The Marginalian
The Marginalian

A Winter Walk with Thoreau: The Transcendentalist Way of Finding Inner Warmth in the Cold Season

A Winter Walk with Thoreau: The Transcendentalist Way of Finding Inner Warmth in the Cold Season

“Human beings make metaphors as naturally as bees make honey,” Adam Gopnik wrote in his wondrous love letter to winter, and no one has honeyed the spirit with more splendid metaphors wrung from winter than Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862).

Long before he contemplated winter cabbage as a lesson in optimism, Thoreau explored winter’s rapturous yet overlooked rewards in a stunning, meandering meditation titled “A Winter Walk,” included in his indispensable Excursions (free ebook | public library).

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Writing in the winter of 1843, shortly after Margaret Fuller’s mentorship made him a writer, the twenty-five-year-old Thoreau awakens to a snow-covered wonderland and marvels at the splendor — a singularly earthly splendor — of a world reborn:

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow-mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work, — the only sound awake twixt Venus and Mars, — advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.

We sleep, and at length awake to the still reality of a winter morning. The snow lies warm as cotton or down upon the window-sill; the broadened sash and frosted panes admit a dim and private light, which enhances the snug cheer within.

Art by Isabelle Arsenault from Once Upon a Northern Night by Jean E. Pendziwol

This quieting of the outside world, this kindling of the inner hearth, is indeed winter’s greatest reward for Thoreau. A century before Albert Camus wrested from the seasons his immortal metaphor for the human spirit — “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” — Thoreau writes:

There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill…. What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter’s day, when the meadow mice come out by the wallsides, and the chicadee lisps in the defiles of the wood? The warmth comes directly from the sun, and is not radiated from the earth, as in summer; and when we feel his beams on our backs as we are treading some snowy dell, we are grateful as for a special kindness, and bless the sun which has followed us into that by-place.

This subterranean fire has its altar in each man’s breast, for in the coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveller cherishes a warmer fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth. A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart. There is the south. Thither have all birds and insects migrated, and around the warm springs in his breast are gathered the robin and the lark.

Art by Alessandro Sanna from The River.

Thoreau believed that “every walk is a sort of crusade.” As he walks through the meadows blanketed in white, up the hills draped with snow-bowed branches, through a world enveloped in delicious quietude and covered in a “pure elastic heaven,” he returns to the invaluable inward focus which winter alone invites — a quiet conquest of one’s interior world. A century before Rilke painted winter as the season for tending to one’s inner garden, Thoreau writes:

In this lonely glen, with its brook draining the slopes, its creased ice and crystals of all hues, where the spruces and hemlocks stand up on either side, and the rush and sere wild oats in the rivulet itself, our lives are more serene and worthy to contemplate.

[…]

In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends.

He revisits the subject in a series of diary entires from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837–1861 (public library) — the trove of wisdom that gave us Thoreau on writing, the sacredness of public libraries, and the creative benefits of keeping a diary. On Christmas Day of 1856, he issues an exhortation central to his philosophy and his daily practice:

Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.

Four days later, Thoreau amplifies the fervor of his point:

We must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day. We must make root, send out some little fibre at least, even every winter day. I am sensible that I am imbibing health when I open my mouth to the wind. Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is in this sense a hospital. A night and a forenoon is as much confinement to those wards as I can stand. I am aware that I recover some sanity which I had lost almost the instant that I come [outdoors].

Art by Princesse Camcam from Fox’s Garden

The following week, as New England lurches into one of the harshest winters ever recorded, Thoreau reflects on how withdrawing from “the wearying and unprofitable world of affairs” and into the sanity-restoring world of the winter wilderness cleanses him of society’s impurities and trifles:

The things I have been doing have but a fleeting and accidental importance, however much men are immersed in them, and yield very little valuable fruit. I would fain have been wading through the woods and fields and conversing with the sane snow. I thus from time to time break off my connection with eternal truths and go with the shallow stream of human affairs, grinding at the mill of the Philistines; but when my task is done, with never-failing confidence I devote myself to the infinite again.

[…]

There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it, — dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.

[…]

I wish to forget, a considerable part of every day, all mean, narrow, trivial men (and this requires usually to forego and forget all personal relations so long), and therefore I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplified.

