Still upon the Shores of Walden

Lewis Connolly July 20, 2017

Picking up from last week, while Emerson was in England meeting his intellectual hero William Wordsworth, a young 18 year-old-man called David Thoreau was taking his entrance exam to get into Harvard University. He was accepted, barely. While at Harvard, Thoreau studied a broad range of subjects. He focused though mostly on languages, learning Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German, and Spanish. In Thoreau’s penultimate year at Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson published his seminal work, ‘Nature’. ‘Nature’ contends that society, which takes us away from nature, destroys our sense of wholeness; that our own spiritual well-being is intrinsically wrapped up with nature. We are part of nature. No human being, no matter how much history has elevated them, or even deified them, is above nature. Take the genteel Wordsworth we met last week. The temptation is to read his poetry, and elevate him in our minds; imagining his verse being of such splendour - coming forth from the mind of a profound genius - the temptation is to imbue Wordsworth with an almost mythic status. But in truth, the Wordsworth we met last week was a gentle and relatable, kind, man, but he was just a man. Nature then is like a great leveller. Nature is in you and I, just as it was in Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau. We do ourselves a great disservice when we allow the weight of the perceived greatness of our forebears to shut down the possibility of individual originality. We must think for ourselves, and not simply conform to the status quo, or traditions, for their own sake. We must live from within, trusting in our own intuitions, reconnecting afresh with the sublime Nature has on offer. When Emerson’s ‘Nature’ was published in 1836, it was immediately recognised as a masterpiece. Anyone who read it could not help feeling more wide awake to the beauty and meaning of creation. And this was certainly the case for David Thoreau, or as he came to be known, Henry David Thoreau, who was enamoured by the book; it shaped everything which was to follow.

The subsequent year, in 1837, Thoreau graduated from Harvard University. That year’s commencement speech was given by none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his speech, titled ‘The American Scholar’, Emerson restates the central ideas of ‘Nature’, emphasising the need for America to throw off its reverential attitude to European intellectual culture. It was time for America to forge its own literary destiny; to read books, yes, but to no longer mimic them. To find its true inspiration within the immensity of Nature. Inspired by Emerson’s work and address, Thoreau began to keep a journal, in which he recorded his daily life, thoughts, and observations of nature. This journal was the basis for everything Thoreau is now notable for - all his subsequent lectures and published works were first drafted in his journal. For next few years, Thoreau helped his father in his business as a pencil maker, and set up a small school he ran with his brother. But increasingly he was becoming active within Emerson’s Transcendental Club, becoming good friends with Emerson, despite being 14 years his junior. And in 1841 he was invited to move into Emerson’s household in Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived off and on for the next decade, officially as the ‘live-in handyman’, but evidently the real purpose was for Thoreau to benefit from Emerson’s support and advice, focusing, as he was, more and more on his writing. There were times when Emerson and Thoreau’s relationship became a bit strained, the primary cause of this tension though seems to have arisen due to the extent to which they idealised one another. They thought so highly of one another that they could not help falling short of each other’s expectations. To Emerson, Henry David Thoreau was a man of such potential, any idle moment was an insult to that potential. Indeed, at times the intellectual intensity between the two men must have been unbearable.

It was during this period that Emerson purchased the land around Walden Pond, and in March of 1845 Thoreau began building himself a small cabin there. As he most famously put it “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...” And so began the two year, two month, two day, Walden pond experiment. As I mentioned last week, the Romanticism movement was in reaction against the industrial revolution, against applying a mechanistic, cold logic to life, working to a clock, in which you measured productivity by the hour, and divided labour into delineated tasks. Was society, and industry, and the clock, and maximising productivity, not diminishing our humanity? Thoreau, in going to the pond, was able in a small way to step back in time, to worry less about everyday affairs, and so devote more time to his writing. It also of course gave him the opportunity to put Emerson’s words to the test, to live in closer proximity to the divine, closer proximity to nature, to live to the rhythm of nature. In his actions we find a model of how to live simpler lives, free of excess, living sustainably, in an environmentally conscious way. Thoreau has been regarded as the first modern environmentalist. In 1847 Thoreau left the pond, going back to live in Emerson’s household, and then a year later moved back to his parent’s home. However, it is worth pointing out that all these places around the town of Concord, Massachusetts, are within small area. The walk from Emerson’s home to Walden pond is only 30 minutes, and similarly the walk from Emerson’s house to Thoreau’s parents’ house was about 40 minutes.

