"Our strength grows out of our weakness."
R.W. Emerson, "Compensation"
Looking at the nearest environment, examining its beauty or cruelty, trying to abstain from projecting onto it the private passions of man, such is the paradigm for ecological awareness that Thoreau's Journal works at. One purpose of the Journal is to establish writing as a move towards the annihilation of the self. The text favors control of the ego as force that blots out perception and excludes biota from being the main concern of humankind. Yet the Journal also invents a genre, reportage writing, based on the act of being present and bearing witness to enhance our perceptiveness of scene and prospect. These apparently competing aims, one giving authority to the ego that drives the witnessing process, one writing off the self, are collaborative acts, that ratify Thoreau as a founder of American landscape writing. It is true that being a founder without foundations, as Stanley Cavell suspects, is one posture of Emerson's thinking.[1] Such collaboration where the need to gain authority through presencing a locus, while denying the ego the duty to effect the presencing that ecological writing requires for its existence, classifies the culture of Transcendentalism as one of blending and linking rather than crisis or alienation.
What is there to learn? Can the ecologist's mind grow if mere looking gains efficiency from a neutral glance, that eliminates the value of the viewer with the intention to canonize the value of what is viewed? There seems to be no value for learning in the ecologist's stance, and yet learning by looking comes as an abiding preoccupation. Like any ecologist to come, Henry David Thoreau observes and feels uneasy with the elements of pedagogy that derive from observation. The infatuation with the scenes and prospects of Massachusetts either distance the viewer from the view, or cause an assimilation of the viewer to the object viewed, depending on whether the writer's epistemology accepts its own didactic motive or not. What might this didactic motive be, when one deals with the environment? This motive might reasonably be defined as follows: demonstrating the extent to which the natural is otherized by an epistemocentric tradition that puts a premium on social organization and, as Lawrence Buell has shown, downgrades the natural environment as an "empirical reality" that "has been made to subserve human interests."[2] Such radical thinking was hard to implement in days when censorship was the normal condition of literature. It is equally true to say that if we understand today the process of othering of the natural as the encomium of human subservience, let us say of women as a disempowered group, the potentially parabolic dimension of any environmental writing places demands upon an author that have to do with her or his acceptance or rejection of didacticism. So that we now understand that an ecologist's mind, like a poet's mind, may still have to grow.
Looking on
There is some distancing when Henry David Thoreau observes a beloved scene near his home in Massachusetts, and he of course takes good care to find an adequate expression that will account for its specificity, exploring unexpected notions that convey the depth of his epistemological angst. In his Journal, Henry David Thoreau first experiences one variety of closeness with his object of inquiry that one is tempted to identify as natural mediation, untainted by anxiety or attention to the perceptual processes at work. "How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health!" he exclaims.[3] Intellectual and moral health depends for its existence on the asking of no question and the attention to no particular preoccupation with one's duties, ease being the prevailing mood. Yet such moments of ecstasy lead to moments of interrogation:
By taking the ether the other day I was convinced how far asunder a man could be separated from his senses. You are told that it will make you unconscious, but no one can imagine what it is to be unconscious - how far removed from the state of consciousness and all that we call "this world" - until he has experienced it. The value of the experiment is that it does give you experience of an interval as between one life and another, - a greater space than you ever travelled.[4]
Confronting heavenly space, Thoreau encounters more space, one identified as similar to the imaginary space that separates one life from another. His senses do not seem to be numbed or ineffectual. It is a moment of enhanced perceptiveness that, curiously enough, he records, a moment that he identifies as privileged by insisting that it is run through by forces of annihilation which he nonetheless empties of their capacity to wreck perception. Is this paradox or erratic spirituality? One might rather understand this to be one strategy of canonization for the eco-text. Avoiding didacticism, Thoreau produces stronger writing, that will be recognized as writing and not as preaching, thus winning over readers of a more literate kind that no pedagogy can ever influence, likely to scoff at preacher and teacher. True, the Journal had no immediate reader, but can we say that there was no expectation of being read in the act of writing so carefully? Putting an end to the process that otherizes the natural (the coinage is Lawrence Buell's) requires whiffs of othering as a relief from the confrontational nature of proximity. Thoreau is in command of his lyricism whenever natural spaces are considered. Admiring the landscape from a hill, he notes the blue mists lining the land, and he soon senses a separation between the earth and the onlooker that he is: "The ether gives a velvet softness to the whole landscape. The hills float in it. A blue veil is drawn over the earth."[5] Such magic estrangement between earth and sky occurs when the animals grazing on the pasturelands are considered. Noting the brick-red color of some cows on a field, Thoreau asks a question that sounds intriguing: "How striking and wholesome their clean brick-red! When were they painted?"