A Table of Green Fields, Guy Davenport [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

JOHN BURROUGHS

 

Thoreau did not love Nature for her own sake, or the bird and the flower for their own sakes, or with an unmixed and disinterested love, as Gilbert White did, for instance, but for what he could make out of them. He says: The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence which only the most ingenuous worshiper perceives at a reverent distance from its surface even. This fine effluence he was always reaching after, and often grasping or inhaling. This is the mythical hound and horse and turtledove which he says in Walden he long ago lost, and has been on their trail ever since. He never abandons the search, and in every woodchuck hole or muskrat den, in retreat of bird, or squirrel, or mouse, or fox that he pries into, in every walk and expedition to the fields or swamps or to distant woods, in every spring note and call that he listens to so patiently, he hopes to get some clew to his lost treasures, to the effluence that so provokingly eludes him.

This search of his for the transcendental, the unfindable, the wild that will not be caught, he has set forth in this beautiful parable in Walden.

 

GEESE

 

Well now, that Henry. Thursday one of the Hosmer boys told him he'd heard geese. He wants to know everything anybody can tell him in the way of a bird or skunk or weed or a new turn to the wind. Well, Henry knew damned good and well that it's no time to be hearing geese. So, always assuming his leg wasn't being pulled, he sat down and thought about it. And after awhile, didn't take him long, he got up and walked to the station. He didn't ask. He told Ned that at half past one on Thursday a train had passed through with a crate of geese in the baggage car. That's a fact, Ned said, but I don't recollect anybody being around here at the time.

STANLEY CAVELL

I have no new proposal to offer about the literary or biographical source of these symbols in perhaps his most famously cryptic passage. But the very fact that they are symbols, and function within a little myth, seems to me to tell us what we need to know. The writer comes to us from a sense of loss; the myth does not contain more than symbols because it is no set of desired things he has lost, but a connection with things, the track of desire itself.

THE JOURNAL: 1 APRIL 1860

 

The fruit of a thinker is sentences: statements or opinions. He seeks to affirm something as true. I am surprised that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, not forethought, so that I occasionally wake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I never consciously considered before, and as surprisingly novel and agreeable to me as anything can be.

6

And yet we did unbend so far as to let our guns speak for us, when at length we had swept out of sight, and thus left the woods to ring again with their echoes; and it may be many russet-clad children, lurking in those broad meadows with the bittern and the woodcock and the rail, though wholly concealed by brakes and hardhack and meadowsweet, heard our salute that afternoon.

7

Solitude, reform, and silence.

8

In A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers Thoreau wrote: Mencius says: If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of the heart, he does not know how to seek them again. The duties of all practical philosophy consist only in seeking after the sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all.

9

Duke Hsuan of Qi arranged his skirts and assumed a serene face to receive the philosopher Meng Tze, and who knows how many devils had come with him? The magicians had drilled the air around the gates with incessant drumming, and the butlers were burning incense.

The duke could see wagons of millet on the yellow road. The philosopher had apparently travelled in some humble manner. From the terrace he could see no caravan. There was no commotion among the palace guard.

Sparrows picked among the rocks below the bamboo grove.

A merchant was handing in a skip of persimmons and a string of carp at the porter's lodge. The weather was dry.

The philosopher when he was ushered in was indeed humble. His clothes were coarse but neat, and his sleeves were modest. He wore a scholar's cap with ear flaps.

They met as gentlemen skilled in deference and courtly manners, bow for bow. The duke soon turned their talk to this feudal baron or that, angling for news. There had for years been one war after another.

—And yet, Meng Tze said, the benevolent have no enemies.

Duke Hsuan smiled. Philosophers were always saying idiotic things like this.

—The grass, Meng Tze continued, stands dry and ungrowing in the seventh month and the eighth. Then clouds darken the sky. Rain falls in torrents. The grass, the millet, the buckwheat, the barley turns green again, and grows anew. Nothing we are capable of can control this process of nature. And yet men who ought to be the caretakers of other men kill them instead. They are pleased to kill. If there were a ruler who did not love war, his people would look at him with longing, loving eyes. It is in nature to love the benevolent.

So there was to be no gossip about Hwan of Ch'i, or Wan of Tsin. So the duke asked politely:

—How may a ruler attain and express benevolence?

—He should regard his people as his charges and not with contempt.

—Am I one, the duke asked slyly, who might be so benevolent? —Yes.

—How?

—Let me tell you about a duke. I had this from Hu Ho. A duke was sitting in his hall when he saw a man leading an ox through the door. The duke asked why, and was told that the ox was to be slaughtered to anoint a ceremonial bell with its blood. Just so, said the duke,