ‘know’ by seeing correspondence in the worlds objects, as if they were the mirror of the self” (147). To Emerson, Thoreau, and their circle of acquaintances, all perception was naturally subjective because all perception takes place in the human mind. Therefore the human was a partial creator of his or her own world, and one’s perception of the natural world was a reflection of one’s very soul. This Transcendental epistemology did not discount the reality of an external, objective world, nor did it dismiss the role of the physical senses in creating perceptions, but it did emphasize the role of the active human mind in creating the images, sounds, tastes, and sensations through which humans interact with their world. It was of this partnership between the physical senses and the mind in creating our perception of the natural world that Wordsworth spoke when he wrote in “Lines Composed a few Miles Above Tinturn Abbey,” that his ears and eyes “half perceive and half create” the natural world around him (Wordsworth, 197). Emerson clearly believed the creative powers of the mind to be the chief component of perception, as seen in his essay titled “The Transcendentalist.” For example, he writes that, “His thought—that is the Universe,” and, “All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought” (83). Thoreau began to read Emerson’s writings as a senior at Harvard and was deeply influenced by him (Bickman 11; Newman 111). In January of 1852, Thoreau wrote a very similar statement in his journal, “What is your thought like? That is the hue, that the purity, and transparency, and distance from earthly taint of my inmost mind, for whatever we see without is a symbol of something within…” (12:201). In a later entry he writes, “I find that it is not [objects] themselves (with which the men of science deal) that concerns me; the point of interest is somewhere between me and them” (16:165). To Thoreau, “there is no objective observation,” as he states in his journal, “Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective” (12: 237, emphasis in the original). The combination of these two elements, the evidence of the actual object, and the image making ability of the mind, creates what humans know as “sight.” Thoreau attempts to explain the principal position the mind holds in creating reality when he wrote on April 3, 1842:
On one side of man is the actual, and on the other the ideal. The former is the province of the reason; it is even a divine light when directed upon it, but it cannot reach forward into the ideal without blindness. The moon was made to rule over the night, but the sun to rule by day. Reason will be but a pale cloud, like the moon, when one ray of divine light comes to illumine the soul. (7:360)
Thoreau sees value in the fact gathering function of the sensory organs, but he sees it as only a reflection of the true source of illumination. It is the ideal light of the mind which illuminates those facts; gathering better facts simply gives our minds a better surface to reflect upon.
Thoreau adds another important texture to this conventional Romantic epistemology. As just described, the mediums whereby a person interacts with their surroundings are the light, sound vibrations, or other sensory stimuli picked up by our senses; and the mind itself. Thoreau drew the necessary conclusion that the constant shifting of these mediums makes one’s personal perception of nature dependent upon the moment in time in which one perceives it.
The shifting hues of light and atmosphere alter dramatically the understanding and meaning of that which is perceived. Thoreau believed that the constantly changing qualities in the air and lighting create a mirage every time one is in nature: “The mirage is constant. The state of the atmosphere is continually varying, and, to a keen observer, objects do not twice present exactly the same appearance…I cannot well conceive of greater variety than it produces by its changes from hour to hour of everyday” (9:291). Robert Abrams says of this aspect of Thoreau’s epistemology, “Thoreau locates a sense of reality that is dissonantly present throughout mutually incongruous characteristics and qualities but never directly, steadily, or absolutely seen,” and then later, “Whatever is witnessed can no more be encompassed by the inert visual image than it can be definitively mapped” (260-261).
To Thoreau, the changing moods of the percipient’s mind were as quintessential to the creation of the mirage of perception as the countryside being observed (Smith 74). Thoreau records a lesson for those who venture into nature in his journal saying, “When you think your walk is profitless and a failure, and you can hardly persuade yourself not to return, it is on the point of being a success, for then you are in that subdued and knocking mood to which Nature never fails to open” (19:111). To Thoreau, the attitude of the perceiver tints the perception of the object just as greatly as if they were two different objects. In “Autumnal Tints” he writes, “The actual objects which one man will see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which another will see as the beholders are different” (5:286). This addition to the epistemology of his peers gave Thoreau an extremely rich and texturized relationship with nature.