[6] Layers are imagined where none is to be found. Is this an act of perception that enriches the senses? Can we not argue that Thoreau shows repression at work within the cognitive act, and that what is repressed is the representation of the connectedness of one ecosystem, moved from within by a chain of connections, as Humboldtian methodology had taught? Laura Dassow Walls has fully analyzed, in her book-length study of Thoreau and 19th century natural science, how Alexander von Humboldt has made prevalent the notion that nature was made up of mutually interdependent parts. [7] What Thoreau does is atomize instead of blend, expressing his own repression, thus also pointing out ways that this repression of the interconnectedness of the natural might be undone. Thoreau invites blending and a holistic vision to assert itself, by the mere suggestion that some elements in the landscape are unduly atomized, it being impossible to tell the cow's color from the cow in actual fact. One question asked amid a close description of scenery contradicts the earlier suggestion of an essential and yet artificial disconnectedness between the cows and their clean brick-red color:
The river is a dark-blue winding stripe amid the green of the meadow. What is the color of the world? Green mixed with yellowish and reddish for hills and ripe grass, and darker green for trees and forests; blue spotted with dark and white for sky and clouds, and dark blue for water.[8]
Attempting thus to define the color of the world, even if the attempt is bound to fail, reveals the conviction that the world ought to be viewed as one world, moved from within by forces that one can assess, with which one can connect, and which are connected among themselves. Thoreau represses the overall interconnectedness of the environment but also performs duties of cultural awareness that deconstruct the othering of landscape and the estrangement of ecosystems from humankind. He does so with such a light stroke of a feathery brush that he avoids preaching.
It is true that viewing surfaces has always involved more than just watching. One goes to the heart of American cultural history there. Ralph Waldo Emerson himself has expressed the view that a rich landscape made him experience a sense of unity, and he quoted (in "Prospects") a George Herbert poem celebrating the unity of all living organisms, a typical Renaissance idea:
Man is all symmetry,
Full of proportions, one limb to another,
And to all the world besides.
Each part may call the farthest, brother;
For head with foot hath private amity,
And both with moons and tides.[9]
The religious element should be taken into consideration to understand this encomium of the cosmos, supposed to be God's creation in the implicit epistemology that Herbert wished to ratify. The modern American eco-text has more edge. It is a more specialized vision of biological process and concrete energy circulating from part of the landscape to another. Henry David Thoreau, in his Journal, views trees traveling across continents as species that propagate from one land to another.[10] His ampleness of vision belongs to the Emersonian legacy of unity in nature. Yet the environment also tends to lose its unmixed nature, and surfaces will typically layer in many instances. The Emersonian legacy of holism does not seem to offer any protection against that layering at work in the perception of natural surfaces. One can argue that the layering process in perception, besides being an effect of the repression of unity, is a side-effect of Thoreau's empiricism. Let us remember that at one point in the Journal, "the landscape wore a classical smoothness. Every object was as in a picture with a glass over it."[11] Even the shadows near White Pond "make a very handsome carpet."[12] One must admit no great commotion that would rift the world asunder occurs. Thoreau notes discreet nuances in his perception of substance. The expectation of unity is so strong, because there is ideological liberation in it from the repression of holism, that one feels perception is going astray, caught up in the uncontrolled epistemological difficulties that proceed from too strict an understanding of what empiricism should be. Rejecting the organization of an epistemology of the environment that would still rely on discriminating between appearances and reality, Thoreau adheres to belief in what one might term a law of surfaces[13] Thoreau clings to a world of appearances from which he feels there is no escape, and finds unexpected layering, therefore surprising complexity, as a result of his stubborn empiricism. True, a critique of empiricism had not yet been carried out back then. One was not aware either of the reduction to surfaces that much ecological writing would go into. Hannah Arendt has aptly analyzed, in "Appearance and semblance", a chapter from her Life of the Mind, the aporias of what she terms the "simple-minded positivism" that believes it can eliminate "all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts, the everyday reality given to our senses."[14] Hannah Arendt identifies empiricism, when too strictly defined, as the purveyor of phenomena she believes to be mental. This pleads in favor of the understanding of metaphor in Thoreau's eco-text as pure mental action, which sounds acceptable enough. A further dimension of metaphor, though, which is cognitive, is able to help rational interpretation of Thoreau's eco-text. It has to do with the fact that Thoreau's act of looking, and the writing that ensues, compensates for a metaphysical tradition of nature perception that constantly provides awareness of the natural branching off into semblance and reality, such divisive process within a legacy of cognition being what otherizes the environmental and alienates us from it. Being reactive, Thoreau's epistemology of landscape produces a counter-ideology of anti-idealization that comes to us as a stifling variety of empirical knowledge, wherein metaphor (the very metaphor of layering) will easily be received as parasitic. It is unwanted; Thoreau does not expect it or desire it, yet here it comes, while the world's substance reveals its heterogeneity.
