"A More Conscious Silence"

It is difficult to begin without borrowing, Thoreau tells us as he relates the borrowing of an ax to found his cabin at Walden, perhaps is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow men to have an interest in your enterprise.'1 project of Walden, promising to take the writer to the necessaryjof life (7), and at the same time to make him matutine, capable of pure origin like the morning, begins already in debt. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, he tells us, the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is perpetual sunrise (62). pure beginning Thoreau seeks at Walden is already undercut by the need for the axe, which like the pen, divides at the same time discovers. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau will describe the poetic frenzy as the poet who scratches with his pen, but who does not detect where the jewel lies, which, perhaps, We have in the mean time cast to a distance, or quite covered up again.2 insufficiency of his beginning throws Thoreau back upon the human community; and though that beginning has been interrupted, Nature is nonetheless seen as a process of continuous origination to which the poet can lend his ear: The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it (58). rift between the abundant meaning inherent in Nature and the possibility of poetic access to becomes the major theme of Thoreau's Week. Consisting of the account of a canoe trip Thoreau took with his brother, the Week returns again and again to the disproportion of poetic language to the natural truths would evoke, yet does so at the same time asserts at least the possibility of a union between the mind and Nature. Few are the critics, however, who sense the prevalence of this problem in the work at all. A sensitive reading such as Sherman Paul's centers on the supposed union achieved by Thoreau's language with the natural meaning

Aesthetics · Art · Friendship · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Silence · History · Psychology · Social Psychology · Thoreau and American Literature