There is one final feature of Thoreau’s epistemology which should be understood before turning to his descriptions of Walden Pond. This third face of Thoreau’s philosophy of knowing involves how he deals with the cultural constructs, or schemata, that people of necessity use to relate to a perceived subject. Thoreau purposefully attempts, as he sojourns in nature, to not see his subjects through this lens of his preconceived understanding of an object or phenomenon. Early on it can be seen that he is attempting, with some frustration, to see through these constructs in order to approach nature with a blank mind in order to allow it to reveal to him what it can. He writes, “I begin to see such an object when I cease to understand it, and see that I did not realize or appreciate it before, but I get no further than this. How adapted these forms and colors to my eye!” (8:107). The infrastructure of his mind is used to conjuring certain images when his eyes see certain forms and colors. These oft used images are laden with connotation and meanings from his past experience and the culture that he was raised in. Thoreau realizes that this is the case and wishes to see nature without the context of his own schemata, hence the lamentation, “How adapted these forms and colors to my eye!” Many years later in his life he writes a very similar point and there seems to be an improvement in his ability to leave behind his culturally given schemata: “It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know…To conceive of it with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange. If you would make acquaintance with the ferns, you must forget your Botany” (18:371). Abrams makes an excellent, clarifying analogy to what Thoreau is trying to say when he writes, “Once to realize the potential strangeness…of markings like ‘q’ and ‘x’…or to accept the potential preposterousness of clothing styles that now seem normal—is to grasp the obscure other side of any culturally mediated object or material surface” (256). This mediation of the image making process of the mind by culturally constructed symbols and meanings is like a boundary on the mind which is very difficult to see past, like the banks of a river they guide the mind to see objects as the rest of the culture sees them. It is against this that Thoreau fought, and put great effort into escaping those mental boundaries to “see” the object without the taint of his cultural heritage. It was only in this mindset that he felt he could come to a new truth about, or relationship with, the object. Interestingly, it is with this same goal in mind, of leaving behind preconceived notions of nature, that enlightenment Empiricists developed the scientific method. Thoreau developed his own method of systematic observation, but one which is centered on making deeper connections between the subject and object, instead of attempting to more fully separate the subject from their object.
Now, with this brief description of Thoreau’s epistemological ideas in place, a look at Walden Pond through his eyes will reveal how the pond itself symbolizes his concept of the human mind. As with everything that Thoreau wrote, his descriptions of Walden are multilayered and complex, but much of what he says about the pond itself can be related to the above discussion. The chapter that contains the most prolonged description of Walden Pond is called “The Ponds” and falls precisely in the middle of the work. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Thoreau proclaims, “Yet the Universe is a sphere whose center is wherever there is intelligence. The sun is not so central as a man” (Concord 259). Here we see, as has been implied above as well, that Thoreau sees the human mind as the center point of his own universe. By placing “The Ponds” in the central location of the book Thoreau by implication is setting Walden Pond up as an allegory to the human mind.
Thoreau begins his description of Walden Pond with one of his most quoted and memorable lines:
It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this fain jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seems as if I might next cast my line upward into air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook. (166)
Thoreau immediately establishes that the surface of the pond is a threshold between two tenuously connected spheres. What are these two spheres? The upper sphere is the conceptual, divine sphere, bejeweled by stars and “vast and cosmogonal themes.” It is the realm of the ideal whose light the human mind reflects. The lower sphere is the natural world. It is the sphere populated by shiny fish and the practicalities of getting a meal for tomorrow. Thoreau, in this “queer” situation, sits half in one and half in the other.
After this poetic beginning, Thoreau describes the color of the pond. He says that “it is a clear and deep green well,” and that it is green because “lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both…the color of the sky,” and at the same time, the “yellowish tint [of] the shore” (167). A couple of sentences later he makes this metaphor clearer by observing that there is no other explanation for the color other than that it is “the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris.” It is very easy to see in these lines the mixture of the ideal (blue) and the natural (yellow) in the mind of man. When Thoreau adds to the metaphor the idea that it is an iris, it can be see that here is a beautiful symbol for the Romantic/Transcendental epistemology. As stated above, the eye receives information from its natural surroundings, but before that sensuous data can be “seen” it must be “mixed” in the mind with the imagination, to become an image in the mind’s eye. As “earth’s eye” the pond receives both from the natural setting around it, mixes these elements with the ethereal colors of the heavens and brings them to green, the symbolic color of life (176). To further flesh out this metaphor for the mind, Thoreau tells the reader that there is not a stream that runs either in or out of the pond and that the only ingress and egress are from the heavens above, rain and evaporation, and “a perennial spring” from deep in the bedrock (166; 171). These features of the pond again show that Thoreau’s concept of the mind had a dual nature, receiving as much from Natures deep wells, as it receives from the abstract realms of Transcendental principles.