Conservation
The world as it appears, in spite and probably because of its minor flaws, is to be preserved from resource overuse . Thoreau was aware of the necessity to tap the energies of nature with care when such notions were unthought of. One reason for his capacity to develop early awareness is to be sought in the fragility of the environment which the perception of layering helped reveal. Conversing with his friend Minott, the farmer, Thoreau makes a note of the following, which questions the productive urge of husbandry:
I was admiring his corn-stalks disposed about the barn to dry, over or astride the braces or timbers, of such a fresh, clean, and handsome green, retaining their strength and nutritive properties so, unlike the gross and careless husbandry of speculating, money-making farmers, who suffer their stalks to remain out till they are dry and dingy and black as chips.[15]
Thoreau praises the strength stored in this barn. The issue has to do with environmental energies encountered in this farmhouse scene, but also with their meaning in terms of human survival, Thoreau standing constantly on the verge of parable. Violence done to nature is identified as proceeding from lust for profit, and the larger context of competition for markets in the rural world, already beginning to be shaped by the spirit of liberalism. As an alternative to material pursuits, it is the habitation of landscape that Thoreau favors. This appears in the defense of trails and tracks, which Thoreau feels should be protected against overuse.[16] At this point, Thoreau as eco-writer sounds prophetic and gives authority to values then in their incipiency, when the parabolic joins with the prophetic, both providing support for each other. Why talk of a parabolic element? The parabolic, though incipient, finds expression there because the discussion of the ways and trails at threat recalls that abiding interrogation, which acquires paradigmatic status, having to do with human survival, a basic theme of religious parable, now rehearsed in terms of inhabiting the land. That these considerations should be prophetic is obvious enough, the vulnerability of the land being the environmental notion that will find its way through cultural history and help in the canonization of wilderness common in the culture of American landscape today. The Appalachian Trail Reader, edited by David Emblidge, bears testimony to the premium placed on visits to the American wilderness as a concept of leisure for city-dwellers in need of restoring a fresh perspective on how one can inhabit the world.[17]
Furthermore, with Thoreau, there is magic in slow life, which may sound like an encomium of sloth, a cultural impossibility in the land of Protestant hard work. The meandering river is largely symbolic of the need to establish values favoring preservation instead of the exploitation of environmental resources. Ideas now widely circulated found their way to Thoreau's Journal notes, proceeding from no known origin one might pinpoint. There stood a clump of Red Cedars on Clark Island, all cut down to make gate-posts in Boston, whereas they used to stand in close vicinity to where the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed on Cape Cod.[18] Some of the magic of the landscape has worn off, this is implied, with the felling of those trees, sacrificed to acquisitiveness. Thoreau, like many an ecologist after him, downgrades the hectic life solely concerned with material wealth. Where America triumphs, the ecologist's mind grows not. Thoreau is bent on preserving that pristine condition of American culture at its highest, when promise had not yet faced the trauma of historical development. This is why the landscape that was there matters as much to him as the one now visible.
