Walden: Thoreaus Spiritual Vision of Unity with Nature and the Significance of Self-Expression - Assignment Example

Walden: Thoreau’s Spiritual Vision of Unity with Nature and the Significance of Self-Expression. Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) was a writer and philosopher whose work has influenced his contemporaries and future generations of writers and artists, naturalists and environmentalists, philosophers and politicians. Thoreau was born and lived in Concord, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard and worked intermittently as a teacher and surveyor and in the family’s pencil manufacturing business. He was a member of the Concord School of Transcendentalists and an avid naturalist. He published several articles and books to mediocre success during his lifetime. Thoreau died of tuberculosis on May 6, 1862 (Lenat, 2007). In an attempt to live life on his own terms and explore his philosophy of self-reliance, simple living and intellectual growth, Thoreau built a primitive cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, situated about a mile from Concord, and lived there from 1845 – 1847: a period of two years and two months. In 1854, Thoreau published ‘Walden,’ an account of his life during that time (Kifer, 2002). ‘Walden’ throbs with Thoreau’s impassioned love for Nature and his exhortation to follow a simple lifestyle, free from the bond of materialism. Walden is Thoreau’s spiritual quest for self-expression. Thoreau urges each man to achieve his full potential for self-expression and identification with God through the exploration of his individual self and shows that union with Nature is the surest path to this goal. Thoreau’s identification with Nature stems from his all-encompassing love for Nature, which is woven into every page of his narrative. To him, Nature is the fount of beauty, joy, companionship, freedom and health. He rises early to lose himself in the beauty of the dawn. Thoreau observes and delights in the minutest details of Nature: even the sound of berry-laden branches breaking off under their own weight. The wealth of detail he lavishes on his description of partridges, loons, owls, hawks, insects and fish and pond ice is characterized by a tenderness which chronicles and cherishes every minute aspect of Nature. A sparrow alighting on his shoulder is considered a badge of honor by him (Winter Animals, 7). His becoming a vegetarian is but a natural offshoot of this love, which leads him to treasure any life, animal or human, and consider this to be a mark of civilization. His keen observation of Nature enables him to make inferences of his visitors by interpreting the significance of bended twigs and dropped flowers. Thoreau’s passionate embrace of Nature is seen in his hunger “to seize and devour --- that wildness” represented by a woodchuck (Higher Laws, 1). He unabashedly owns that “One can never have enough of Nature” (Spring, 24). Nature’s unconfined, vast horizons are the source of his joy. Thoreau finds “the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society” in Nature and in “the friendship of the seasons” (Solitude, 4). It is not only his friend, companion and happiness, but also the key to innate freedom and his recipe for health. It is “the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented” (Solitude, 18). Again, Thoreau reiterates that “We need the tonic of wildness” for our well being (Spring, 24). He implicitly trusts Nature’s promise to nurture and feed her children and sees her vigor and dignity even in the least of her creatures. Thoreau’s love of Nature leads him to immerse himself in it until he becomes one with it. He chafes against anything which construes a barrier between himself and Nature. A house separates the dweller from Nature, which becomes a “forgotten Heaven” (Economy C, 15). He abhors the idea of distancing himself from Nature: for him, there must be “No yard: but unfenced Nature reaching up to (his) very sill” (Sounds, 22). His simple dinner of bread and butter, when eaten outdoors, takes on the fragrance of pine and his furniture, when left outdoors, assumes nature’s forms. Thoreau shuns curtains so that “the sun and the moon --- look in” to his house (Economy E, 2). His best room is no man-made, ornamented drawing room, but the pine wood behind his house, which Nature keeps for him. When Thoreau sits in “his sunny doorway from sunrise to noon, rapt in revery,” (Sounds, 2) he loses himself in the contemplation of Nature, achieving a spiritual unity with the life outside. He thrills in this union, when, as a part of Nature, he “imbibes delight through every pore” (Solitude, 1). He feels so close to Nature that even little pine needles seem to sympathize with him and he is gripped by a pervasive feeling of kinship with Nature, which to him is “the perennial source of life” (Solitude, 5), in whose society he is never lonely. His spiritual vision of unity with Nature is reiterated time and again, as when he extols Nature’s sympathy and asks, “Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” (Solitude, 17). In man, he sees the very same raw material and forces that are present in a grain of sand or a leaf. The human body to Thoreau is but the manifestation of Nature’s attributes. “What is man but a mass of thawing clay?” he asks (Spring, 8). Likewise, he compares human life to grass, mown down to its’ roots, yet renewing its’ life to all eternity. In Thoreau’s view, Man and Nature are one. He even communicates with Nature by rousing echoes as speech. Thoreau’s mystical union with Nature verges on the spiritual, leading to his identification with his Creator. Nature to him is eternal and the embodiment of the Divine. The lilac which outlives men’s houses and the hands that planted it, is symbolic of eternity. Similarly, the fathomless depth and purity of Walden Pond is, to Thoreau, a symbol of man’s abiding belief in eternity. The winds carry to Thoreau “celestial music” (Where I Lived, 8). Even mundane sounds like distant bells and the lowing of cows are voices of Nature and part of the “vibration of the universal lyre” (Sounds, 15). Nature is synonymous with the Divine Creator and is the “mother of humanity” (Spring, 9). He worships Dawn as a personification of Divinity. Thoreau’s shrines and temples are not man-made edifices, but the pine groves and swamps of Nature. Nature to him is a vast, colorful, ever-changing art gallery, whose manager is the Divine Creator. Heaven is not just a paradise in the skies, but is very much “under our