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Volume 28:

Essays: English and American (full text)

I first read Thoreau's essay Walking, which is included in the Classics' second volume of essays, as a freshman in a course on the American Renaissance. More recently, I've taught the essay several semesters in an undergraduate writing class. In between, I've probably read it close to fifty times. In my writing class, I talk a lot about the way that Thoreau's meandering style matches his subject matter, and more generally about the way that form and content align in a good piece of writing. But the real reason I teach Walking, and the reason I read it over and over again, is because I love it as much as anything I've ever read.

When my friend Josh got married in his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts last year, I spent the morning before the ceremony at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, whose Author's Ridge holds Emerson and Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott. The first grave I looked for was Thoreau's, and I spent a long time in front of it, thinking mostly about what this essay has meant to me at various times in my life. Even skimming over it now to write this post, I find my heart rate elevating a little. So what did it mean to read these twenty familiar pages as part of 20,000 in the Shelf?

I wish to speak a word for Nature, the essay begins:

for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, --to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization.

Thoreau emerged from roughly the same New England society that a few generations later produced Charles Eliot. Like Eliot he was Harvard educated. He lived in a world that placed great stock in culture -- and the limits it placed on human behavior -- as opposed to instinct and wildness. Thoreau shared with Emerson the worry that a particular American genius risked being smothered in the cradle by a too-great reverence for European antiquity. In Walking, he links this general philosophical belief with the more immediate conviction that culture teaches men to give over too much of their lives to indoor occupations when they might be out in the natural world. All of which suggests, in part, that Thoreau would think rather little of a young man in the prime of life who chose to spend a year sitting inside reading classic works of literature.

There is an honest answer to this charge, one I've carried with me since February, when I read some of the same points expressed somewhat differently by Emerson. Plainly, we no longer live in an age too much in thrall to the past. Our culture is more than willing to honor instinct and to throw off the limits and demands of cultivation. In particular America is more than willing to celebrate a wild American genius at the expense of European civilization.

All of it true. Thoreau wrote in a different time. But I have come over the years to believe that there's something lasting about this essay, something that speaks to me in a particular way, and so I couldn't simply dismiss it as irrelevant when it seemed to challenge what I was doing with my time. It troubled me as I read Walking for the fifty-first time last week. Then I came to what has always been my favorite passage in the essay:

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers--for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers--a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes, --Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop.

Go to grass. I shiver every time I read these words. But this time they especially moved me. I'm more than halfway through the Shelf now, and it feels at times like I've been reading it my whole life. I suspect that some part of me will continue to read it my whole life. But part of me hopes that along with whatever knowledge the Shelf have given me, it is adding to my store of useful ignorance. And when I've finished the green crop will come, and I will be ready to go to grass.

--CRB, August 31, 2007

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