These colors shift and change as more or less light is mixed with the waters, the mood of the air around the pond, and according to the vantage point of the viewer. Seen from far off the pond looks blue, sometimes “a darker blue than the sky itself,” but upon approach to the shore the water turns to green and even yellow near the shore (167). The shifting waters of Walden reflect light in numerous different hues and moods. Sometimes it is slate grey during cloudy weather, at others a silky cerulean, and yet other times it is “literally as smooth glass,” with only the thinnest of lines separating the two spheres (167; 168; 177). The waters of Walden, in this sense, exemplify the second feature of Thoreau’s epistemology; which is that there is not a way to absolutely see Walden Pond. One can only perceive that particular aspect which the mood of the water and the light from the sky will allow to be revealed. At times when the reflection of the water is perfect and serene, nothing can move across its surface without leaving its rippling traces. So too is Thoreau’s concept of the mind; it is at times much more susceptible to receive truths, as in the example of the “subdued” state that comes after much walking.
Another feature of Walden Pond described by Thoreau is the unique way in which the pond is naturally bordered by what look like enormous paving stones. These stones are of such regular placement, he said, that it could just have easily gone by the name “Walled-in-Pond” (173). Upon noting this, Thoreau immediately tells two legends concerning the creation of Walden (172-173). He tells one involving local Indian lore and another about God analogized as an Ancient Settler. Thoreau purposely reveals these stories at this time to link the border of the pond to myth and legend. Just as with his third layer of his epistemology, wherein the way in which the mind make images out of the sensory data passed on to it by the senses is bound by the cultural constructs of one’s heritage, Thoreau connects the actual border to legends of the locals, and his own mythologized God character. Occasionally, perhaps every thirty years or so, the pond overflows its bounds, due of course to a rising of the deep springs, and fill a meadow. The water overflows so significantly that one may fish in the flooded meadow. These occasional overflows can likewise be related to Thoreau’s attempts, usually frustrated, to see beyond the familiar schemata of his mind, to see a part of nature that he has seen a thousand times as wonderfully strange; and from that strangeness come to know new truths about it.
At the end of his description of Walden, Thoreau leaves off with a last enigmatic line, “One proposes that be called ‘God’s Drop’” (183). In the context, it would seem to refer poetically to being directly placed by God onto the earth, or maybe a tear from God’s eye, or even to a celestial eye drop to wash away the dirt of society from one’s eyes, however a second interpretation may also apply to this phrase. The term ‘God’s Drop’ is also the name of the Bindu, or “dot” worn on the forehead by Hindus. It is well known that Thoreau read and was very interested in Hindu texts (Benoit 122). The Bindu represents a physical point of meditation upon which the Hindu devotee should concentrate in order to visualize the Absolute—it is the point from which the diagram of divinity in all of its transformations expands (123). Interpreting “God’s Drop” as a reference to the Bindu adds a wonderful new depth to Walden as a symbol of Thoreau’s philosophy of the mind.
Plotinus, writing in the third century, called the human soul, “an amphibian hovering between two worlds” (Paul xlvii). The amphibious soul is bound to the lower, watery elements of the material world, and the body in which it resides; but at the same time is able and obligated to ascend to a more rarified, spiritual sphere where it inhales its life giving breath. What a wonderfully Thoreauvian image Plotinus worked with some 1700 years ago. Thoreau affirmed this dualistic understanding of the human condition, and no doubt would have been gratified by the naturalistic allegory that Plotinus uses to explain it. Thoreau labored philosophically to remain in both spheres simultaneously. He was a doer of his own words and put his philosophy to work day in and day out. He would spend many, many hours engaged in the pursuit of empirical facts by searching, measuring, observing, cataloging, calculating, and charting many aspects of the waters and surrounds of Walden Pond. After gathering the facts he would look on them and see in them transcendent implications. He took the earthy facts concerning Walden Pond, and without altering them to suit his purposes, saw in them the deeply abstract, symbolic, and human implications in them. His observational and interpretational methods were a perfect example of his own personal transcendental epistemology. This was to Thoreau the value of nature; to better know himself, and to know how to better himself. In the rhythms and material he saw his own, and in its inspirational symbolism and beauty, he saw the ideals to which he should aspire. Truly he did catch two fish on one hook.
Works Cited
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