OF A GOLDEN AGE

I’ve been reading thoreau’s writings: journal xiv for the last half hour or so. before, I read emerson’s journals, which I enjoyed but did not find as inspiring as thoreau’s — perhaps for the very reason that thoreau did try to live as a transcendentalist “should” and developed an ambivalent relationship with his experiments. he is not an orator so much as the “hopeless romantic” type in our oeuvre of transcendentalists.

I imagine thoreau as the dennis-the-menace to emerson’s mr. wilson, or that episode of the simpsons in which george h.w. bush moves into the mansion across from the simpsons. (bart proceeds to destroy almost everything in bush’s home, of course.)

early in this volume, thoreau describes (with characteristic volume) the oft-unnoticed beauty of his new england world:

“When your attention has been drawn to them, nothing is more charming than the common colors of the earth’s surface.”

part of what appeals to me most is the vaguely scientific affectation thoreau takes on when making his observations — he gives the latin names for many plants and animals and elaborates on their characteristics.

later in the volume, he complains of the incomplete nature (no pun intended!) of contemporary botany and those who write it.

“I rarely read a sentence in a botany which reminds me of a flower or living plants. Very few indeed write as if they had seen the thing which they pretend to describe.”

he hearkens to early botanists and names gerard in particular, john gerard, who is often considered the father of botany and continues to be cited in everything from histories to the economist: “Gerard, writing before the migration pattern of birds was understood, declared that geese emerged from the encrustations on the bark of barnacle trees” (11/12/05). gerard is revered for his thorough coverage of all aspects of plants, from their physical characteristics to medicinal properties and mystical reputations.

this reminded me of a project that former beloit math professor (and number two in an ever-rotating string of my advisors) glenn appl-by helped bring to campus two years ago: a display of rare medieval and renaissance herbals. they were exquisite and appreciable as much for their precise, loving etchings and illustrations as for their content. I felt at the time a sense of wonder toward these books that I think our friend thoreau feels too — the men who wrote and drew them clearly cared greatly for nature, both as a mechanical wonder and as a manifestation of our perfect, awesome universe.

on page 259 of this volume, thoreau says of his local flora that various plants

“are your companions, as if it were an iron age, yet in simplicity, innocence, and strength a golden one.”

I have a soft spot in my heart for the phrase “golden age” and an associated word that, to the best of my knowledge, the brilliant michael chabon discovered for his novel the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay: aetataureate, literally “of a golden age.”

the contrast of iron to gold is an interesting one. the iron age of world history is often glorified and identified as the beginning of the distant roots of industrialism. iron itself will win no beauty contests, but gold is both finer and more reflective of the colors of nature. thoreau seems only to need the gold of

“all the heat and sunlight that there is, reflected back to you from the earth. The sandy road itself, lit by the November sun, is beautiful.”

a couple of pages later, thoreau begins hierarchizing the fruits of nature in terms of local versus imported. part of his reverie whilst walking is in the discovery of new things: “So long as I saw one or two kinds of berries in my walks whose names I did not know,” he writes, “the proportion of the unknown seemed indefinitely if not infinitely great” (261). he goes on to describe foreign fruits and how he does not care for them so much, but that the people to whom the foreign fruits ARE local fruits should love them the way thoreau loves the woodland berries.

this idea of localized natural affection is a little discomfiting to me, as if thoreau is fractalizing the world and only taking small pieces to avoid connecting to another place. I know I’m oversimplifying, but there does seem to be a place for both the local and the distant to intrigue us as intellectual beings.

this passage does bring to mind the moral values lecture last spring on localized nutrition. when I interviewed biology professor marion f-ss afterward, she told me she feels people should hone in on the items that occur naturally in their climates. her rationale, though, was about the decentralization of enormous corporate farms and a push to purchase organic local food. she and thoreau display similar symptoms of different diseases, so to speak.

(695 words excluding quotes, 3112 total)

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