A box of pencils from J. Thoreau & Company.

In this period then, after the Walden experiment, when Thoreau was in his early 30s, he once again began working in the production of pencils. Thoreau’s pencils are actually very notable. At this time, his pencils were considered the best. The reason for that was that his pencils did not merely contain graphite, but rather a combination of New England graphite and clay, making them stronger. The combining of graphite and clay in pencils was invented, or at least reinvented, by Thoreau, and is still used to this day. When he wasn’t making pencils, he was working on his most notable book, ‘Walden’, about his time by Walden Pond. Unlike Emerson’s ‘Nature’, which was a big success on publication, when Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ eventually came out, it was a flop. Despite being a more notable book today, at the time it was met with indifference. As Thoreau moved into his late 30s, he had to come to terms with the fact that he would not be the major proponent of transcendentalism he longed to be. And so, disheartened, he turned his attention towards more practical matters, political issues of justice in his own day, most importantly the abolitionist cause. He wrote his second most notable work, ‘Essays on Civil Disobedience’, in which Thoreau advocated for a non-violent, passive resistance approach to slavery. He wrote this essay against the backdrop of America’s 11th president, James K. Polk, who believed strongly in the necessity of slavery. His was a strongly militaristic presidency; he declared war on Mexico to secure the Texas border, and came close to launching the states into a third war with Britain. Thoreau defined himself politically in opposition to Polk. At the heart of this essay, Thoreau asks the question, which again seems exceedingly pertinent to now, what should citizens do when confronted with a president they wholly disagree with? After all, the president was elected, and therefore he was the rightly and democratically appointed man for the job. The prevailing sentiment was that as the majority had spoken, everyone in opposition was obliged to keep silent and respect the will of the majority. Thoreau wanted to challenge this kind of thinking. He believed people should not be blind nationalists following obediently the authority structures in place, but rather be individual thinkers, directed by their own conscience - not just on polling day, but every day. And as such, as individuals directed by our own conscience, we should, when confronted with political authority we disagree with, find our own ways of resisting said authority by non-violent means. To sing our opposition, to march in opposition, to speak in opposition. In 1908, a lawyer from India read Thoreau’s essay ‘On Civil Disobedience’. It was to have a lasting impact on him, and ultimately upon his country of India. His name was Mahatma Gandhi.

By Thoreau’s late 30s he had begun to sufferer from tuberculosis. He grew weaker, and died in 1862, when he was only 44 years old. His death was not widely reported. Despite today being regarded as one of America's greatest literary artists, he died practically unknown. Thoreau's funeral eulogy was given by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a eulogy which focused almost entirely on all that was worst about the man. Emerson painted a picture of a man who was cold, brittle, and anti-social, a picture which tainted Thoreau’s reputation, and resulted in his work not being read for a century. Thoreau's work was never about building a linear or logical argument, it was about one’s personal experience in the face of nature, it was about those isolated moments of sudden awareness. Thoreau’s work differs from Emerson’s in a number of ways, most obviously in being far more grounded, and practical. Thoreau invites us afresh to consider our relationship to Nature, one another, and also to the state.

‘Mist’ - a poem by Henry David Thoreau

Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,
Fountain-head and source of rivers,
Dew-cloth, dream-drapery,
And napkin spread by fays;
Drifting meadow of the air,
Where bloom the daisied banks and violets,
And in whose fenny labyrinth
The bittern booms and heron wades;
Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers,—
Bear only perfumes and the scent
Of healing herbs to just men’s fields.

Amen.

