English 387
Professor Friedman
May 5, 1992 (May 12, 1992)
The Role of Landscape in Walden
In the beginning of Walden, Thoreau wrote: "I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only." For his shore life in the wilderness at Walden Pond, Thoreau began writing it early in 1846, some month after he began living at Walden Pond, and Walden was published in 1854 after rewriting the manuscripts several times. To study the role of landscape in the book, I analyze Walden through summaries including characterization and property.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) lived and died in Concord, Massachusetts, and he was an independent spirit, concerned only with having time to write and meditate. After education at Concord Academy and Harvard Unversity, he had constant contact with some of his era's greatest thinkers and writers. Among these was the influential Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), who encouraged Thoreau's writing and helped to publish his poetry and essays. Emerson, who was Thoreau's first and most powerful literary acquaintance, offered Thoreau some land by Concord's Walden Pond for use in an experiment that Thoreau could live there in self-sufficient living. Thoreau spent two years on Emerson's property at the pond (1845-47) in a cabin he built himself. Thoreau's journal of the two-year sojourn, begun July 4, 1845, later served as the basis for his masterpiece, Walden.
Why did Thoreau go to the pond? As E. B. White said in his essay, "A Slight Sound at Evening," that "Henry went forth to battle when he took the woods, and Walden is the report of a man torn by two powerful and opposing drives - the desire to enjoy the world and the urge to set the world straight. One cannot join these two successfully, but sometimes, in rare cases, somthing good or even great results from the attempt of the tormented spirit of reconcile them. Henry went forth to battle," To battle, Thoreau set the circumstances himself with his own manner. Thoreau took, as White observed Walden, man's relation to nature (I want to call this "a landscape") and man's dilemma in society and man's capacity for transcending his spirit. He tried to solve all these matters together with the Walden experiment in his economic thought and practice (as in the chapter " Bean-Field") and individualism than religious attitude.
Walden consists of eighteen chapters. Among them, there are some significant chapters with elements of landscape, which I mainly study its property appeared in Walden that gives essential properties to Thoreau, a nature-lover, in a wilderness. In the first chapter "Economy," Thoreau wrote that "My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish." Here, we can see that landscape of the pond played for Thoreau as a "haven," (Thoreau, later in the chapter "Pond in Winter," said that he felt "Heaven" at the pond) that he wanted to belong for his ideal individualism and transcendental life in the woods. Thoreau also tried to show that his purpose was to encourage the readers to evaluate the way he had been living and thinking at Walden Pond where he attemted to fulfill his longing for ideal existence in the real world.
When he went to the pond, Thoreau felt that "The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage" and to make haste to his own experiment, and he started to build his house: (As he wishes, now is the time that his dream comes true. He really gets into the center of nature, Walden Pond landscape and his battle with landscape begins.)
Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intend to build my house, and began to cut
down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their
youth, for timber.
I think his historical movement towards Walden Pond was not a retreat from the Concord society but a forceful experiment for his desire and messages to the external, natural world to realize transcendental life than materialism in the mid-nineteenth century in New England.
Thoreau advises his readers to follow his example by similarly simplifying their lives as he wrote that "I learned from my two year's experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength." As Thoreau explained in the chapter "Economy," "Economy" means something like "philosophy of living." He examined this "philosophy of living" through his simplified life with meditation and suggested his readers to reform their lives inward to get perfection of each individuality. And they would discover the way for a rebirth of transcendental life in their real life in light of his simplified wilderness living in the heart of a landscape as a "Man [who] is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances."
In the chapter "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," Thoreau views the Waldon Pond that "For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes.... This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain storm in August . . . and the woodthrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore." In this indication, Thoreau readers can see that his relationship to the pond helps the development of his spiritual life. His cry "Simplisity, simplisity, simplisity!" draws the reader's attention that how he wants to wish to live in nature, individually in landscape of the pond. We can think that Thoreau expects the pricipal role of landscape offering solitary togetherness. In Walden, truely, the reader sees that he enjoys moments days and nights in the wilderness. Confessesing his busy experiences of building his house and cultivating beans, Thoreau tells the readers about "reading" that "Incessant labor with my hands impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work."At the end of chapter "Reading," Thoreau suggests social reform the society by reading that "New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her." In the chapter "Sounds," Thoreau felt himself a potential victim of sounds of the railroad and commerce. He thinks that these sounds interrupt improvement of spiritual quality of life at the pond. The sounds from the railroad and Concord town play as an "adversary" to him. As Jack London used landscape as the background of his writing, I can see these sounds affect Thoreau to remind of materialism and civilization, where he belonged not long ago.
