A Table of Green Fields (11 page)

Breathless
is an apt word, even though it means both a stillness of wind on such a calm day as this, beautiful and voluptuously calm, and not breathing, as in death. With both meanings was Proserpina familiar.

Gray is a deathly color, and yet it is clouds, which are water, high and cold, the source of life, that grizzle the sky.

It is a breathless, gray day, that leaves the golden fall woods unanswering in their own stillness, kingly and comely in their dying.

AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON

At his small sanded white pine table in his cabin at Walden Pond on which he kept an arrowhead, an oak leaf, and an
Iliad 
in Greek, Henry David Thoreau worked on two books at once. In one,
A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers,
he wrote: Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. In the other,
Walden, or Life in the Woods,
he wrote three such sentences, a paragraph which no intelligence can understand: I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers whom I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

JOHN BURROUGHS

 

Thoreau did not love Nature for her own sake, or the bird and the flower for their own sakes, or with an unmixed and disinterested love, as Gilbert White did, for instance, but for what he could make out of them. He says: The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence which only the most ingenuous worshiper perceives at a reverent distance from its surface even. This
fine effluence
he was always reaching after, and often grasping or inhaling. This is the mythical hound and horse and turtledove which he says in
Walden
he 
long ago lost, and has been on their trail ever since. He never abandons the search, and in every woodchuck hole or muskrat den, in retreat of bird, or squirrel, or mouse, or fox that he pries into, in every walk and expedition to the fields or swamps or to distant woods, in every spring note and call that he listens to so patiently, he hopes to get some clew to his lost treasures, to the effluence that so provokingly eludes him.

This search of his for the transcendental, the unfindable, the wild that will not be caught, he has set forth in this beautiful parable in
Walden.

GEESE

 

Well now, that Henry. Thursday one of the Hosmer boys told him he'd heard geese. He wants to know everything anybody can tell him in the way of a bird or skunk or weed or a new turn to the wind. Well, Henry knew damned good and well that it's no time to be hearing geese. So, always assuming his leg wasn't being pulled, he sat down and thought about it. And after awhile, didn't take him long, he got up and walked to the station. He didn't ask. He told Ned that at half past one on Thursday a train had passed through with a crate of geese in the baggage car. That's a fact, Ned said, but I don't recollect anybody being around here at the time.

STANLEY CAVELL

I have no new proposal to offer about the literary or biographical source of these symbols in perhaps his most famously cryptic passage. But the very fact that they are symbols, and function within a little myth, seems to me to tell us what we need to know. The writer comes to us from a sense of loss; the myth does not contain more than symbols because it is no set of desired things he has lost, but a connection with things, the track of desire itself.

THE JOURNAL: 1 APRIL 1860

 

The fruit of a thinker is sentences: statements or opinions. He seeks to affirm something as true. I am surprised that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, not forethought, so that I occasionally wake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I never consciously considered before, and as surprisingly novel and agreeable to me as anything can be.

6

And yet we did unbend so far as to let our guns speak for us, when at length we had swept out of sight, and thus left the woods to ring again with their echoes; and it may be many russet-clad children, lurking in those broad meadows with the bittern and the woodcock and the rail, though wholly concealed by brakes and hardhack and meadowsweet, heard our salute that afternoon.

7

Solitude, reform, and silence.

8

In
A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers
Thoreau wrote: Mencius says: If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of the heart, he does not know how to seek them again. The duties of all practical philosophy consist only in seeking after the sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all.

9

Duke Hsuan of Qi arranged his skirts and assumed a serene face to receive the philosopher Meng Tze, and who knows how many devils had come with him? The magicians had drilled the air around the gates with incessant drumming, and the butlers were burning incense.

The duke could see wagons of millet on the yellow road. The philosopher had apparently travelled in some humble manner. From the terrace he could see no caravan. There was no commotion among the palace guard.

Sparrows picked among the rocks below the bamboo grove.

A merchant was handing in a skip of persimmons and a string of carp at the porter's lodge. The weather was dry.

The philosopher when he was ushered in was indeed humble. His clothes were coarse but neat, and his sleeves were modest. He wore a scholar's cap with ear flaps.

They met as gentlemen skilled in deference and courtly manners, bow for bow. The duke soon turned their talk to this feudal baron or that, angling for news. There had for years been one war after another.

—And yet, Meng Tze said, the benevolent have no enemies.

Duke Hsuan smiled. Philosophers were always saying idiotic things like this.

—The grass, Meng Tze continued, stands dry and ungrowing in the seventh month and the eighth. Then clouds darken the sky. Rain falls in torrents. The grass, the millet, the buckwheat, the barley turns green again, and grows anew. Nothing we are capable of can control this process of nature. And yet men who ought to be the caretakers of other men kill them instead. They are pleased to kill. If there were a ruler who did not love war, his people would look at him with longing, loving eyes. It is in nature to love the benevolent.