Vitalism acts as a guideline that conditions Thoreau's response to the natural before him. Should the environment be tampered with, it acts as a force within man that seeks protection from an essential weakness of ecosystems, which may explain Thoreau's impatience with the havoc that can be caused to anything strong or alive in the land he enrolls in his Journal. The forces of man and those of nature stand in a relationship which is collaborative. This blending of forces maintains a process having to do with the parabolic within a text devoted to world awareness. The night Thoreau walks to Walden Pond, on June 13th, 1851, to find that a glimmer proceeds not from the heavens but from within the water testifies to the force of the epistemocentric tradition that binds him. The prospect as seen from the author's vantage-point offers vistas having to do with the revision of the environmental at work then in American culture:
The water shines with an inward light like a heaven on earth. The silent depth and serenity and majesty of water! Strange that men should distinguish gold and diamonds, when these precious elements are so common. I saw a distant river by moonlight, making no noise, yet flowing, as by day, still to the sea, like melted silver reflecting the moonlight. Far away it lay encircling the earth.[19]
A vulgar reading of what Thoreau does would be to suggest that there are elements of spirituality contained here. The enshrining of the natural, far from condoning spiritualist propositions, blends the senses with a feeling of wonder, which reformulates the spiritual in terms of sensuality. Daniel Peck, in Thoreau's Morning Work, has convincingly shown "that perception can bridge the chasm between spirituality and sensory experience", though there is potential conflict here that moments of blending do not resolve once and for all.[20] Himself following in the footsteps of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological analysis of perception, as Hannah Arendt had done when examining what she termed "the reversal of the metaphysical hierarchy" that, to her, led to placing a premium on the surface,[21] Daniel Peck tends to underestimate the role of conflict in Thoreau's epistemology. One can suggest that in sensory experience, Thoreau fears time and that his response in terms of spirituality is a culturally constructed set of values at his disposal that let him imagine an abiding condition of presence within a world in keeping with his expectations. That Thoreau should favor slow time, lazy rivers, and relaxed indians watching them in admiration testifies to his preoccupation with the value of surfaces, alluring, yet concealing the vulnerability of those moments, while paradoxically letting attentive minds suspect that eternity does not roam in them as much as would be desirable. Conserving the beauty of scene and prospect involves a mental act of attachment to a fleeting eternity working through them.
Can one say that the conflict of the sensory and the spiritual is a paradigm of environmental writing? One certainly can, while it is also true that much environmental writing extols the vulnerable in its object of ecological inquiry, even though it can be perfunctorily understood to be performing a cultural task aiming to protect us from and ward off the vulnerable in the environment. The stream undermining the rocks in the Concord woods illustrates Thoreau's conflation of the weak with the strong, and the correlative blending in his environmental imagination of the forces of havoc with an ingrained resilience that mere observation does not suffice to reveal. There is a sense of loss in the ill-use of natural resources felt to be inexhaustible: "Where the wood has been cleared, it is almost covered with the rubbish which the woodchoppers have left, the fine tree-tops, which no one cared to make into fagots," writes Thoreau.[22] Examining the rocks undermined by the stream flowing right under them will be the embryonic parable compensating for the vulnerability of the natural for which the woodchoppers are to be held accountable. Water can overturn trees that claw rocks in their roots and thus water can remove rocks from its path, as Thoreau describes.[23] Now the trees, earlier preyed upon, can reshape the topography of the land. Thoreau views them as both threatened and sturdy. Such ambiguous status, based on actual observation by the careful eye of the naturalist, also lends itself to an interpretation as parable, telling a story of weakness and obduracy, and of strength resulting from weakness somehow. Thoreau is foundational in American environmental culture because he needs the vulnerable to canonize conservation, and because he avails himself of fragile nature to bring home the cultural necessity that will condition our response in favor of conservation. Thought itself, supposed to be a critical capacity that will help us define values of conservation and respect, has been contaminated by the very weakness it intends to dispel, while it assimilates to its object of inquiry: "No thought but is connected as strictly as a flower, with the earth."[24] One asks how strict this connection can be. A mere whiff of air can disconnect the bond, and a rainfall bring low that testimony of proud endeavor. Thought masquerades as power while careful examination makes us wonder, as Shakespeare would now put it, how with this rage shall nature hold a plea, whose action is no stronger than a flower.
