Transcending Summer Session

After several weeks of concentrated work, summer session is over. The professor liked the papers I wrote about the Transcendentalists, so I'm optimistic about my grade. More importantly, I learned how these American poet-philosophers fit into the development of both the American character and of philosophy around the world.

While I haven't evicted Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman from the house entirely, it's been refreshing to put them aside for a few days. It was fun to revisit them so many years after high school, but I'm glad my senior thesis won't be about Thoreau and his influence on the 21st century perception of nature.

Speaking of the senior thesis, we have our first assignment, and one of my classmates is having a senior thesis party next week. I'm not sure if beer, notebooks, or both are involved in this kind of celebration, so it will probably be a learning experience.

Crowded House

Thoreau and Emerson are making room for Walt Whitman, whose "Song of Myself" is on the reading agenda this week. Thoreau scowls and says he's going to move to the garage, while Emerson, despite his essay "Self-reliance," is being very social and agreeable. I suspect that Whitman doesn't notice either of them. As one of my fellow students once said about a yoga instructor in Centralia, "He's, like, really into his body."

There's more to Whitman than that, but I'm too new to his work to say much more. It's interesting that so many teachers have assigned this poem to my classes over the years, but always only in parts. It's easy to see why they left out most of the poem: there's a lot of material that probably isn't suitable for grade-school students, and it's a phenomenally long work. I can just imagine what Marvin, the guy who sat behind me in sixth grade, would have asked Mrs. Ryan if he'd seen more than two pages of the "Song."

I don't have to imagine how my parents would have reacted to my reciting parts of the poem if it had been assigned in its entirety. As I said earlier, Whitman was really into his body, and a lot of other people's, too. The difference between Whitman and a zillion other similar minds is that he says it so well. He must have been irresistable in the flesh.

Transcending Above it All

As in all relationships, there are reasons for staying and for leaving. In Thoreau's case, he has a lot of flaws, and his critics have had about 173 years to notice them. For one thing, Thoreau held the majority of people in contempt. Critic Ira Booker points out that the poet-naturalist had a distaste for "the 'low' pursuits of his countrymen . . . [which] sometimes sound like an effort to prove that, while he may not have been able to live up to Nature's standards, he has achieved what he believes to be some of the highest callings of mere humans: he is well-read, capable of appreciating Nature, and resourceful enough to establish his own dwelling in the woods." I should add here that he was resourceful enough to establish his own one-room shack in woods borrowed from his one-time friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Thoreau didn't get along with many people, so one suspects his two years in the woods may have been a relief to some of his neighbors who remained in town. He was almost constantly patronizing in his attitudes toward most living people; he loathed the Irish immigrants doing the grunt work in his community, but he revered the people who had lived on Walden Pond a generation or more earlier. He respected the local Native Americans, but only because he didn't know any personally. For some reason, these qualities remind me of a lot of some of our contemporary eco-warriors, who embrace Thoreau's idea that Nature with a capital N is only deserved by those who are educated enough to appreciate it.

And researchers say Thoreau expressed admiration for only one woman in his life, a young Irish servant who read On Walden Pond and wanted to live the same way, on her own property. Typically, he wrote a lovely tribute to her in his journal, but left her name out of the entry.

Booker calls Thoreau "stiff-necked," and after some weeks in his company, I have to agree. Still, I feel sorry for him in one respect: he was a loner who didn't know how to be anything else:
"I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers."

Elsewhere in Walden, Thoreau indicates he restricted his diet severely, living mostly on corn meal, molasses, and a few berries. He boasted about how clean his diet was, and derided others for indulging in milk, butter, coffee, and tea. Toward the end of the book, he talks about his virtuous joy in becoming light-headed from hunger. He sounds remarkably like an anorexic -- he certainly ate like one.

In more than one way, Thoreau was lost in the woods, a forest of his own making.

And that's what I love about college: I would never have come to know Thoreau in this way. Otherwise, I would have thought he was the idol of the environmentalists and the political independents. He may well be, but poor, friendless Thoreau was a great deal more.