feet” in the guise of Nature (Pond In Winter, 2). Thoreau sees God in Nature as embodied by Walden Pond: to him, his Creator’s face is mirrored in the beauty of its waters: “I cannot come closer to God and Heaven/ Than I live to Walden even” (The Ponds B, 9). For Thoreau, there is an inevitable progression: his love of Nature leads him to a spiritual union with it, which in turn, leads him to self-expression and identification with God. Thoreau’s quest for self-expression leads him to identify materialism as the biggest obstacle in man’s spiritual path towards self-realization. Only when man breaks the bonds of materialism, restricts his physical needs to the bare essentials, is open to change and explores his individual self, can he aspire to genuine self-expression. According to Thoreau, men burdened with the claims of inherited wealth and property, are but “serfs of the soil” (Economy A, 4). They delude themselves into thinking that the gaining of transient, material wealth is the goal of life and ignore the pursuit of spiritual wealth. Caught in the vicious cycle of labor for monetary gain, they fail to pick the “finer fruits” of life (Economy A, 6) and live in despair. Material wealth, asserts Thoreau, is but “accumulated dross --- (with which men have) forged their own gold or silver fetters” (Economy A, 21). In the mad rush to earn more, man falls into a trap of his own making and is caught in the coil of unremitting toil, becoming “the tool of their own tools” (Economy C, 15). Thoreau claims that the more man is laden with, and slowed down by, the physical trappings of material wealth, the more spiritually poverty-stricken he is. These bonds of materialism can easily be broken by the simple expedient of restricting ones’ labor to the acquisition of just the basic necessities of life in the form of food, clothes, shelter, warmth and the simple accessories of work and study. It is the paranoid search for excess that entraps man. Thoreau unequivocally states that “Most of the luxuries --- are positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind” (Economy A, 19). External material wealth is a barrier to attaining inner spiritual gain. The pursuit of luxury is at the cost of spiritual poverty: “Not till we have lost the world (of materialism) will we begin to find ourselves” (Village, 2). He advises man to concentrate more on the spiritual aspect of self-improvement and self-expression and less on the outward appearance imparted by clothes. Thoreau advocates individualism as the path towards the goal of self-realization and ultimate identification with God. If a man makes himself a slave to the tyranny of public opinion, there can be no hope of freedom for him to express the divinity in himself. “What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines --- his fate” (Economy A, 8). Only when man gives up his prejudices and interprets life’s experiences in his own individual way, without blindly following external advice and conventional thinking, can he move towards self-expression. There is no single path to the truth: there are myriad paths open to the man who is receptive to change. Life is of many kinds: one cannot categorically be held to be better than the other. Thoreau exhorts, “Keep on your own track” (Sounds, 10), for the spirit of independence and individualism are essential for spiritual growth. When life is being ever renewed, inherited misconceptions must be abandoned and man must go forward “with a horizon all his own” (Baker Farm, 8). Thoreau repeatedly stresses the importance of individualism and denigrates common sense and mental degeneration which obstruct different interpretations of life. He advises man “to mind his own business and endeavor to be what he was made” (Conclusion, 9). Thoreau deplores confinement within commonly prescribed limits and encourages each individual to march to his own “drummer”: to follow the dictates of his own inner self. To be carried heedlessly by the crowd is to lose the opportunity to “walk even with the Builder of the Universe” (Conclusion, 14). It is only when individuality is asserted that true exploration of the self can begin. Thoreau concedes his own ignorance of the eternal truth and wishes to seek and find it, beginning the search in himself, for man is one with his Creator. “Next to us is --- the Workman whose work we are” (Solitude, 6). His love of solitude is a manifestation of this desire to explore his self. Only when man breaks free from the monotony of routine and seeks new adventures, perils and discoveries can he develop experience and character. Thoreau exhorts man to break away from the mean confines of the physical and reach out to the “glorious existence --- possible” (Pond In Winter, 13). Man is the maker of his own life and the molder of his body and mind: “Every man is a builder --- our material is our own flesh and blood” (Higher Laws, 14). Walden is Thoreau’s call to man to wake up from the sleep of ignorance and “stagnant self-complacency” (Conclusion, 16) and discover what he is. In self-discovery lies self-expression. When man casts aside materialism and follows wisdoms’ dictates to live “a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust” (Economy A, 19), meets life as an adventure, lets his life not get frittered away by haste, unnecessary details and possessions, stops deluding himself with external superficialities, observes reality and yet remains detached, he is on the path to self-realization. Thoreau sees “truth and frankness” (Visitors, 15) as the starting points on this voyage of self-discovery and goodness as the “only investment that never fails” (Higher Laws, 10). Nature, with her simplicity, diversity and pure beauty is the reality which surrounds us and the light which is Thoreau’s “proof of immortality” (Spring, 23). When man subjugates his animal nature, his intellect comes to the fore and “Man flows at once to God” (Higher Laws, 11). Thoreau’s spiritual vision of union with Nature is his bridge to the Divine, by which he lives deeply and “sucks out all the marrow of life” (Where I Lived, 16). This union with God, through spiritual union with Nature, is Thoreau’s highest form of self-expression. (2,075 words) References. Kifer, K. 2002. Analysis and Notes on Walden. Henry Thoreau’s Text with Adjacent Thoreauvian Commentary. http://www.kenkifer.com/Thoreau (accessed 26 February 2007). Lenat, R. 2007. The Thoreau Reader. The annotated works of Henry David Thoreau. http://thoreau.eserver.org/thoreau.html (accessed 26 February 2007). Read More