The Invention of Nature

Thoreau was still trying to make sense of nature. He continued to march through the countryside, straight as a pine, as his friends said, and with long strides. He also began to work as a surveyor, which brought him a small income and allowed him to spend even more time outside. Counting his steps, Emerson said, Thoreau could measure distances more precisely than others could with the surveyor’s instruments of rod and chain. He collected specimens for the botanists and zoologists at Harvard University. He measured the depth of streams and ponds, took temperatures and pressed plants. In spring Thoreau recorded the arrival of birds and in winter he counted the frozen bubbles that were captured in the icy lid of the pond. Instead of ‘calling on some scholar’, he often hiked several miles through the woods for his ‘appointments’ with the plants. Thoreau was groping towards an understanding of what these pines and birds really meant.

Thoreau, like Emerson, was searching for the unity of nature but in the end they would choose different avenues. Thoreau would follow Humboldt in his belief that the ‘whole’ could only be comprehended by understanding the connections, correlations and details. Emerson on the other hand believed that this unity could not be discovered through rational thought alone but also by intuition or through some kind of revelation from God. Like the Romantics in England such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the German Idealists such as Friedrich Schelling, Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists in America were reacting against scientific methods that were associated with deductive reasoning and empirical research. To examine nature like that, Emerson said, tended to ‘cloud the sight’. Instead, man had to find spiritual truth in nature. Scientists were only materialists whose ‘spirit is matter reduced to extreme thinness’, he wrote.

The Transcendentalists had been inspired by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his explanation of man’s understanding of the world. Kant had talked of a class of ideas or knowledge, Emerson explained, ‘which did not come from experience’. With this Kant had turned against the empiricists such as the British philosopher John Locke, who in the late seventeenth century had said that all knowledge was based on the experience of the senses. Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists now insisted that man had the capacity ‘of knowing truth intuitively’. For them facts and nature’s appearance were like a curtain that needed to be drawn to discover the divine law behind it. Thoreau, however, was finding it increasingly difficult to weave his fascination with scientific facts into this worldview, because for him everything in nature had a meaning in itself. Here was a Transcendentalist who was searching for those grand ideas of unity by counting the petals of a bloom or the tree rings of a felled trunk.

Thoreau had begun to observe nature like a scientist. He measured and recorded, and his interest in this kind of detail became increasingly more urgent. Then, in autumn 1849, two years after he had left his cabin and just as the full extent of the failure of A Week became obvious, Thoreau made a decision that would change his life and give birth to

Walden as we know it today. Thoreau completely reoriented his life with a new daily routine that required serious study every morning and evening, punctuated by a long afternoon walk. It was the moment when he took his first steps away from being just a poet who was fascinated by nature towards becoming one of America’s most important nature writers. Maybe it was the painful experience of publishing A Week

, or his break with Emerson. Or maybe Thoreau had found the confidence to focus on what he adored. Whatever the reasons, everything changed.

This new regime marked the beginning of his scientific studies which included extensive daily journal writing. Every day, Thoreau would note what he had seen on his walks. These entries, which had previously been the odd fragment of observation but had mainly been draft passages for his essays and books, now became regular and chronological, documenting the seasons in Concord in all their intricacies. Instead of cutting up his journals to paste them into his literary manuscripts as he had done before, Thoreau left the new volumes intact. What had been random collections now became ‘Field Notes’.