Sucking the Marrow

If we know anything about literature, I’m sure we’ve heard of the famous Walden, or, Life in the Woods, by Henry D. Thoreau. The whole scene becomes a symbol for what Emerson was groping for in his essay Self Reliance, the call for independence, non-conformity, and the avoidance of a hollow consistency. Follow your instincts! Emerson muses: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.” Sure, you may be wrong. But that is not the point. We, of course, desire to know the truth, and it is to be cherished when found. But in the meantime, we are also humans. Better to be a passionate human in error than a broken clock blundering on the right time.

On July 4th, 1845, with the permission of Emerson (Walden was on his land), Thoreau built a cabin, and began the experiment of living life, which continued for a little over 2 years. I’m not especially interested with the critics who call Thoreau’s experiment a sham because he didn’t experience bona fide isolation (he was within walking distance from Concord and received visitors). I think these criticisms miss the point: the crux was to become a symbol, a visible symbol - not to amputate himself from society, but to wrench himself out of joint: not to break, but to sprain. A man will learn to live with a missing limb; but the dislocation of a joint vexes until put back into place.

I am more interested in the content of the book itself, distancing itself from the genre of undiluted autobiography, but embracing an exaggerated poetic license. But I don’t judge this as a vice. Thoreau builds on this license to construct a work of art, of literature. If nothing else, the book is a chronicle of a consciousness to the second power. Thoreau finds in the otherwise ho-hum vista of Nature a kingdom of wonder and excitement. And it's not only the content but the way in which it’s written: Thoreau draws upon a wealth of metaphor, mythology, and literary pizzazz to recount his experience.

Let us look at some examples. Thoreau reports in his chapter on Sounds: “I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.” A sumach is a shrub or a small tree with a reddish hue, able to grow clumps of fruit. I can imagine the sumac tilting against its neighbors while the wind gently flutters, the wind and the humming coming from the mutual contact of pines, while the birds chant intermittently, and all this at dusk when you seem to “grow in those seasons like corn in the night.” Thoreau would have been referring to Indian corn, which grows more briskly on warm summer nights than at any other time. Thoreau referred to this metaphor copiously: it called attention to the way his spirit grew, that it was a warm summer in his spirit and that tending to these beloved sounds made his spirit swell like Indian corn in the warm summer night. This is just one example. The book is bursting at the seams with such imagery. Let’s look at more!

“Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumblings, I am more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my mediations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway.” - once again, in the Chapter Sounds. The subtlety and delicacy of his awareness is profound. And you can’t fully appreciate the quotes without running into them when reading the chapter as a whole, like how poet Owen Barfield in his Poetic Diction described the ‘felt change of consciousness’ that accompanies the reading of poetry: I need to be actually ‘passing’ the coil of wire between the poles of a magnet to generate an electric current.

“Men frequently say to me, ‘I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially.’ I am tempted to reply to such, - This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?” Apart from the validity of the reasoning (which is irrelevant in this context), we meet the sensibility of an individual, the delicious musings of a particular man, apart from the rabble. As Pascal said before him, the eternity before us and the eternity after us hem us in! The evanescence of whatever aid comes from contact with other men is like a vapor. It is not permanent. It is a momentary mist that is here today and gone tomorrow. Thoreau sought to seize upon the eternal things, the things that our Spirt can suckle on. As C.S Lewis said: “Whatever is not eternal is eternally out of date.” The mass of men throng around the clamoring fog, lose their bearings, hit the age of 40 or 50, and wonder why they feel this gnawing sense of desperation.

As Thoreau says in Where I lived, and What I Lived for: “Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail.” Long ago we were changed into men! In Greek mythology, King Aeacus (of Oenopia) has his kingdom obliterated by a plague. He enjoined Zeus to repopulate it. How? A gathering of ants swarmed an old oak tree and Zeus transformed the ants into men. These are the men that populate Concord. In the Illiad, Homer compared the Trojans to cranes (elegant, long-necked birds that dance to court their mates) assaulting pygmies - “As when there is a clangor of cranes in the heavens who avoid winter and unspeakable rain, they fly with clangor toward the streams of ocean bearing slaughter and fate to Pygmaean men.” Clout upon clout! Error upon error.

All this to say, Walden is filled to the brim with wonderful insights and insightful wonders. Some during his time were critical. Robert Louis Stevenson called it a “womanish solicitude; for there is something unmanly, something almost dastardly” in that way of living. Even Emerson was apprehensive: “I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this [that is, lacking ambition] instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!” But I disagree! He was misunderstood. Thoreau lived Emerson’s reverie. Stevenson segregated the letter of the deed from the spirit. Literarily, the book is a tour de force that rivals anything done by Emerson or Stevenson. The only difference? Thoreau lost himself in the main character of his own work. This isn’t any less artistically praiseworthy than Heath Ledger losing himself in the character of the Joker. While Emerson saw the frontier of his vision, Thoreau navigated it, and then told us what he saw! Did they even bother to read the book?

Out of Mind, Out of Sight?

“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.” - R.D. Laing “The Politics of Experience

I recently came across an insight from Ronald David Laing that I found very interesting. In a book called “The Divided Self”, the Scot psychiatrist Laing puts forth a maverick understanding of mental illness. Usually, we tend to think of a person with mental illness as out of touch with reality, psychologically rotten, or out of their mind. Laing, on the other hand, thinks the exact opposite.

According to Laing, in terms of mental illness, there are two types of people in the world: the secure person and the one who “cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy and identity of himself and others for granted and who consequently contrives strategies to avoid ‘losing his self’". A secure person, for example, is a person who has come to terms with his or her own peculiar view of the world, with his or her own mind and the way it perceives the world, whether or not this involves what society would call a ‘mental illness’. The other kind of person is the vast majority of people, people who have striven to become normal by molding themselves onto society’s expectations for, say, socially approved behavior. Their unique, idiosyncratic mind is suppressed to appear ‘normal’.

Think of Thoreau’s famous maxim: most men live lives of quiet desperation. This ‘quiet desperation’ seems to a symptom of something that the course of humankind has been unable to excise. But then we meet people in the everyday, workaday world. They don’t appear to be in despair. Exactly, says Laing: they are asleep. They don’t appear to be in despair because they can’t take the ‘identity of themselves and others for granted’. By this, I think he means that they can’t come to terms with how they really feel about themselves, and that these despairing feelings might actually be a window to the universal human condition of desperation. They tend to waive off such feelings as unnatural and unhealthy, and we have what William James would have called The Religion of Healthy Mindedness in his Varieties of Religious Experience.

But Laing is saying that mental illness, the quiet hours of desperation, are portals to the human condition: that the person who accepts the unusual ways these feelings manifest themselves in his consciousness is the person who is secure in who he or she is. Thus, extreme illnesses such as schizophrenia or psychosis are not illnesses at all: they are gifts given to particular individuals that enable them to see a part of the world that is really there!

The people society thinks are psychotic, according to Laing, are those that society can’t put to sleep. The schizoid hears what others are deaf to and perhaps these voices tell the truth. I think of St. Paul in Romans 7 as he struggled with his divided self and how dealing with this division, accepting it, lead him to truth.