Sitting with Emerson by the Fire

Lewis Connolly July 10, 2017

In 1832, the architect of American intellectual culture, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was going through a dark patch in his life. He had just lost his first wife to tuberculosis, and he was only 29 – same age as me; he was, at the time, the Unitarian minister of a prominent Boston church, and his ministry was suffering as a result. Full of grief, and feeling lost for purpose, he took to his pulpit each Sunday to berate his congregation. His sermons were becoming increasingly gloomy and stern. He was burning bridges fast, falling out with parishioners left, right, and centre. Ralph Waldo Emerson may well be the most important Unitarian to ever have lived, and yet here we find him in a very destructive mode of being, embittered at the world. It’s always interesting I think to read about great people of history at their darkest moments. From our historical omniscient vantage point, we know that things get a lot better for Emerson; we know he has about fifty years ahead of him being a very successful writer and speaker, but in this moment he does not know that. For Emerson, in the light of his pain and uncertainty, the world seems to be closing in. He felt unrooted, lonely, and his job seemed uncertain, and so he threw in the towel, packed his bags, and on Christmas day 1832 embarked for England. In the early 1800s getting from Boston to England would have meant six gruelling weeks at sea. When he eventually arrived in England in 1833 he visited both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. I don’t think we can underestimate the significance this voyage has had upon Unitarianism, and even upon the world. Without this journey, the world is unimaginably different. That may seem like an over exaggerated assertion, but given the shift this pilgrimage prompted in Emerson, and the subsequent impact he had upon religious philosophy, literature, national identity, politics, and the Unitarian movement itself, it is not an unreasonable claim. Without this voyage, what worship looks like each Sunday here in the meeting house would be very different; indeed we may not even be here at all.

By the time Emerson did arrive in England, Coleridge and Wordsworth were both in their 60s, and well established on the literary scene. The poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, or ‘Daffodils’ as it is more popularly known, was already a celebrated English poem. Coleridge and Wordsworth were both leading lights of British Romanticism. Romanticism was an artistic and literary movement of this period, the early 1800s. It was basically a reaction against the industrial revolution, and the hard-headed rationalism of people like John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. In other words, it was resisting the kind of cold rationalism that reduced us to being merely cogs in a machine, or numbers on a screen to be manipulated. Romanticism wanted to elevate the value of our subjective sense of things. It’s a conflict society and organisations repeatedly knock up against when making decisions - should we be basing them solely on what makes most economic or business sense, or should we be allowing our intuitive sense, or other more metaphysical claims like the inherent value of humanity, or the inherent value of sentient life, to have a bearing on our decision-making process also? Since the industrial revolution these kinds of questions have never not been pertinent, but in recent months, in light of the Grenfell tower fire for instance, societal consciousness in this area seems to have risen.

Following the enlightenment, the notion of gods sitting on other planes of existence, rewarding the good, and punishing the bad, became intellectually unsatisfying. The danger was, many intellectuals extrapolated that to mean that the world was therefore a soulless place, red in tooth and claw, an ever-unfolding Darwinian battle, a cold machine suited to some cold hard logic. The trouble is, people cannot live in a world like that. Romanticism was an attempt to redress that imbalance, an attempt to hold rationalism in one hand, while at the same time recognising the great value of love and beauty: the value of poetry and words, the value of ‘how it sits with you’, and ‘what your gut sense tells you’, the value of spiritual language, the value of feelings, and hopes, and dreams, and in so doing, elevating the significance of ‘Nature’. Communing with our primordial self through nature, or communing with God through nature; ‘God’ for Wordsworth being a metaphor for mystery, or like Spinoza, a word to be equated with Nature or everything. But again, the line between a ‘belief in God’, and Atheism, is incredibly thin. Coleridge called Wordsworth a ‘Semi-Atheist’. For Wordsworth then, a belief in God was essentially when individual people turn their hearts towards love and the good for no logical reason. That is God.

Okay, back to Emerson’s visit to England. He first visited Samuel Taylor Coleridge in London, and was very disappointed. 60-year-old Coleridge was a large, bombastic man, and Emerson said “the visit was more spectacle rather than a conversation, of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity”. Coleridge merely spouted nonsense for about an hour, before Emerson was able to escape back onto London’s streets. His encounter with Wordsworth was far more satisfying. Finding his way to the lake district, he moved along the picturesque tracks. Feeling inspired and uplifted by the countryside, he walked to Dove Cottage resting in a thickly wooded hillside, where William Wordsworth lived. He knocked unannounced at the door. Wordsworth was a plainly dressed, elderly man with white hair. He was kindly and serene, warm, and generous with his time. Emerson was invited in, and they sat talking by the fire. Their conversations meandered where you would imagine, they talked about Coleridge, and the fact that his poetry was unnecessarily complicated, they talked about politics of course - Wordsworth lamented that America seemed obsessed with money in a very unhealthy way. Wordsworth recited some of his poetry to Emerson, poetry Emerson was very familiar with, and some new poetry, never yet recited. When it was time for Emerson to leave, Wordsworth walked along with him, accompanying him for a mile before turning back ‘with great kindness’.