So there was to be no gossip about Hwan of Ch'i, or Wan 
of Tsin. So the duke asked politely:

—How may a ruler attain and express benevolence?

—He should regard his people as his charges and not with contempt.

—Am I one, the duke asked slyly, who might be so benevolent? —Yes.

—How?

—Let me tell you about a duke. I had this from Hu Ho. A duke was sitting in his hall when he saw a man leading an ox through the door. The duke asked why, and was told that the ox was to be slaughtered to anoint a ceremonial bell with its blood. Just so, said the duke, but don't do it. I cannot bear the fear of death in its eyes. Kill a sheep instead.

—This is a thing I did, the duke replied. You have learned of things in my court.

—Yes, Meng Tze said with a smile. And I see hope for you in it. It was not the ox but your heart you were sparing.

—The people thought otherwise. They said I begrudged an ox. Qi is but a small dukedom, but I can afford the sacrifice of an ox. It had such innocent eyes and it did not want to die.

—And yet you sent for a sheep. You knew the pity you felt for the ox. How was the sheep different?

—You make a point, the duke said. You show me that I scarcely know my own mind.

—The minds of others, rather.

—Yes. You are searching for compassion in me, aren't you? In
The Book of the Odes
it is written
the minds of others I am able by reflection to measure.
You have seen why I spared the ox and was indifferent to the misery of the sheep. 1 did not know my own mind.

—If, Meng Tze said with great politeness, you will allow me to play that lute there by the bronze and jade vessels, I will sing one of the most archaic of the odes, as part of our discourse.

The duke with correct deference asked him by all means to sing it.

Meng Tze, finding the pitch, sang:

The world's order is in the stars.

We are its children, its orphans. 

Cicadas shrill in the willows.

 

It is not fault, it is not guilt 

that has brought us to this. It is 

disorder. We were not born to it.

 

The autumn moon is round and red. 

I have not troubled the order, 

yet I am no longer in it.

 

In the first waywardness we could 

have gone back. In the second we 

began to confuse lost and found.

 

Had we been angry to be lost,

would we have taken disorder 

for order, if any had cared?

 

Cicadas shrill in the willows.

There was a time we had neighbors. 

The autumn moon is round and red.

 

Men without character took us 

into the marshes, neither land 

nor river, where we cannot build.

 

Order is harmony.

It is innovation in tradition.

The autumn moon is round and red. 

 

Elastic words beguiled our ears. 

What is the courage worth of fools? 

Cicadas shrill in the willows.

 

Fat faces and slick tongues sold 

us disorder for real estate.

The autumn moon is round and red.

 

The young lord's trees are tender green.  

Saplings grow to be useful wood. 

Hollow words are the wind blowing.

 

Cicadas shrill in the willows.

There was a time we had neighbors.

The autumn moon is round and red.

 

10

 

The dove is over water in Scripture: over the flood with an olive twig in its beak, the rainbow above; over the Jordan with Jesus and John in it, upon the sea as Jonah (which name signifieth 
dove),
up out of the sea as Aphrodite (whose totem animal it was). It was the family name of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

The horse is the body, its stamina, health, and skills. The hound is faith and loyalty. But symbols are not sense but signs.

Mencius's Chinese cock (tail the color of persimmons, breast the color of the beech in autumn, legs blue) and unimaginable Chinese dog have become under Concord skies a biblical dove, a Rover, and a bay horse. The one is a pet, one is a friend, one is a fellow worker.

We lose not our innocence or our youth or opportunity but our nature itself, atom by atom, helplessly, unless we are kept in possession of it by the spirit of a culture passed down the generations as tradition, the great hearsay of the past.

 

11

 

Thoreau was most himself when he was Diogenes.

12

 

One ship
speaks
another when they pass on the high seas. There is a naval metaphor in the paragraph (misprinted as 
spoken to
in modern ignorance). Thoreau and his brother John had sailed around the world in August of 1839, all on the Concord and Merrimac, and you could see him in his sailboat on the Concord with a crew of boys, or the smiling Mr. Hawthorne, or the prim Mr. Emerson.

CONVERSATION

 

The mouse, who left abruptly if Thoreau changed from one tune to another on his flute, was a good listener.

—A man who is moral and chaste, Mr. Thoreau said to the mouse, does not pry into the affairs of others, which may be very different from his own, and which he may not understand. —O yes! said the mouse. But the affairs of others are interesting. You can learn all sorts of things.

—The housekeeping of my soul may seem a madman's to a Presbyterian or a bear.

The mouse twitched his whiskers. Offered a crumb of hoe-cake, he took it, sitting on Mr. Thoreau's sleeve, sniffed it, and began a diligent chewing.

The mouse knew all about the lead pencils and their inedible shavings, the surveyor's chain, the Anakreon in Greek (edible), the journal with pressed leaves between the pages, the fire (dangerous), the spider family in the corner (none of his business), but it was the flute and the cornmeal that bound him to Mr. Thoreau. And the friendliness.