West Meets East

The following excerpts are from the Conclusion to Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Enjoy!

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that is 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. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things . . .

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit. Some would find fault with the morning-red, if they ever got up early enough. "They pretend," as I hear, "that the verses of Kabir have four different senses; illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas"; but in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man's writings admit of more than one interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprise? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It isnot important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. . . . If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me. . . . It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. . . . Superfluous wealth can buy superfluitites only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.

. . . I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me; not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less, not suppose a case, but take the case that is; to travel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resist me. It affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittybenders. There is a solid bottom everywhere. We read that the traveler asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveler's horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, "I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom." "So it has," answered the latter, "but you have not got half way to it yet." So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an old boy that knows it. . . .

. . . Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts - from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb - heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board - may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

I do not say that John or Johnathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning-star. [end]

I may be going through a phase now, but as I read Thoreau's Walden I see again and again connections in his thinking with Eastern religious thought. Anyone who has learned anything at all worthwhile about Buddhism must know of the importance of attention a person gives to this or to that. It is an act of will to give attention to something. It may also be at the same time an act of love. Buddhism's talk of quieting the self is not nihilist talk conducive to self-loathing. It is a means of attaining a calm which enables clear vision, correct perceptions and wise choosing. The quiet, calm self can make choices based on the best information available. It is an act of will to calm oneself in the face of, for instance, repeated stories of the personal downfalls of leaders and the agendas which drew us to them initially but which now can no longer be pursued. It is an act of will to pursue that which one believes to be honest, good and true. It is an act of will to acknowledge beauty. It is an act of will to love the neighbor. It is an act of will to open one's heart wider. An open mind is a great thing. How much more so an open heart.

Henry David Thoreau

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His deepest personal longings Thoreau either concealed in his Journal or turned into poems. His most frutful poetic period dated from the time he began writing the A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to shortly before the publication of Walden. His poems are significant utterances, both because of their intrinsic merit and because of his high conception of the role of poet. True, some of the later verses are hasty and prosaic, while some of the early ones imitate Herbert and other metaphysicals. But in between lie a considerable number which contain the essence of Thoreau's Transnecdentalism, sensitive, natural, and independent.¹

The following poems are included in The Portable Thoreau:

I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied; In the Busy Streets, Domains of Trade; I Knew a Man by Sight; Lately, Alas, I Knew a Gentle Boy; Each More Melodious Note I Hear; Independence; Not Unconcerned Wachusett Rears His Head; My Friends, Why Should We Live; Low in the Eastern Sky; Great Friend; Fog; Brother Where Dost Thou Dwell; This Is My Carnac, Whose Unmeasured Dome; Love Equals Swift and Slow; Though All the Fates Should Prove Unkind; Manhood; Between the Traveler and the Setting Sun; Nature.

According to the English Web at Virginia Commonwealth University, the following poems by Thoreau were published in The Dial (1840-1844).²

Prayer ***The Moon *** Smoke ***Conscience***Rumors from an Aeolian Harp*** Low-Anchored Cloud *** Let such pure hate still underprop *** The Inward Morning ***The Summer Rain*** Sic Vita ***[My Life Has Been the Poem]***Friendship*** I Knew a Man by Sight ***Epitaph on the World ***Indeed, Indeed, I Cannot Tell***On Fields O'er Which the Reaper's Hand has Passed***Pray to What Earth***They Who Prepare my Evening Meal Below***What's the Railroad to Me?***Within the Circuit of This Plodding Life*** Inspiration

Of the eighteen poems published in 1947 and the twenty-one poems published approximately 100 years earlier, only two poems have the distinction of enjoying the favor both of the editor(s) of yesteryear and of the 20^th century. Sic Vita reappears as I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied. According to the University of Notre Dame's online translation service, sic can mean any of the following: so, thus, in this way; like this, as follows; in that case, with this limitation.³

A number of questions emerge for me when I consider the selections made for each publication. Was Carl Bode aware of the poems published in The Dial? I imagine he was aware. Perhaps he wanted to call attention to poems he thought had been underappreciated. Perhaps he was swayed by his preference for poetry that seems to indicate a “high conception of the role of poet,” a preference which the editor(s) of The Dial may have shared and interpreted differently than Mr. Bode.

Did Thoreau submit the poems selected for The Portable Thoreau to The Dial? Possibly those poems had not yet been written. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was published in 1849. Walden was published in 1854. Mr. Bode prefers the poems written during this time (1849 to 1854) to the ones published in the early 1840s, as explained above.