The Emerson who returned to America later that year was a changed man. Within three years, he had begun giving his lectures, married his second wife, and written his most significant book, ‘Nature’. He was doing the important work of the poet, which Emerson described as ‘that insightful [person], who can pierce this rotten diction, and fasten words again to visible things.’ Weaving new meanings, and new narratives. He formed the Transcendental club, to discuss, in an open and free manner, issues of spirituality and philosophy. Transcendentalism empowered individuals to do no less than weigh religion for themselves, to form their own faith as their conscience led. Ralph Waldo Emerson directly inspired many artists, writers, visionaries, and poets, none more so than Henry David Thoreau. If Emerson was the architect of American intellectual culture, setting forth the theoretical framework, Henry David Thoreau was the man who lived it, and embodied it. But for that chapter, you’ll need to wait till next week…

Amen.

The Colours of the Spirit

Lewis Connolly February 26, 2016

It seems overly cliché to bemoan our increasing, blinding reliance upon technology, our advancing inevitable shift into virtual space. On one hand it is tempting to dream of a world in which we can return to the land, that Jeffersonian vision of the simple rural life, in which we are not tainted and corrupted by urban vices. Lives in which we can be intimately connected to nature, not enslaved to corporations, but rather dictate our own destinies. Many Transcendentalists of the 19th century were quite taken with this notion, and it still endures today as a thread of the environmental movement.

What will cities in the future look like?

The problem is that such a romantic notion is hopelessly flawed; who would sacrifice the perpetual engagement the modern world has to offer, to return to some idyllic country life [1] – however edifying spiritually that supposedly is? Furthermore, there’s the environmental cost. It might seem counter-intuitive to you, but the average carbon footprint cost for a city dweller is considerably lower than for someone who lives in the countryside.

It has only been in the last couple of decades that the global population of people living in cities has surpassed that of those living in the country. That ecological time bomb we all hear about, if we overcome it, it will be because people are in cities not despite it. And of course, the city-dwelling population is only going up. I think these facts pose an interesting challenge to our Unitarian Transcendentalist heritage, especially given that communing with the divine through nature has endured as a consistent theme within our movement.

When ‘Nature’ was written by Emerson in the 19th Century and Henry David Thoreau went and lived in his cabin for those two years to get closer to nature and to live ‘deliberately’, the urban population in New England had just tipped over the 50% mark. Now it is north of 80% in the USA as a whole.

Emerson’s book begins by setting out that one simple question: if the great prophets and sages of old beheld God and nature face to face, through their eyes, why should we not also enjoy an original relationship with the universe?

And my rather pessimistic answer is, because we are irrevocably alienated from nature, we could never return to the land in any meaningful way. In fact, to do so would be detrimental to humanity. People can never be any more than nature’s tourists. How then can we know God?

19th Century New England painting by Mary Blood Mellen — 19th Century New England painting by **Mary Blood Mellen**

Because New England urbanisation was so low, Emerson could assume his audience had experienced nature first hand, even if only in a meaningfully intimate way in their youth. We cannot assume that today. If people today are biblically illiterate, then perhaps they are illiterate to the beauty of nature also. Perhaps we assume an innate reverence for nature which the urban dwellers cannot even begin to recognise. Or at least, they may lack the language to recognise it. We may be a community so in touch with the supreme significance of nature’s beauty that it proves an insurmountable hurdle to those that cannot see it.

Take a community that values the biblical narrative; they would not abandon it when faced with the biblically illiterate. But rather they would strive to invite people into that shared conversation, to educate, inculturate, not assume anything. So we might do the same when it comes to the spiritual language of nature’s beauty. And part of that bridge-building process is also to learn cultural languages which are alien to us – as I have suggested before, film, art, and technology, are such languages that perhaps the urban dwellers of today have a more innate grasp upon.