Complement this particular portion of the timelessly rewarding Journal of Henry David Thoreau with Annie Dillard on how winter awakens us to life, then revisit Thoreau on the greatest gift of growing old, the difference between an artisan, an artist, and a genius, the only worthwhile definition of success, and how to use civil disobedience to advance justice.

BP

How to Be More Alive: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent on Breaking the Trance of Near-living

How to Be More Alive: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent on Breaking the Trance of Near-living

The point, of course, is to make yourself alive — to feel the force of being in your sinew and your spirit, to tremble with the beauty and the terror of it all, to breathe lungfuls of life that gasp you awake from the trance of near-living induced by the system of waste and want we call civilization.

Inside the system, these opportunities for raw aliveness are not easily found — they must be sought, seized, and then surrendered to.

At four-thirty in the afternoon of June 17th, 1929, a decade after his reckoning with the creative spirit and the meaning of life on a remote Alaskan island, in the interlude between two world wars, the artist and philosopher Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971) boarded a small boat headed for Greenland. The crew consisted of him, a Parisian skipper named Cupid, and the young captain, whose father had built the boat and named it Direction after his credo that direction is the most essential thing one must have in life.

The Star-Lighter by Rockwell Kent. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Kent was confounded to be assigned navigator of the expedition. But he took the duty of direction seriously — along with his drawing paper and inks, he packed a notebook into which he had studiously copied formulae from a spherical geometry textbook and his “beautiful and precious sextant,” the box of which read NATIONAL PHYSICAL LABORATORY CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION CLASS A. Along the way, he would come to see in the science of navigation a philosophy for living consonant with the old boat-builder’s credo — after narrowly escaping being crushed by icebergs, Kent would reflect:

Even in the most dreary situation you keep your eyes on where you want to be.

Where he wanted to be was the unknown, guided not by an instrument but by the shimmering urge to break free from the chains of habit, to contact something vaster and more alive. He opens N by E (public library) — the exquisite account of his year in Greenland — with that ignition spark of the imagination exhilarated at the beckoning horizon as New York Harbor vanishes behind the stern:

The bright sun shone upon us; the lake was blue under the westerly breeze, and luminous, how luminous! the whole far world of our imagination. How like a colored lens the colored present! through it we see the forward vista of our lives. Here, in the measure that the water widened in our wake and heart strings stretched to almost breaking, the golden future neared us and enfolded us, made us at last — how soon! — oblivious to all things but the glamour of adventure. And while one world diminished, narrowed and then disappeared, before us a new world unrolled and neared us to display itself. Who can deny the human soul its everlasting need to make the unknown known; not for the sake of knowing, not to inform itself or be informed or wise, but for the need to exercise the need to know? What is that need but the imagination’s hunger for the new and raw materials of its creative trade? Of things and facts assured to us and known we’ve got to make the best, and live with it. That humdrum is the price of living. We live for those fantastic and unreal moments of beauty which our thoughts may build upon the passing panorama of experience.

Art by Rockwell Kent from N by E.

A decade later, Georgia O’Keeffe would locate the essence of being an artist in “making your unknown known… and keeping the unknown always beyond you.”

The unknown is in some sense always beyond us because it is always inside us — that is what true solitude reveals, why it can be so clarifying and so terrifying at the same time.

Kent touches this terrifying thrill on his first night swaddled by infinite horizons on every side:

As it darkens and the stars come out, and the black sea appears unbroken everywhere save for the restless turbulence of its own plain, as the lights are extinguished in the cabin, then I am suddenly alone. And almost terror grips me for I now feel the solitude; under the keel and overhead the depths, — and me, enveloped in immensity.

Bowsprit by Rockwell Kent from N by E. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

There amid the open sea, where “the solitude is unrelieved,” Kent confronts the most elemental questions of existence — why are we here, how did we get here, what does it mean to be alive, to have purpose, to wield a will against the given of the universe?

