My Walden

Reading Walden this week felt like taking a mini-vacation for me. Not that I’m as big a fan of Thoreau as I am of Austen, although his little jokes do crack me up, but I have another connection to Walden Pond and Thoreau than this class.

I have a sorority sister who lives in suburb of Boston that I used to visit at least once a year, usually on St. Patrick’s Day, and for a week we’d bop around the surrounding areas and sightsee. The first year I visited her was for my first St. Pat’s Day in Boston. Rolling with an Irish family full of cops in Boston on March 17 is a singularly entertaining experience. J 

During the week I stayed there I wanted to see as much as I could because I didn’t know if I would ever be able to go back. We went to Salem and Concord to do the witch-hunt and the Transcendentalist thing. I grew up reading books by Louisa May Alcott and once I got older, her children’s books led me to her novels for adults and her father’s writings. The Alcott’s led me into other Transcendentalist authors, including Emerson and Thoreau. Once I knew I would be visiting Concord, I knew I had to see Orchard House and Walden Pond.

As I was reading Walden, I kept envisioning the place I visited. Even as a tourist attraction it is peaceful and imparts that sense of vitality and fertility that Muir and Thoreau talk about in their writing. I remember the first time that I read that Walden was not written out in the wilderness. Like many others, when I was reading I assumed that Thoreau cut off most of his contact with the outside world and that he was somewhere without contact with the “modern” world. I remember feeling disappointed, as though I had been lied to.

After re-reading I feel like maybe I wasn’t so at fault for thinking that he was off on his own away from everywhere and everything. The text lends itself to the trope of “the man off in the woods”. This reminded me of the nature that isn’t natural idea that we’ve been reading and talking about this quarter. Walden is written as though Thoreau is one man who retreats from the world and into the forest and when he comes out he has been enlightened and has this amazing account to share with the world. This is that fictional nature idea. He wasn’t far from other people or civilization, he only gave up those luxuries that it amused him to do without. His account came from a journal that he revised over and over; it’s not the divinely inspired account that it seems at time. I’ve been having a problem with the idea of “fake nature” but after connecting that idea with my memories of Walden, I’m not sure that it’s such a big problem anymore. That this little bit of pastoral beauty was preserved because someone wrote a sort of fantasy of the wild is okay with me.

 

I’ve been lucky enough to experience the pond in three of four seasons. You haven’t lived until you’ve hiked around the pond while inhaling snow during a blizzard. The blazing colors in the fall and the vibrant greens and blues of the summer setting will be something that I never forget. The fact that I was able to experience a bit of this pastoral/rural fantasy because of the pretense of the wild makes me only grateful that Thoreau and Muir wrote what they did. This pretense and the fiction of other “wild” spaces (like National Parks) seem essential to preservation and conservation in this modern, capitalistic society. That pretense allows a value to be placed on the wild and if that’s the only way to save places like these, I think I need to come to an uneasy truce with the practice. I’ll settle for this approach at least until public opinion changes or becomes more enlightened and the reason to preserve “nature” need only be that it exists and not for what it can provide to humans.

John Muir - My Summer in the Sierras

Reading John Muir’s “My Summer in the Sierras” made me want to go out and hike all weekend. Unfortunately, finals are looming so my butt is glued to my desk but my love of the outdoors has been reawakened. It made me remember spending so much time outside when I was younger. I used to run around my backyard inspecting bugs and chasing garter snakes and lizards. I loved working with my mom in the garden and with our neighbor who was even more into plants than my mom is. I learned plant names and characteristics, how to care for them, what they like and don’t like, what works well together from them. Muir’s journal entries also reminded me of taking Marine Bio in high school. Our teacher had several of these big tanks that were actually saltwater tanks filled with animals and different kinds of kelp. Several times over the year we took field trips and spent the whole day studying tide pools close up. Part of our assignments for that class was that we had to do these observation cards. We needed to pick an organism and then give its classification, common name, some other info and then do a sketch of it. Reading Muir’s entries made me think of those observation cards.

There were a few moments in the text that caught my attention for different reasons. The first was the way that Muir confronts the idea of utility in the text. A few different times he looks at different things and speculates on why they were created. He is observing how poison ivy runs rampant and how it coexists peacefully with other parts of nature. He notices that even though poison ivy is seen as a bane to humans and a nuisance it has a part in nature, it is even “intertwined” with it. He gently raises the question of the validity of utility as a measure of the value of nature or even if we have the right to place a value on nature. He defers that question to God. The idea of nature as having value only if it’s useful to humans goes back to the secondary readings we’ve done this quarter, most obviously for me, Evernden.

