The Invention of Nature

Thoreau continued to search for this balance. Over the years, the struggle became less intense, but he remained worried. One evening, for example, when he had spent a day at a river, scribbling page after page of notes on botany and wildlife, he finished the entry with the sentence: ‘Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.’ But as he plunged into Humboldt’s writing, Thoreau slowly lost his fear. Cosmos taught him that the collection of individual observations created a portrait of nature as a whole, in which each detail was like a thread in the tapestry of the natural world. Just as Humboldt had found harmony in diversity, so too did Thoreau. Detail led to the unified whole or, as Thoreau put it, ‘a true account of the actual is the rarest poetry.’

The most graphic proof of this change came when Thoreau stopped using one journal for ‘poetry’ and another for ‘facts’. He no longer knew which was which. It had all become one and the same, because ‘the most interesting & beautiful facts are so much the more poetry,’ as Thoreau said. The book that became the expression of this was Walden

.

When he had left his cabin at Walden Pond, in September 1847, Thoreau had returned with a first draft of Walden, and had then worked on several different versions. By mid-1849 he had put it aside and it took him three years to return to the manuscript – three years during which he became a serious naturalist, a meticulous record-keeper and an admirer of Humboldt’s books. In January 1852 Thoreau unpacked the manuscript once more and began to rewrite Walden

completely.²

Over the next few years he doubled the book’s original length, filling it with the scientific observations he had made. With that Walden

became a completely different book from the one he had set out to write. He was ready, he said, ‘I feel myself uncommonly prepared for some literary work.’ In noting every detail of the patterns and changes of the seasons, Thoreau developed a deep perception of nature’s cycles and interrelationships. Once he had realized that butterflies, flowers and birds reappeared every spring, everything else made sense. ‘The year is a circle,’ he wrote in April 1852. He began to compile long seasonal lists of leafing out and flowering times. No one else, Thoreau insisted, had observed these intricate differences as he had. His journal would become ‘a book of the seasons’, he wrote, mentioning Humboldt in the same entry.

In Walden’s early drafts Thoreau had concentrated on criticizing American culture and avarice, and what he saw as the increasing focus on money and urban life – using his life in the cabin as counterpart. Now, in the new version the passing of spring, summer, autumn and winter became his guiding light. ‘I enjoy the friendship of the seasons,’ he wrote in Walden.

Thoreau began, as he said, to ‘look at Nature with new eyes’ – eyes that Humboldt had given him. He explored, collected, measured and connected just as Humboldt did. His methods and observations, Thoreau told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1853, were based on his admiration of Views of Nature, the book in which Humboldt had combined elegant prose and vivid descriptions with scientific analysis.

All the great passages of Walden have their origin in Thoreau’s journals. Here Thoreau jumped from one subject to the next, breathlessly engaging with nature, with earth as ‘living poetry’, with frogs that ‘snore in the river’ and with the joy of birdsong in spring. His journal was ‘the record of my love’ and of his ‘ecstasy’ – both poetry and science. Even Thoreau himself questioned if anything he would ever write would be better than his journal, comparing his words to flowers, wondering if they would look better assembled in a vase (his metaphor for a book) or in the meadow where he had found them (his journal). By now he was so proud of his exact knowledge of Concord’s nature that he became upset if anybody else was able to identify a plant that he didn’t recognize. ‘Henry Thoreau could hardly suppress his indignation,’ Emerson wrote one day to his brother, not without glee, ‘that I should bring him a berry he had not seen.’

Thoreau’s new approach didn’t mean that his doubts disappeared completely. He continued to question himself. ‘I am dissipated by so many observations,’ he wrote in 1853. He feared that his knowledge was becoming too ‘detailed & scientific’ and that he might have exchanged sweeping prospects as wide as the heavens for the narrow views of the microscope. ‘With all your science can you tell how it is,’ he asked despairingly, ‘that light comes into the soul’ but he still finished this journal entry with detailed descriptions of blossoms, birdsongs, butterflies and the ripening of berries.