Walden

Looking for trees in color, we set out for Concord: Walden Pond, where Thoreau had his cabin, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where the most famous Transcendentalist authors are buried, the North Bridge, where the colonists fired the shots that triggered the Revolution. The day brilliantly sunny, trees here and there in bridge reds or yellows, we, among many others, enjoyed the balmy day by walking, visiting, pointing out, reflecting.

There's a bronze of Thoreau in front of a replica of his cabin near Walden Pond. The characteristic beard and big nose identify the walking figure as the writer we know of, and do know somewhat, but don't really know. Is the statue life-sized? Was he really that short? At least it has him walking and his head turned as if listening, or having just thought of something.

He writes in Walden about the mirror-like quality of the pond especially this time of year, September or October. He calls it 'sky water' and saw it as a field of water that 'betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from the sky.'  We saw serious distance swimmers churning up the water, strong shoulder muscles moving forward like whale backs while arms regularly rose out of and slid back into the water. It gave me a start to see one of them so close to the shore, as if the distance between us had been foreshortened, until I saw  that the sandy bottom dropped away sharply where I stood.

One man we met as we circumambulated was lounging in the water, completely immersed only his head showing with which we exchanged greetings, but so close to the shore that, once more, my perspective cues were discordant.

There seems to be a whole subculture of swimmer/loungers around the shores of the pond. I saw one man emerge from the water with something like a balaclava hat of rubber with a face mask and' snorkel. The Thoreau who wrote: 'I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching sand, and I arose to see what short my fates had impelled me to--days when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry,' would have understood  what draws these people to and into that water.

'...the latter part of October, when the severe frosts have come, ' he wrote, but we were enjoying summer temperatures. He kept such careful records over the years of the times of arrival of birds and blooming of flowers that we can observe the gradual shifts to earlier and earlier in the year that signal the warming of our climate. Would you have been shocked by yesterday's weather?

Your grave stone up on Author's Ridge, catty-corner to Hawthorne's, a few steps from Alcott's and in stone throwing distance from Emerson's is simple: Henry, it says. The Thoreau family stone next to it has all the details of your immediate family and their dates. Nothing mysterious about your origins. You were born into a Concord family, lived in this town, and finally (I think this is your second burial) ended up so close to the sunlit, mossy slope that you must have been short not to have your legs sticking out in the air.

Your wander-walking days are over, yet in Walden, as I've read it and browsed in it (along with your other writings, especially Cape Cod) still seems a peripatetic work, an on-the-go kind of account of someone who was resolved to really be where he was. 'We must learn to reawaken and to keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids (no coffee?) but by an infinite expectation the dawn...' The passage goes on, as do they all, into an overgrown thicket of ironic obscurities, but, you, Mr Thoreau (however your name was pronounced), sought to put to the test the Transcendentalist claim that each moment have infinite resonance, which we can hear if only we listen.

Your prose, indeed your persona, was gnarly but the moment caught by the lumpy statue near the cabin was of one of the many moments of encounter that, like upwellings of a spring, fed the pure Walden of your existence. It's such moments I try to recognize in this blog.