Now, in the chapter "Solitude," Thoreau tells us a solitary relationship with nature, saying that "I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself." He is no more lonely than Walden Pond which is developing as a metaphor for purified true soul. Again, Thoreau also states that "What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average," appreciating landscape's role, which povides him a mood to elevate his naturalism for fulfilling a transcendental life. As Thoreau once said that "nature is natural; it depends on you," he tries to experiment a human capability of his own life in an untamed, adversary landscape for his individual ideals.
We can see Thoreau's principal activity in the bean-field. His hoeing the rows is not only cultivating soil for bean but entertainment. Thoreau left industrial Concord society to Walden Pond to cultivate the wilderness and improve himself towards transcendental life in philosophical way. This experience is a large one for Thoreau as he expressed that "It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over, and selling them." His cultivating bean-field suggests that a man can control any environmental situations as long as he intends to do so. Concluding his husbandry experience, which leaves "a pecuniary profit of $8.715," he tells us the farmer's appreciation for the benefit of landscape like sun's light and heat, and also worries about possible damages from elements of landscape such as woodchucks, weeds, and squirrells.
As Thoreau experienced entertainment by cultivating nature in the bean-field, in this chapter "Ponds," Thoreau tells the readers about the landscape of the Walden Pond that "The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur. It is a clear and deep green well.... The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet . . . they are exclusively woodland." Thoreau remembers that the pond is a vitreous greenish blue like those patches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. And Thoreau wonders the pond's existence on the earth like "Eden Walden Pond" where Adam and Eve were driven out on the spring morning "with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myrids of ducks and geese."
"A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." This landscape is one of Thoreau's expressions about the Walden Pond. He further declares: "How peaceful the phenomena of the lake! ...Walden is a perfect forest mirror.... Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky warter." He is very much amazing by the role that landscape plays at the pond.
In his poem about "Baker Farm," Thoreau sings with his exclamation about the role of landscape:
O Baker Farm!
Landscape where the richest element
is a little sunshine innocent....
Thoreau had a dialogue with a Hermit and did fishing, and spent much time observing a "loon," listening to his
wild, laughing cries on the pond. He observed the autumn landscape at pond. (In chapter "Brute Neighbours")
In the chapter "House-warming," Thoreau shows us that he is inspired by influences of nature or landscape. After he spent spring and summer at pond, preparing for winter, he has been renewed and vitalized. He had to turn inward and said that "I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavoured to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast" to survive "spiritual winter."
Winter has come at the pond and it changed nature. "For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn . . . of Waldon Wood, and quite familiar to me at last. I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it." Thoreau heard the winter sounds like the loud honking of a goose, the whooping of the ice in the pond, the foxes, the red squirrel in the dawn, the chicaees in flocks, and a pack of hounds thrading all the woods." He also saw wild mice, the hares, rabbits, and patridges, and at winter midnight, interestingly, he observed that "when there was a moon, I sometimes met with hounds in my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if afraid and stand silent amid the bushes till I had passed."
In the chapter "Spring," the nature surrounding the pond began to show signs of its annual rebirth and role of landscape. Thoreau informs us that "I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chanse note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters." Meeting with these winter animals, as Thoreau told us frequently that the animals were "very familiar," he was deeply involved with landscape in nature. (In chapter "Winter Animals")
Like Rousseau once declared "Return to Nature," Thoreau finally found himself in nature at the winter pond. Landscape embaced him in its heart and Thoreau felt a transcendental life - his individual perfection at the pure lake, feeling "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads." (In chapter "Pond in Winter")
In "Conclusion" of Walden, Thoreau said that "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." But when I think of Thoreau's life at Walden Pond, I want to conclude his life at the pond as "a successful experiment, as Thoreau might say, on his superindividuality seeking transcendental life withdrawing from the "civilized" society with a great deal more than "family" as a thirty year-old youth.
Thoreau, as a social philospher also a naturalist or a lover of nature, refused to live by the materialistic values of New England society. He wrote Walden in the organic prose, poetic expression, and the symbolic characters of landscape that he wanted to experiment with nature for his transcendental life. Especially, in Walden, landscape, where Thoreau really lived, played the role of the nest for him to meditate himself in his philosophy, which he called his own individual life, and compared the relationship of the civilized Concord society to his hermit-like individualism. In Thoreau's Walden, I ccould find that the landscape at the pond was Thoreau physically and emotionally; so Thoreau was the landscape. They were oneness!
Works Cited
"Walden, Or Life in the Woods." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Third Edition., Volume 1,
1989: 1635-1808
White, E. B. "A Slight Sound at Evening." Walden. by Henry David Thoreau. Pennsylvania: Courage Books, 1990: 199-204.