I'm sure our Readers can imagine their own questions as well. Here are a few poems from The Dial, followed by a few from The Portable Thoreau.

Prayer

Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou'st distinguished me.
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.

Conscience

Conscience is instinct bred in the house,
Feeling and Thinking propagate the sin
By an unnatural breeding in and in.
I say, Turn it out doors,
Into the moors.
I love a life whose plot is simple,
And does not thicken with every pimple,
A soul so sound no sickly conscience binds it,
That makes the universe no worse than 't finds it.
I love an earnest soul,
Whose mighty joy and sorrow
Are not drowned in a bowl,
And brought to life to-morrow;
That lives one tragedy,
And not seventy;
A conscience worth keeping;
Laughing not weeping;
A conscience wise and steady,
And forever ready;
Not changing with events,
Dealing in compliments;
A conscience exercised about
Large things, where one may doubt.
I love a soul not all of wood,
Predestinated to be good,
But true to the backbone
Unto itself alone,
And false to none;
Born to its own affairs,
Its own joys and own cares;
By whom the work which God begun
Is finished, and not undone;
Taken up where he left off,
Whether to worship or to scoff;
If not good, why then evil,
If not good god, good devil.
Goodness! you hypocrite, come out of that,
Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
I have no patience towards
Such conscientious cowards.
Give me simple laboring folk,
Who love their work,
Whose virtue is song
To cheer God along.

[My Life Has Been the Poem]

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.

I remember this couplet from my high school English textbook. :^)

Pray to What Earth

Pray to what earth does this sweet cold belong,
Which asks no duties and no conscience?
The moon goes up by leaps, her cheerful path
In some far summer stratum of the sky,
While stars with their cold shine bedot her way.
The fields gleam mildly back upon the sky,
And far and near upon the leafless shrubs
The snow dust still emits a silver light.
Under the hedge, where drift banks are their screen,
The titmice now pursue their downy dreams,
As often in the sweltering summer nights
The bee doth drop asleep in the flower cup,
When evening overtakes him with his load.
By the brooksides, in the still, genial night,
The more adventurous wanderer may hear
The crystals shoot and form, and winter slow
Increase his rule by gentlest summer means.

Friendship (excerpt)

I think awhile of Love, and while I think,
Love is to me a world,
Sole meat and sweetest drink,
And close connecting link
Tween heaven and earth.

The following two poems were published in The Dial and also in The Portable Thoreau.

Sic Vita AKA I Am A Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.
A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I'm fixed.
A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.
And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.
Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they're rife.
But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life's vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.
That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.

I Knew A Man By Sight (excerpt)
Late in a wilderness
I shared his mess,
For he had hardships seen,
And I a wanderer been;
He was my bosom friend, and I was his.
And as, methinks, shall all,
Both great and small,
That ever lived on earth,
Early or late their birth,
Stranger and foe, one day each other know.

The following poems are from The Portable Thoreau.

In The Busy Streets, Domains of Trade

In the busy streets, domains of trade,

Man is a surly porter, or a vain and hectoring bully,

Who can claim no nearer kindredship with me

Than brotherhood by law.

Each More Melodious Note I Hear

Each more melodious note I hear

Brings this reproach to me,

That I alone afford the ear,

Who would the music be.

Independence (excerpt)

My life more civil is and free

Than any civil polity.

Ye princes keep your realms

And circumscribed power,

Not wide as are my dreams,

Nor rich as is this hour.

...

The life that I aspire to live

No man proposeth me -

No trade upon the street

Wears its emblazonry.

Excerpted from comments at Poets dot org accessed 6/28/08:

Although Thoreau thought of himself primarily as a poet during his early years, he was later discouraged in this pursuit and gradually came to feel that poetry was too confining. It is as a prose writer that Thoreau made his most meaningful contributions, both as a stylist and as a philosopher. A tireless champion of the human spirit against the materialism and conformity that he saw as dominant in American culture, Thoreau's ideas about civil disobedience, as set forth in his 1849 essay, have influenced, among others, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and his mastery of prose style has been acknowledged by writers as disparate as Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, and Henry Miller. Largely ignored in his own time, the self-styled "inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms" has emerged as one of America's greatest literary figures. Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862, in his native Concord.⁴

1. from The Portable Thoreau, 1947, p. 238. Carl Bode, editor.

2. from http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/thoreau/thoreaupoems.html accessed 6/28/08.

3. from http://catholic.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl?stem=sic accessed 6/28/08.

4. from http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/601 accessed 6/28/08.