Thoreau's Sublime Journey Into My Heart

"The full ethereal round,
Infinite worlds disclosing to the view,
Shines out intensely keen; and all one cope
Of starry glitter glows from pole to pole."

I decided that I love Henry David Thoreau, and I wish I could go ice skating with him.

My initial impression of Thoreau was not very pleasant. I was fifteen and my father bought me "Walden Pond" for a Christmas present; he told me it was an important book and I should read it. Being an obedient daughter and excited to acquaint myself with a venerated text, I cracked it open. Ten minutes later, I was asleep. When I woke up, I decided that I didn't even know how to pronounce the word "transcendental" and that it was lame anyway.

From that point on, I resigned myself to nodding enthusiastically whenever somebody spoke of the "genius" of Thoreau, even though I had no real clue as to what he was about.

Five years later, I find myself in a class called "Transcendentalism." By this point, I can not only pronounce it, but I can spell it as well. An undeniable improvement. My professor tells the class that during Thoreau's famous and allegedly independent time spent on Walden Pond, he was visiting the Emersons' every day to take home treats prepared by Emerson's wife. He wasn't doing much of his own cooking. Furthermore, his spinster Auntie was making weekly visits to wash his clothes in the river--the same Auntie who (out of embarrassment)bailed Thoreau out of jail when he refused to pay his taxes. The experience of incarceration, Thoreau claims, made him see that, "if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar" (558 Thoreau,"The Transcendentalist." Ed. Joel Meyerson). Brave words for a man who spent a whopping one night in jail.

My initial disposition of Thoreau was disinterest, and my subsequent, partially educated opinion was cynical and scoffing. However, I am happy to publicly declare, after a half semester in the class, that my frigid disposition has melted into a kind of endeared warmth for the man.

After reading pages and pages of the dense philosophies of Emerson, Thoreau is like a breath of fresh air. Younger, more earnest, and (as I picture him) with eternally tostled hair and an untucked shirt. I honestly think he was oblivious to the way he used his Auntie and Mrs. Emerson; he was so (ironically) caught up in voicing the need for introspection and being acutely aware of one's conscience that he completely failed to read the demeaning signs of gender construction within his society. Thoreau was rather focused on the atrocity of slavery and what a citizen could do to radically withdraw their support. I applauded Thoreau's intrepidity in "Resistance to Civil Government" and "Slavery in Massachusetts."

Aside from his efforts for social reform, I was delighted by his child-like fascination with the world when he writes of nature, and the earnestness in which he talked about the "empire of fish" beneath this shoes, when ice skating over a frozen pond. He spent paragraphs discussing the watery kingdom and how even the fisherman thinks "fishy" thoughts, and how in a sense, he becomes a fish himself.

Transcendentalists were snickered at and called crack-pots because of their pure fascination with the world. Even the stiff-colored Emerson acted as a child in nature when he endorsed bending over and looking at the landscape upside-down, through the legs, just for a different perspective.

So in conclusion, I am glad that I didn't completely write Thoreau off when I deemed him boring and sexist. He is definitely more than he appears, initially. After reading so much Transcendental literature, I am able to see the color of Thoreau's personality and I have learned to recognize his sense of humor. And after reading "A Winter Walk" (1843) I think I might have found a poetic soul mate.