Professor Friedman
May 5, 1992 (May 12, 1992)
The Role of Landscape in Walden
In the beginning of Walden, Thoreau wrote: "I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only." For his shore life in the wilderness at Walden Pond, Thoreau began writing it early in 1846, some month after he began living at Walden Pond, and Walden was published in 1854 after rewriting the manuscripts several times. To study the role of landscape in the book, I analyze Walden through summaries including characterization and property.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) lived and died in Concord, Massachusetts, and he was an independent spirit, concerned only with having time to write and meditate. After education at Concord Academy and Harvard Unversity, he had constant contact with some of his era's greatest thinkers and writers. Among these was the influential Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), who encouraged Thoreau's writing and helped to publish his poetry and essays. Emerson, who was Thoreau's first and most powerful literary acquaintance, offered Thoreau some land by Concord's Walden Pond for use in an experiment that Thoreau could live there in self-sufficient living. Thoreau spent two years on Emerson's property at the pond (1845-47) in a cabin he built himself. Thoreau's journal of the two-year sojourn, begun July 4, 1845, later served as the basis for his masterpiece, Walden.
Why did Thoreau go to the pond? As E. B. White said in his essay, "A Slight Sound at Evening," that "Henry went forth to battle when he took the woods, and Walden is the report of a man torn by two powerful and opposing drives - the desire to enjoy the world and the urge to set the world straight. One cannot join these two successfully, but sometimes, in rare cases, somthing good or even great results from the attempt of the tormented spirit of reconcile them. Henry went forth to battle," To battle, Thoreau set the circumstances himself with his own manner. Thoreau took, as White observed Walden, man's relation to nature (I want to call this "a landscape") and man's dilemma in society and man's capacity for transcending his spirit. He tried to solve all these matters together with the Walden experiment in his economic thought and practice (as in the chapter " Bean-Field") and individualism than religious attitude.
Walden consists of eighteen chapters. Among them, there are some significant chapters with elements of landscape, which I mainly study its property appeared in Walden that gives essential properties to Thoreau, a nature-lover, in a wilderness. In the first chapter "Economy," Thoreau wrote that "My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish." Here, we can see that landscape of the pond played for Thoreau as a "haven," (Thoreau, later in the chapter "Pond in Winter," said that he felt "Heaven" at the pond) that he wanted to belong for his ideal individualism and transcendental life in the woods. Thoreau also tried to show that his purpose was to encourage the readers to evaluate the way he had been living and thinking at Walden Pond where he attemted to fulfill his longing for ideal existence in the real world.
When he went to the pond, Thoreau felt that "The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage" and to make haste to his own experiment, and he started to build his house: (As he wishes, now is the time that his dream comes true. He really gets into the center of nature, Walden Pond landscape and his battle with landscape begins.)
Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intend to build my house, and began to cut
down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their
youth, for timber.
I think his historical movement towards Walden Pond was not a retreat from the Concord society but a forceful experiment for his desire and messages to the external, natural world to realize transcendental life than materialism in the mid-nineteenth century in New England.
Thoreau advises his readers to follow his example by similarly simplifying their lives as he wrote that "I learned from my two year's experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength." As Thoreau explained in the chapter "Economy," "Economy" means something like "philosophy of living." He examined this "philosophy of living" through his simplified life with meditation and suggested his readers to reform their lives inward to get perfection of each individuality. And they would discover the way for a rebirth of transcendental life in their real life in light of his simplified wilderness living in the heart of a landscape as a "Man [who] is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances."
In the chapter "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," Thoreau views the Waldon Pond that "For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes.... This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain storm in August . . . and the woodthrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore." In this indication, Thoreau readers can see that his relationship to the pond helps the development of his spiritual life. His cry "Simplisity, simplisity, simplisity!" draws the reader's attention that how he wants to wish to live in nature, individually in landscape of the pond. We can think that Thoreau expects the pricipal role of landscape offering solitary togetherness. In Walden, truely, the reader sees that he enjoys moments days and nights in the wilderness. Confessesing his busy experiences of building his house and cultivating beans, Thoreau tells the readers about "reading" that "Incessant labor with my hands impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work."At the end of chapter "Reading," Thoreau suggests social reform the society by reading that "New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her." In the chapter "Sounds," Thoreau felt himself a potential victim of sounds of the railroad and commerce. He thinks that these sounds interrupt improvement of spiritual quality of life at the pond. The sounds from the railroad and Concord town play as an "adversary" to him. As Jack London used landscape as the background of his writing, I can see these sounds affect Thoreau to remind of materialism and civilization, where he belonged not long ago.
Now, in the chapter "Solitude," Thoreau tells us a solitary relationship with nature, saying that "I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself." He is no more lonely than Walden Pond which is developing as a metaphor for purified true soul. Again, Thoreau also states that "What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average," appreciating landscape's role, which povides him a mood to elevate his naturalism for fulfilling a transcendental life. As Thoreau once said that "nature is natural; it depends on you," he tries to experiment a human capability of his own life in an untamed, adversary landscape for his individual ideals.