Another thing that caught my attention was the way that Muir positions himself in comparison to the shepherd. He talks about the difference between how being a shepherd in Scotland is this almost ideal way of life. It allows man to be outdoors, provides him a living, and affords him the opportunity to still nourish his soul through reading and interacting with his neighbors and family. However, the shepherd that Muir observes has a relatively unhappy life. His living is exhausting, from before morning to well after night he is forced to work, alone and unsupported. The difference I see in the two is a question of scale. The Scottish shepherd works for himself and his family. His business (his herd) will only grow to the size that he can comfortably handle. It’s more of a “natural” approach to business, the undertone is that it isn’t a lifestyle motivated by greed. In contrast, this shepherd is working for someone else. He is working to make that someone else rich. Since the point of this sort of business venture is wealth and not survival the shepherd is pushed to work to the end of human limits. His lifestyle is in opposition to nature, motivated by the greed of capitalism. This goes back to the idea of sucking the marrow from the bones of nature in the service of making money. What Muir’s journal does is raise the question: “is this the best way to live?”  This approach to nature is exhausting an essentially blinds those taken in by it. The shepherd Muir observes is blind to all of the beauty that Muir sees in the land around them and by extension he is also excluded from the knowledge and deeper reflection that Muir acquires and experiences by observing nature.

Another thing that caught my attention was the brief anecdote about the Frenchman and the cave. The story is that a Frenchman passing along sees this cave and seeing no one else there decides to fence and gate the entrance to the cave and then charge admission. At first I laughed at the story but almost at the same time I got angry. That story is so typical of the Western/American relationship to land. The idea that a cave can belong to a person is ludicrous. It also reminds me of some texts that I’m reading for Dr. Karafilis’ class. So much of the justification for the Indian Removal Act is rhetoric that centers around ideas of discovery and possession. Essentially, America justified evicting the Native Americans because of the hallowed principles of “finders keepers” and “possession goes to whoever has the bigger gun”. 

Innate or acquired?

First off, a little confession. I love Jane Austen. No, really… LOVE her. I have loved her novels since I read Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility in my high school AP English classes. I have read and re-read her novels since then. Jane Austen and the Brontë’s are responsible for my decision to major in English. Just to clarify, I don’t mean that I am one of the bandwagon Austen-philes that read the mass-marketed fanfic that provide sequels for Mr. Darcy and Lizzie’s life together or that tell what would happen if zombies infiltrated Pemberley. I’m old school. I enjoy her novels for the way she depicts characters and gently laughs at all of them. I love the detail she incorporates in the text and how she makes me feel as though I’m sitting with her in the drawing room, discussing those around us.  

With that said, this is the first time that I’ve ever read Mansfield Park. I remember picking it up once in my late teens but I can’t remember why I didn’t read it at that time. I’m glad now that my first time reading Mansfield Park is as a part of this class. As much as I adore my Austen, I think I would have been bored stiff by, or quite possibly have abandoned the book altogether. However, with the readings from this class percolating in the background of my brain I found myself involved in the text through the concepts of Nature/nature. Throughout my reading I found myself looking at the ways that Austen it playing with or pointing out different features of human nature. I was particularly interested in how the characters act out this question of whether human nature is in fact, natural, or if it is fabricated. There seems to be an assumption of innate nature rather than actual definitive actions of nature when the nature we’re discussing is of the human sort. The Bertram girls are assumed to be ladies, they are assumed to have genteel minds and fine perceptions but as the story progresses we see how “nature” really plays out. On the other hand there is Fanny who is assumed to be low and coarse because of the type of people her parents are but she ends up being the most morally upright person in the novel.

One other authorial move that I especially enjoyed in the novel was how the action revolves around families. The novel begins by discussing the marriages of the three Ward sisters. One marries well, one moderately, and one “to disoblige her family” (1). Since many of the people in the book are related to or spring from the three Ward sisters it could be expected that they would share similar traits or possibly have similar personalities. It seemed strange to me that through marriage a woman’s personality and her offspring could be so materially different from her beginnings. I did enjoy seeing the difference between the children of one Ward sister and Sir Bertram and another Ward sister and a Lieutenant in the Marines. This same idea is echoed in the Grant-Crawford family. It was intriguing to see the idea of nature played out through the characters, where they begin and what is expected of them compared to where they end up and how they actually behave.

Sublimity and other questions

Response to “Perspectives” - I was amused by Dorothy Wordsworth’s recounting of the incident between Coleridge and another tourist at the Falls of the River Clyde and less so when I read Coleridge’s “reimagining” of the moment. It’s irritating to have the man in the anecdote changed to a woman, and to what purpose? Only, it seems, to be able to poke fun at silly women who are intellectually incapable of discerning the nature of the sublime.

Another point that caught my attention was the use of a Claude glass by those in pursuit of the picturesque. It seemed very like our modern practice of taking pictures on our phones, more preoccupied with sending a post to Facebook or Instagram rather than enjoying what is before us. The use of the Claude glass and the tinted glasses to define and appreciate the picturesque in nature reminded me of what some of the critical readings were saying about the way we package and consume nature. The travel guides and “favored observation points” work together to create and promote a “proper” way to appreciate or be affected by the natural environment. The idea that there must be somewhere within the scene “an interesting object” to “prompt ruminations on personal and historical mutability” served to reinforce the artificiality of these trips. It made me think of people who watch sappy movies because they enjoy crying at the happy endings. Bah!