The upgrading of landscape derives from the concurrent threats that enhanced ecological awareness makes visible. As a consequence of the fragility of ecosystems, the natural catches on a heroic dimension, occasionally, that elevates it beyond even the wildest dreams of revaluation. On these occasions, Thoreau unleashes an epic tone that he generally avoids, preferring the ordinary language of daily exchange. Struck by the beauty of a scene admired from uphill, Thoreau introduces an element of celebration that may sound outlandish. "The distant river-reach seen in the north from the Lincoln Hill, high in the horizon, like the ocean stream flowing round Homer's shield, the rippling waves reflecting the light, is unlike the same seen near at hand."[25] Bringing in Ancient Greece, with references of the most elevated kind takes perception out of experience. Thus, the power of cultural hope upon the cognitive capacity of the text, and of such incipient values as conservation that cause anxiety for being insufficiently accepted, gains prominence, by letting the written message be contaminated by allusion and imagery, indeed imagery suggesting physical force, combat and strife. Transfiguration does not reveal the cultural domination of a new set of ideas, but it is a preparation for them. Strength and weakness echo each other, and depend on each other for their existence, blending in the evocation of questions of environment and ecological balance, untouched by the rising capitalism that Thoreau felt would be the worst threat to the conservation purposes that he was only beginning to extol. The values that Thoreau seeks to promote are a paradoxical substance that oscillates between absolute power and total dispossession, both a plenum and a void. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in "Compensation" has shed light on this foundational crux of meaning in culture that allies power and weakness in some great men:
Our strength grows out of our weakness... A great man is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill. [26]
Emerson glories in the experience of learning through failure, and of thus strengthening his mind through the awareness of frustration. Similarly, Thoreau puts his ideas to the test of experience. The obstacles to the values of conservation (like the representation of the scant popular support accorded the preservation of resources) are thus one step in their canonization in American environmental culture, while, on a more personal plane, Thoreau rehearses imagery that makes him little because it is cultural empowering that he seeks, as when he confesses his incapacity to resist misleading or alluring appearances in the natural world: "... I saw the same deceptive slope, the near hill melting into the further inseparably, indistinguishably;..." [27] The natural spaces looked upon are able to resist the writer's epistemocentrism, and give themselves up as natural reality, if only for a time, conflating reference with phenomena.
Natural space as ideology
Let us at this point quote what University of Auckland environmental scholar Sarah Hill has underlined: "One of the problems with landscape is that, like ideology, it masks its status as a construction, inviting us to interpret it as a natural given."[28] Sarah Hill views the perception of natural spaces as a conflict between our capacity to see through appearances and our readiness to accept the signs that natural spaces convey as a natural given that cannot be analyzed further. If we take the interpretation of natural spaces to be an equivalent of the cognition processes at work in the interpretation of ideology, then it is a definition of ideology that we need, which Paul de Man does provide in his now famous essay, "Resistance to theory": "What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism."[29] Examining now the processes at work in Thoreau's Journal, one can seek to define whether Thoreau is a naïve onlooker, charmed and silenced by what stands before his eyes, or whether the ideology of landscape is not encountered to be deconstructed, that is to say understood as a language whose rules can be made explicit for everyone to understand. In Thoreau's magnificent lyric written in 1838 upon observing Walden Pond (unpublished in his lifetime), natural space is, curiously enough, viewed as a language that preserves the mysteries it is expected to reveal:
- True, our converse a stranger is to speech,
Only the practised ear can catch the surging words,
That break and die upon thy pebbled lips.
Thy flow of thoughts is noiseless as the lapse of thy own waters,
Wafted as is the morning mist up from thy surface,
So that the passive Soul doth breathe it in,
And is infected with the truth thou wouldst express.[30]
Does the idea of imparting that truth which, we must note, remains undisclosed, thrill Henry David? Nowhere does he show signs of enthusiasm. The very idea of truth has magic, but, like any alluring object to an experienced man, is found to be profoundly deceptive. Walden pond speaks and does not speak, it has a language which yet is not a language. Sarah Hill has this quite striking judgment on the interpretation of landscape: "Landscape is caught up in networks of memory and tradition, both obscuring and encouraging its own legibility."[31] One might add that this is so not because landscape reclines where it does, but because someone is watching it and writing about it. Obscuring and encouraging legibility, this is the paradigm of the environmental imagination that Thoreau inaugurates, being foundational in lumping together legibility and obscurity, knowledge and ignorance, strength and weakness, and understanding the deconstruction of the ideology of landscape as a process and not as a finding, which would be vulgar, and didactic.
