OF A GOLDEN AGE

on september 26, 1852, Thoreau wrote this intriguing passage:

“Dreamed of purity last night. The thoughts seemed not to originate with me, but I was invested, my thought was tinged, by another’s thought. It was not I that originated, but that I entertained the thought” (volume 5, page 354).

wow. this begs the question, where are the rest of the details? this volume of his journals is much less cohesive than volume xiv, which I read last time. I also wonder, don’t all dreams have a certain sense of disconnectedness from our possession? Freud would say of course they don’t, but even disregarding his vaguely valid ideas on dreams, these bursts of subconscious are still at least a step removed from our waking thoughts. rather than view them as someone else’s thoughts visiting our minds, though, at least for me, I’ve always considered dreams to be the synthesis of the mental detritus we just don’t consciously consider.

to change gears, I made an error in philosophy class today that I think will probably happen more frequently now that everything in my academic intellectual life is folding in on itself — I directly described a passage in class thinking it was from a Hegel text, but a classmate corrected me: “oh, wait, isn’t that from walden?” hahaha yes, yes it is. MY BAD. I was just telling the professor earlier that my classes are doing this to me, though, combining topically and confusing the hell out of me a lot of the time.

backtracking to Thoreau’s dream, though. it’s especially interesting that he “dreamed of purity” whilst entertaining the thoughts of another. I picked up this volume because it’s from the Walden era, and chose this entry because its date is so close to today’s, but it fits into our discussion in class today of Thoreau’s attempt to get close to the gods of nature. he implies that his dream was inhabited by something whose message was purity, probably pretty naturalistic in his mind.

as a linguistic side note, I marked a place in Walden where Thoreau used the word “extravagance” but as two separate words. it never occurred to me before that vagance would have meaning on its own, even though the word is obviously that kind of formation, so I looked it up in the OED. vagancy: “A wandering or strolling.” the word extravagance, therefore, literally means “outside wandering.”

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