I would like to talk about a short passage from Walden, written by Henry David Thoreau. At the tail end of the chapter “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”, Thoreau talks about the relevance of time and the value of intellect as we see it. I gave my first attempt at close reading on my own and this is what I came up with.
In the beginning of the paragraph, Thoreau starts by writing, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” Thoreau compares our perception of time to the flowing water of a stream, unidirectional and never repeating itself. Each glance at the moving water in a stream offers a unique visual image that can be recalled from our memory, but never duplicated exactly. Similarly, our perception of time causes continual change which prevents us from recreating the past, forcing us to rely on memories to revisit those past moments.
Thoreau continues that paragraph later on by saying, “Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” If we view our own self as a portion of water in the stream, our life journey becomes the stream in its entirety. Each moment as we travel down the stream is different from the last as we continue to move forward and grow. Consequently, when we flow on, we are replaced by the water behind us or the next generation of the human race, as one might look at it. Our own journey makes up just a small portion of the stream, almost to the point where we may not be significant at all. For as you look at the stream, the water is moving, but the physical presence of the stream remains, with new currents of water constantly replacing and renewing the stream. Thoreau labels us to be this ever changing, always moving water, while the presence of the stream as a whole depicts the eternity of life on this earth.
Later on in that paragraph, Thoreau changes focus and talks about his view on intellect, how it is lost, and how it can be the dissecting tool for life. He writes, “I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born, The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way in to the secret of things.” What Thoreau titles as wisdom, I see as creativity. It is in our youth when our minds are most creative and have not been censored by our environment. As we grow and learn, certain subjects are emphasized and a particular structured path is preferred upon us. This intellect that we develop causes us to pry deep into the secrets of life, secrets that may or may not be meant to surface. By losing our creativity and gaining this certain type of intellect, we demand to know more about the meaning of life and how it works and care less about enjoying life itself.
There is a really good TED talk by Ken Robinson on how our school systems are destroying creativity. Check it out!
I really enjoyed reading your post as this is one of my favorite passages in Walden, and you do a good job at identifying what I think is the central question of this passage: what is the relationship of the mind to nature and how do we know nature? (Sound familiar? Emerson was interested in the same question — compare Thoreau’s claim “I was not as wise as the day I was born” to Emerson’s line about “perpetual youth”). One suggestion for developing your close reading a bit more (if you choose to continue writing about this passage) is to focus more on the language and details of the passage and less on what you think the passage is saying. For instance, you claim that “Each glance at the moving water in a stream offers a unique visual image that can be recalled from our memory, but never duplicated exactly.” What in the wording or phrasing of the passage makes you interpret this to be Thoreau meaning?
Some other questions to consider: Why does Thoreau begin with the act of fishing but then segue to drinking and then counting? Why does he write that he “would drink deeper”? Why “would”? Is there a reason why he can’t drink deeper? Also, later in the passage what do you make of Thoreau’s claim that “the intellect is a cleaver”? What does he specifically mean by this phrase and what does the metaphor suggest? And why does he switch from the metaphor of a cleaver to the metaphor of burrowing or mining in the ground? [These are just a few questions you might ask yourself about the passage — and we will hopefully have time to talk about a few of them in class tomorrow]
Thanks for posting this video! Robinson argues that “creativity” is just as important in education as “literacy.” I’m not sure Thoreau would see the two as necessarily different — not if we conceive of literacy as being able to read the world (as opposed to reading the word).