The idea of truth, especially if it seems to derive from a beautiful prospect that the writer observes, is far from convincing. To a contemporary reader (true, the Journal had few, because it was widely read only posthumously), it must have been persuasive, especially when Thoreau writes how the grass acquires a heavenly dimension, which brings religiosity, an influential cultural construct still strong in American society, into the picture. What better illustration of Sarah Hill's proposition that landscape is caught up in the networks of memory and tradition? "The blue-eyed grass, well-named, looks up to heaven," writes Thoreau.[32] One feels that truth is a social compact that derives authority from the community it serves, but that the eco-writer, whose aim is to curb the othering of the natural, cannot rely on it. If nature has to be salvaged from the estrangement that explains much of its downgrading, then a solitary confinement of the natural with the values of spirituality that went into the making of the process othering the natural will only augment the vulnerability of landscape. The scene viewed on June 15th 1851 is one whose apparent magic conceals for a time, hence ends up uncovering, the fragility of the Summer flowers abundant before the writer's eyes. All are caught up in time, having risen as if from the dead shortly before being viewed: "Saw the first wild rose to-day on the west side of the railroad causeway. The whiteweed has suddenly appeared, and the clover gives whole fields a rich and florid appearance, - the rich red and the sweet-scented white."[33] Thoreau's scene may remind of Wordsworth's own, with its "golden daffodils" and the attendant "pensive mood" that seeps from them to the poet's soul. The pensive mood before natural scenes is much more than just a naive celebration of beauty. There is an epistemological question embedded in it which has to do with the duties of the writer and the role of writing. Let us note that in Wordsworth's famous lyric, the daffodils do not achieve full parabolic status. No dialogue occurs between them and the poet while the flowers dance (as a human would do) but never speak. Thus, Wordsworth avoids didacticism of the natural, and understands poetry as a modest proposal that will not reshape experience beyond recognition (as would have happened if a dialogue between the daffodils and the poet had been invented). The fragility of self (only a strong self can be didactic), while poetry encounters its object in the natural world, is how Wordsworth wants to effect the canonization of his poem, hence also ratify his achievement as poet. Similarly, Henry David Thoreau suggests through nuance instead of teaching through the artificial rhetorics of parable or allegory. Lyrical understatement is what guides him in his effort to gain sufficient authority for himself as artist, and claim the right to discreetly value landscape. What is unexpected, though, is that considering landscape as ideology implies that there is resilience in landscape (as there is resistance in ideas that have shaped into ideology). If we hold the view that Thoreau reads landscape as ideology and, as a second step, while his mind grows from the enhanced awareness that further thinking brings along, deconstructs it, that is to say reads it as language that cannot be mistaken for phenomenon, how is it, then, that the ideology of religion seems to pervade the ideology of landscape, as happens in The Journal, yet not be clearly deconstructed? Or is there a subtle deconstruction of religiosity at work there that dare not speak its name? One can answer these questions by suggesting that Thoreau, telling a story of natural weakness, brings the heavenly powers into the picture only to let us know how powerless they are. He cuts deep into an established dogma of romanticism (mainly from continental Europe, Wordsworth being a more complex writer who prides in the legacy of British empiricism) that views religiosity of the natural as a value one must rely on to value the natural. One can quote an amusing notation by French Romantic poet Chateaubriand who, watching the clouds in Le Génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity), states the following: "Conçoit-on bien ce que serait une scène de la nature si elle était abandonnée au seul mouvement de la matière? Les nuages, obéissant aux lois de la pesanteur, tomberaient perpendiculairement sur la terre, ou monteraient en pyramides dans les airs." ("Does one really conceive of what a scene of nature would be if abandoned to the sole movement of matter? The clouds, obeying the laws of gravity, would fall perpendicular to the ground, or would rise heavenward as pyramids.)[34] Chateaubriand implies that God is the ruler who is capable of keeping the clouds in their appointed place, though the proposition is preposterous enough (what causes storms?). It is however this legacy of belief handed down by European Romanticism that Thoreau puts into perspective. Such intellectual growth of mind was no doubt the most difficult one to effect when America lived in the thralls of preachers of various kinds. The downgrading of religious ideology was a less urgent task, because it was much ahead of him and his contemporaries further down the lane of American cultural history, than the revaluation of the natural. Yet the task of ending alienation from landscape as environment, resource and habitat amounted to ending our alienation from ourselves and was thus quite similar to the partially repressed task of deconstructing religious ideology.