In reading the Kant and Burke selections on the sublime I noticed that Kant says that “the sublime is not to be looked for in things of nature, but only in our own ideas” (45). I’m wondering why that is? Burke’s idea of the sublime seems to be tied to emotion and this sense of excess, of overflowing but Kant’s ideas seem more tied to rationality. Even if I’m on the right track that still doesn’t explain why. Kant says that the sublime is “absolutely great” and that “reason demands absolute totality”, so is this why sublimity is tied to reason for him? Since he believes that reason has a point of absolute and nature does not, maybe because nature has the connotation of being imperfect, reason would be the true vehicle of the sublime? Although as I read and re-read the Kant section I think I’m understanding his version of the sublime as “residing” in our minds because even though nature is great and has power over us, nature is only sublime in that it forces us to think? The last line of the penultimate paragraph on p. 46 is driving me crazy, especially this part: “of those cases in which the mind can make itself sensible of the appropriate sublimity of the sphere of its own being”. I feel like I have a handle up to that point but after that it doesn’t make sense to me. What is the sphere of the mind’s own being? Is that the aforementioned Reason? And what is the mode or measure of the “appropriate sublimity” of the mind’s sphere? I think I’m going to let these questions about the sublime percolate before I try to take on the picturesque. I’m going to take a break with Wordsworth’s Preface.

Rime Revisited

I was excited to read Coleridge this week as I love "Rime of the Ancient Mariner". I remembering reading it in Honors English in high school wondering what sort of trip Coleridge must have been on and where I could get some of the same. I think my favorite stanzas are the ninth in part the second ("Water, water, every where…") and the eleventh in part the third ("Her lips were red, her looks were free…") just for sheer blood-curdling pleasure. I love how creepy and strange the whole becalmed ship section is, it all just seems like some gothic Poe-esque opium fever dream. A question that I have always had is why does the Mariner choose that one particular wedding guest to accost? Was there something in his look or attitude that moved the Mariner? Did he feel that the Wedding Guest in particular had something to learn from his story? I have searched the stanzas for an answer but haven't ever been able to come up with anything satisfactory. That doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't an answer somewhere in the poem, goodness knows there are still some stanzas that I am trying to understand even now. 

Reading "The Eolian Harp" I'm trying to figure out what the point of the poem is. At first it seems as though Coleridge is enjoying himself romancing and and pondering while on his honeymoon but then it seems that at a reproving glance from his bride that he feels penitent for his idle musings and resolves to approach thoughts about the divine with more respect. Why would he feel guilty about idle thoughts? The comparison between an Eolian Harp and his mind seems to remove the potential for guilt since an Eolian Harp is a passive instrument and reliant on the currents of the wind for stimulation or impetus to action. If "all of animated nature/Be but organic harps" that are only stimulated into thought as "o'er them sweeps/[…]one intellectual breeze" then whose fault is it if those harps devolve into "many idle flitting phantasies"? Or is it as a gesture of gratitude for his "peace", "cot", and his "heart-honour'd Maid" that Coleridge is responsible for attempting to regulate the thoughts that flit through the imperfect mind that God gave him?

Grown-ups and children

I responded most to the poems that seemed to show how people can learn from Nature and the poems that showed children interacting with adults. I was most taken by "We are seven" and “Anecdote for Fathers”. The footnote attached to Wordsworth's "We are seven" explains that he wrote the poem to show "the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion." However, I don't see that the child in the poem is ignorant of death but that perhaps her idea of it is different from the narrator's.

The narrator in the poem describes a conversation he has with a small girl. He asks her how many children are in her family and she replies "'Seven are we,/ And two of us at Conway dwell,/ And two of us are gone to sea./ 'Two of us in the church-yard lie'" while she lives with her mother in a cottage near the church yard. The speaker tries to correct the little girl's belief that there are seven children in her family by pointing out that if two of her siblings are dead then they are actually only five. The speaker makes much of the child's inability to realize that since two siblings are dead that they are gone and don't count.

I don't agree with Wordsworth that this shows how children are ignorant of death. In the poem I see that the little girl does know about death, intimately even since she has had two people close to her die. It's not that she doesn't understand death but that perhaps due to her innocence she refuses to equate death with non-existence. Just because she can't see them anymore doesn't necessarily mean they are no longer part of her family. She chooses to spend her time in the graveyard singing to the graves of her sister and brother and to share her meal time with them. In this way she is continuing her connection with them. The narrator's comment that trying to explain that her siblings are dead "'Twas throwing words away" only serves to show that the narrator is blind to anything beyond the rational and not that the girl is stubborn as is implied. Just as she counts those siblings who live at Conway and at the sea as still part of her family so too does she count those unfortunate young ones she can no longer touch. In this case youth sees more clearly than age. This poem seemed to have a unintentional thematic connection to the "Anecdote for Fathers", in that it presents an example of an adult interacting with a child in a way that provides an opportunity for the adult to learn about human nature if the adult is open and observant.

One thing that struck me, or made me wonder about “Anecdote for Fathers” was the repetition of the father holding the son’s arm as he asks his son if he prefers Kilve or Liswyn farm. I couldn’t figure out why the question was so significant or why his son’s response should agitate him so. I’m not even sure why the father is certain that the son is lying, he might have glanced up at the weathervane by coincidence. Besides why would the son lie about which home he prefers? That didn’t make sense to me and seemed to cause a strange note of discordance in the poem.