We can see Thoreau's principal activity in the bean-field. His hoeing the rows is not only cultivating soil for bean but entertainment. Thoreau left industrial Concord society to Walden Pond to cultivate the wilderness and improve himself towards transcendental life in philosophical way. This experience is a large one for Thoreau as he expressed that "It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over, and selling them." His cultivating bean-field suggests that a man can control any environmental situations as long as he intends to do so. Concluding his husbandry experience, which leaves "a pecuniary profit of $8.715," he tells us the farmer's appreciation for the benefit of landscape like sun's light and heat, and also worries about possible damages from elements of landscape such as woodchucks, weeds, and squirrells.
As Thoreau experienced entertainment by cultivating nature in the bean-field, in this chapter "Ponds," Thoreau tells the readers about the landscape of the Walden Pond that "The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur. It is a clear and deep green well.... The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet . . . they are exclusively woodland." Thoreau remembers that the pond is a vitreous greenish blue like those patches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. And Thoreau wonders the pond's existence on the earth like "Eden Walden Pond" where Adam and Eve were driven out on the spring morning "with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myrids of ducks and geese."
"A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." This landscape is one of Thoreau's expressions about the Walden Pond. He further declares: "How peaceful the phenomena of the lake! ...Walden is a perfect forest mirror.... Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky warter." He is very much amazing by the role that landscape plays at the pond.
In his poem about "Baker Farm," Thoreau sings with his exclamation about the role of landscape:
O Baker Farm!
Landscape where the richest element
is a little sunshine innocent....
Thoreau had a dialogue with a Hermit and did fishing, and spent much time observing a "loon," listening to his
wild, laughing cries on the pond. He observed the autumn landscape at pond. (In chapter "Brute Neighbours")
In the chapter "House-warming," Thoreau shows us that he is inspired by influences of nature or landscape. After he spent spring and summer at pond, preparing for winter, he has been renewed and vitalized. He had to turn inward and said that "I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavoured to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast" to survive "spiritual winter."
Winter has come at the pond and it changed nature. "For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn . . . of Waldon Wood, and quite familiar to me at last. I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it." Thoreau heard the winter sounds like the loud honking of a goose, the whooping of the ice in the pond, the foxes, the red squirrel in the dawn, the chicaees in flocks, and a pack of hounds thrading all the woods." He also saw wild mice, the hares, rabbits, and patridges, and at winter midnight, interestingly, he observed that "when there was a moon, I sometimes met with hounds in my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if afraid and stand silent amid the bushes till I had passed."
In the chapter "Spring," the nature surrounding the pond began to show signs of its annual rebirth and role of landscape. Thoreau informs us that "I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chanse note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters." Meeting with these winter animals, as Thoreau told us frequently that the animals were "very familiar," he was deeply involved with landscape in nature. (In chapter "Winter Animals")
Like Rousseau once declared "Return to Nature," Thoreau finally found himself in nature at the winter pond. Landscape embaced him in its heart and Thoreau felt a transcendental life - his individual perfection at the pure lake, feeling "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads." (In chapter "Pond in Winter")
In "Conclusion" of Walden, Thoreau said that "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." But when I think of Thoreau's life at Walden Pond, I want to conclude his life at the pond as "a successful experiment, as Thoreau might say, on his superindividuality seeking transcendental life withdrawing from the "civilized" society with a great deal more than "family" as a thirty year-old youth.
Thoreau, as a social philospher also a naturalist or a lover of nature, refused to live by the materialistic values of New England society. He wrote Walden in the organic prose, poetic expression, and the symbolic characters of landscape that he wanted to experiment with nature for his transcendental life. Especially, in Walden, landscape, where Thoreau really lived, played the role of the nest for him to meditate himself in his philosophy, which he called his own individual life, and compared the relationship of the civilized Concord society to his hermit-like individualism. In Thoreau's Walden, I ccould find that the landscape at the pond was Thoreau physically and emotionally; so Thoreau was the landscape. They were oneness!
Works Cited
"Walden, Or Life in the Woods." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Third Edition., Volume 1,
1989: 1635-1808
White, E. B. "A Slight Sound at Evening." Walden. by Henry David Thoreau. Pennsylvania: Courage Books, 1990: 199-204.
At Walden Pond
LA나그네님 말씀처럼 좋은 포스팅입니다. 잘 감상했습니다. 저의 청산문학일기방에 제가 영문과 다니면서 썼던 영문 에세이 The Role of Landscape in Walden를 올렸습니다. 저는 젊은 교수이셨던 Timothy Steele 교수님으로부터 UCLA와 Cal State LA에서 poetry writing을 공부했습니다. 저의 한국문학도서관 청산문학서재 My essay collection에서 다른 에세이들을 읽을 수 있습니다.
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