How strange to be here in a little boat! — and not by accident, not cast adrift here from a wreck, but purposely! What purpose, whose? And if I call to mind how I have read of Greenland and for years have longed to go there, how I have read and read again the Iceland sagas and been stirred by them, how I’ve been moved by the strange story of the Greenland settlements and their tragic end, by all the glamour and the mystery of those adventures, how I have followed in the wake of Leif and found America, and how by all of that I’ve come to need to know those countries, tread their soil, to touch the ancient stones of their enclosures, sail their seas to think myself a Viking like themselves, — then I may boast that purpose and my will have brought me here. And yet this very moment is the contradiction of it. The darkness and the wind! the imponderable immensity of space and elements! My frail hands grip the tiller; my eyes stare hypnotically at the stars beyond the tossing masthead or watch the bow wave as we part the seas. I hold the course. I have no thought or will, no power, to alter it.

[…]

Dream? here is reality so real it nips the bone.

N by E is a ravishing read in its entirety. Couple it with Kent’s later reflection on wilderness, solitude, and creativity drawn from the nine months he spent in Alaska with his young son, then revisit Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, Hermann Hesse on how to be more alive, and Ellen Bass’s superb ode to waking up from the stupor of near-living.

BP

Michael Faraday on Mental Discipline and How to Cure Our Propensity for Self-Deception

Michael Faraday on Mental Discipline and How to Cure Our Propensity for Self-Deception

The pioneering English physicist and chemist Michael Faraday (September 22, 1791–August 25, 1867) planted the seed for the study of electromagnetism — a cornerstone of our present understanding of the universe, without which Einstein wouldn’t have been able to link space and time in his seminal theory of special relativity. But Faraday, like many great scientists before the dawn of psychology, was also a man of enormous insight into the human psyche and its pathologies. On May 6, 1854, he delivered a lecture at the Royal Institution on the subject of “mental discipline,” later included in his volume Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics (public library | public domain).

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Two centuries before modern psychologists coined “the backfire effect” — the root of why we have such a hard time changing our minds — Faraday captures our profoundly human propensity for self-deception when it comes to confirming our convictions and indulging our desires:

Among those points of self-education which take up the form of mental discipline, there is one of great importance, and, moreover, difficult to deal with, because it involves an internal conflict, and equally touches our vanity and our ease. It consists in the tendency to deceive ourselves regarding all we wish for, and the necessity of resistance to these desires. It is impossible for any one who has not been constrained, by the course of his occupation and thoughts, to a habit of continual self-correction, to be aware of the amount of error in relation to judgment arising from this tendency. The force of the temptation which urges us to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose them, is wonderfully great. In this respect we are all, more or less, active promoters of error. In place of practising wholesome self-abnegation, we ever make the wish the father to the thought: we receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very reverse is required by every dictate of common sense.

More than two hundred years before the term “confirmation bias” entered the popular lexicon, Faraday extols the essential self-discipline of continually questioning even our most dearly held beliefs and probing whether what we desire to be true is actually true:

The inclination we exhibit in respect of any report or opinion that harmonizes with our preconceived notions, can only be compared in degree with the incredulity we entertain towards everything that opposes them… It is my firm persuasion that no man can examine himself in the most common things, having any reference to him personally, or to any person, thought or matter related to him, without being soon made aware of the temptation and the difficulty of opposing it… That point of self-education which consists in teaching the mind to resist its desires and inclinations, until they are proved to be right, is the most important of all, not only in things of natural philosophy, but in every department of daily life.

Complement with Carl Sagan’s indispensable Baloney Detection Kit and Adrienne Rich on what “truth” really means.

BP

Love Anyway

You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal.

I think about this and a passage from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum (public library) flits across the sky of my mind:

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.

This, of course, is what life evolved to be — an aria of affirmation rising like luminous steam from the cold dark silence of an indifferent cosmos that will one day swallow all of it. Every living thing is its singer and its steward — something the poetic paleontologist Loren Eiseley captures with uncommon poignancy in his 1957 essay “The Judgment of the Birds,” found in his altogether magnificent posthumous collection The Star Thrower (public library).

Raven by Jackie Morris from The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane

Eiseley recounts resting beneath a tree after a day of trekking through fern and pine needles collecting fossils, dozing off in the warm sunlight, then being suddenly awakened by a great commotion to see “an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak” perching on a crooked branch above. He writes:

Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents. No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death. And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable. The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.

Couple with Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, then revisit Loren Eiseley on the warblers and the wonder of being.

BP

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