Thoreau's vision of prospect and scene, so infatuated with the substance of surface and the alluring colors of his world, defines at an early stage in their development what the rules of environmental advocacy would be. Watching is an act that rules out dictums and avoids offering them as clues to perceiving, interpreting and deciding how the environment has to be managed. Thoreau is foundational in that he has established a culture while never straying away from the tone of meditation that sustains the authority of voice and vision. He does not quite establish a theory because he rarely expresses his vision in the abstract terms that would transcend specific situations the eco-text considers as its normal topics. There is however in Thoreau's environmental writing an impulse towards the general. In his essay titled "The Architecture of Theories" (originally published in 1891), Charles Sanders Pierce has pointed out elements of critical thinking about thought itself that are well worth considering, in terms inspired by the prevailing scientism of the day: "The one primary and fundamental law of mental action consists in a tendency to generalization. Feeling tends to spread; connections between feelings awaken feelings; neighbouring feelings become assimilated; ideas are apt to reproduce themselves."[35] The question of Thoreau's growth as an environmental writer, and more generally (let us not resist the Peirce proposition) of environmental writing beyond him, has to be posed in terms of resistance to the theory of generalization. Thoreau resists generalization, because not resisting would be immoderate mental action detrimental to the canonization of environmental writing. There is pressure to uncover the workings of that law, though, because efficient advocacy depends on it: impetus is gained in defining new struggles, and expanding the world of ethical responsibility beyond the narrow confines of the self into the lesser known areas of the natural. Therefore, repressing the law of generalization in environmental writing is one preparation for and one step in undoing that repression, we might conclude, in a modestly Cavellian manner.
[1] For a general discussion, consider Stanley Cavell's intuition of this foundational paradox about foundations which he concludes with the following: "As if Emerson's self-repression is to enact the wish to found a tradition of thinking without founders, without foundation; as if we are perhaps to ratify ourselves with Founding fathers." See In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 28.
[2] Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 21.
[3] Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (New York: Dover Publications, 1962), 1: 192.
[4] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 193.
[5] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 261.
[6] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 222.
[7] See the chapter "Thoreau as Humboldtian" in Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 134-147.
[8] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 222.
[9] See "Prospects" in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 44.
[10] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 194.
[11] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 213.
[12] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 215.
[13] For a definition of this concept, examine James J. Gibson's phenomenology of the environment, especially the chapter "Surfaces and the Ecological Laws of Surfaces" in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1986), 22-32.
[14] Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1981), 1: 39.
[15] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 284.
[16] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 225.
[17] David Emblidge, ed., The Appalachian Trail Reader (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
[18] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 232-233.
[19] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 206.
[20] See H. Daniel Peck, Thoreau's Morning Work: Memory and Perception in A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the Journal and Walden (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 117-133.
[21] Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:26-30.
[22] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 296-7.
[23] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 297.
[24] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 195.
[25] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 191.
[26] See "Compensation" in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 298.
[27] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 191.
[28] Sarah Hill, "Landscape, Writing, and Photography" in Deep South , Autumn 1996 [database online], 3 [cited 18 January 1997].
[29] Paul de Man, "Resistance to Theory" in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3.
[30] Henry David Thoreau, Collected Poems, ed. Carl Bode (Chicago: Packard and Co, 1943) 98.
[31] Sarah Hill, "Landscape, Writing, and Photography" , 4.
[32] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 210.
[33] Thoreau, The Journal, 1: 210
[34] Chateaubriand, Essais sur les Révolutions, Génie du Christianisme, ed. Maurice Regard (Paris: Gallimard/Coll. La Pléiade, 1978), 559-560.
[35] Justus Buchler, ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover, 1955), 320-321.
Retour
à la page d'accueil -- Back to main page