The Invention of Nature

Instead of composing poems, he investigated nature – and these observations became his raw material for Walden. ‘Nature will be my language full of poetry,’ he said. In his journal, the tumbling crystal-clear water of a brook was ‘the pure blood of nature’ and then a few lines down, he queries the dialogue between himself and nature but concludes that ‘this close habit of observation – in Humboldt–Darwin & others. Is it to be kept up long – this science.’ Thoreau plaited science and poetry into one thick strand.

To make sense of it all, Thoreau searched for a unifying perspective. When he climbed a mountain, he saw the lichen on the rocks at his feet but also the trees far in the distance. Like Humboldt on Chimborazo, he perceived them in relation to each other and ‘thus reduced to a single picture’ – repeating the idea of the Naturgemälde. Or during a winter storm, one cold January morning, as the snowflakes swirled around him, Thoreau watched the delicate crystalline structures and compared them to the perfectly symmetrical petals of flowers. The same law, he said, that shaped the earth also shaped the snowflakes, pronouncing with emphasis, ‘Order. Kosmos.’

Humboldt had plucked the word Kosmos from ancient Greek where it meant order and beauty – but one that was created through the human eye. With this Humboldt brought together the external physical world with the internal world of the mind. Humboldt’s Cosmos was about the relationship between humankind and nature, and Thoreau placed himself firmly into this cosmos. At Walden Pond, he wrote, ‘I have a little world all to myself’ – his own sun, stars and moon. ‘Why should I feel lonely?’ he asked. ‘Is not our planet in the Milky Way?’ He was no more lonely than a flower or bumblebee in a meadow because like them he was part of nature. ‘Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?’ he asked in Walden.

One of Walden’s most famous passages encapsulates just how much Thoreau had changed since he had read Humboldt. For years, every spring, Thoreau had observed the thawing of the sandy railway embankments near Walden Pond. As the sun warmed the frozen ground and melted the ice, purple streams of sand would be released and seep out, lacing the embankment with the shapes of leaves: a sandy foliage that preceded the leafing out of the trees and the shrubs in spring.

In his original manuscript, written in the cabin at the pond, Thoreau had described this ‘blooming’ of the sand in an aside of less than 100 words. Now it stretched to more than 1,500 words and became one of the central passages in Walden. The sands, he wrote, displayed ‘the anticipation of the vegetable leaf’. It was the ‘prototype’, he said, just like Goethe’s urform. A phenomenon that had just been ‘unaccountably interesting and beautiful’ in the original manuscript now came to illustrate no less than what Thoreau called ‘the principle of all the operations of Nature’.

These few pages illustrate how Thoreau had matured. When he described the phenomenon on the last day of December 1851, just as he was reading Humboldt, it became a metaphor for the cosmos. The sun that warmed the banks was like the thoughts that warmed his blood, he said. Earth was not dead but ‘lives & grows’. And then, as he observed it again in spring 1854, just as he was finishing the final draft of Walden, he wrote in his journal that earth was ‘living poetry … not a fossil earth – but a living specimen’, words that he included almost verbatim in his final version of Walden. ‘Earth is all alive,’ he wrote, and nature ‘in full blast’. This was Humboldt’s nature, thumping with life. The coming of spring, Thoreau concluded, was ‘like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos’. It was life, nature and poetry all at the same time.

Walden was Thoreau’s mini-Cosmos of one particular place, an evocation of nature in which everything was connected, packed with details of animal habits, blooms and the thickness of ice on the pond. Objectivity or pure scientific enquiry did not exist, Thoreau wrote when he had finished Walden

, because it was always twinned with subjectivity and the senses. ‘Facts fall from the poetic observer as ripe seeds,’ he noted. The foundation of all was observation.

‘I milk the sky & the earth,’ Thoreau said.

¹ Thoreau also lived with the Emersons for two years, earning his board by helping as a handyman around the house and garden while Emerson was away on his frequent lecture tours.

² Thoreau wrote seven drafts of Walden. The first was finished during his time at Walden Pond. He worked on drafts 2 and 3 from spring 1848 to mid-1849. He returned to the manuscript in January 1852 and worked on the next four drafts until spring 1854.

PART V

New Worlds: Evolving Ideas

20

The Greatest Man Since the Deluge