How can we impart the wisdom of nature to a people unfamiliar with nature? Part of that must lie in bringing nature’s beauty into urban spaces. This is most obviously done by encouraging people into their city’s green spaces, but also in smaller ways, such as bringing flowers into the Meeting House. In this way, we might practice the appreciation of Nature.

Part of Nature’s beauty, as Emerson explains, lies in its unattainable nature. You may own this land, but you cannot own the horizon, you cannot own the stars above. This invokes a youth of the heart, and in turn, it offers us a blank slate. The same feeling is invoked in Mary Oliver’s poem: the dance goes on, with no discernable beginning or end, there is only being present. Practicing the presence of Nature then offers us a fresh beginning, recharges us, and offers us the capacity to move forward and accept what has past, shedding the day-to-day stress of life. It further brings our focus off judging ourselves, others, and situations. The more you appreciate, the less you judge.

Some of us have the privilege to find solitude in uninhabited nature, to be there so wholly and intentionally that we surpass mere admiration, and feel it envelop our senses. Perhaps such people have a calling to be nature’s ambassadors, to communicate their appreciation and the wisdom it offers to a people who can never know it to that degree.

The notion often surfaces that the beauty nature has to offer cannot ever be surpassed by the creations of humanity. And I wonder if that is, in fact, true. Perhaps the highest forms of art and beauty are in cities, not outside them. Perhaps Transcendentalist thought has historically missed the true significance of humanity’s creative power. In elevating nature to such a height, and regarding nature as the principal way of communing with the divine, we may blindside ourselves to beauty in its multiplicity of forms – maybe in the cinema, or in art galleries, or restaurants, experiencing the transcendent is just as conceivable, just as valid.

If trends continue as they are, then in my lifetime the population of the entire world will be in cities. No doubt the rate of migration into our cities will level out before then, but none the less our future is squarely in the urban space. What does our movement have to say to a world like that? Do we wish to stand prophetically resistant to such a world? Or do we wish to find our voice in a brave new one?

Amen.

[1] I think this point does deserve a footnote. You might be protesting, “I would sacrifice modern convenience for the idyllic country life”. And that may well be true. My point is that you are therefore part of a dwindling minority.

Narcissistic Solitude?

Lewis Connolly June 5, 2015

Replica of Thoreau's cabin near Walden Pond

In Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) we have a philosophy of rugged self-reliance, pure individualism, in which one’s best self flourishes, free of political and religious allegiance. True community then, is found in the communing of real individuals – in shared recognition of the divine within each of us.

In a desire to actualize this philosophy, Thoreau took to the woods for two years (1845 – 1847), living on the shores of Walden Pond, Massachusetts, on a piece of land owned by Ralf Waldo Emerson.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

This romantic idea of throwing off the shackles of contemporary life is undeniably appealing. In the history of religion there are countless examples of individuals taking to the wilderness, such as the desert fathers, in search of solitude. In Thoreau’s masterwork ‘Walden’, Thoreau recounts his time in the woods, and expounds upon the conceptual underpinning of this venture. The real gem within the work though is the chapter on solitude itself.

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

I both find this idea agreeable, for it certainly aligns with my disposition, and yet partly concerning, for it seems to me to indulge a narcissistic impulse. There seems to me to be a fine line between the self-edifying eremitic life, and simply disengaging from society for self-centred reasons. And yet I am unsure. Perhaps it is only perceived as self-centred by those not brave enough to disengage from society – those invested in society must justify their choice. Or, perhaps the value of extended periods of solitude is to be found in the insights such individuals bring back to society, such as Thoreau’s work itself.

Solitude can be a deadly counsellor, or friend of infinite worth. Perhaps any lack of true solitude within our current society should be taken as a societal ill – we are tentatively never alone - our ups and downs can be learnt of vicariously all the time. And yet perhaps the lack of true solitude impairs true connection – in our destitution we cannot really be known.

So I return to Thoreau and the Transcendentalists’ notion of the ‘communing of real individuals’. Perhaps the lure of tribalism blinds us from the true value of solitude, which in turn robs us of truly communing at all.