A life is the perfect communication

Thoreau was a writer and yet he believed that a man’s life was the perfect communication.

Transcendentalism unified the interests of Thoreau

Everything that Thoreau did was interconnected to a single purpose. He knew who he was and he was persistent to fulfill that identity.

His quest, his transcendentalism reconciles all of his divergent interests and seeming paradoxes.

Thoreau’s interest in languages and words were transcendental rather than semantic or etymological.

All of Thoreau’s interests and disciplines took their unique shape in relationship with his quest.

The quest of Thoreau

This was Thoreau’s occupation according to him:

“The fact is I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot. Now that I think of it, I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist.”

Why should not a man’s faith determine his work?

Thoreau spent a quarter of a century in a quest for transcendent reality, in an attempt to discover the secret of the universe.

something he never fully finds: the true and ideal world.

Thoreau asserts that the so-called impracticality of the poet, the philosopher, and the transcendentalist is the only true practicality.

Mysticism was the primary method of Thoreau

Thoreau was a mystic first and a naturalist second.

“Thoreau, though a naturalist by habit, and a moralist by constitution, was inwardly a poet…His mind tended naturally to the ideal side.”

For Thoreau, the mystic state is the truest means to discovering reality and nature is second.

The main activities of Thoreau

Thoreau’s main activities were

observation
thought
writing
reading

Thoreau advocated practical philosophy

Thoreau was a practitioner of his philosophy: “Philosophy practiced is the goal of learning.”

“There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers… To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live… a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.”

Transcendentalism

A Creator exists.
This creator wants to be accessible to all his creatures.
This creator made no special revelations to special groups and does not entrust the truth to any exclusive religion or philosophy.
This creator has opened the channel of communication between himself and every soul.
The soul is able to recognize and communicate with the creator.
The soul can perceive its relationship to everything.
Man needs solitude, reverence and faith to find this creator.
Every man can be a mystic.
Man can find the answers within him. But also needs to observe nature to find answers there because nature contains patterns and principles.
Once man has seen and discovered, he becomes a natural philosopher.
Once he discovers the secret of the universe, he becomes a prophet or seer of the future.
A prophet is a poet. His function is to speak.
Every man can be a poet.

The journal of Thoreau is a chronicle of his quest

Thoreau’s journal is largely the record of a search for something he never fully finds: the true and ideal world.

For Thoreau, his journal is his real work, perhaps even his “only” work. The journal contained writing his own biography.

It is not a “circumstantial” journal, one that deals with fact and deed, with the trivia of everyday life, but a “substantial” one of truth and thought; yet not the truth and thought of the public documents, modified, simplified, and presented as conclusions, but truth and thought in the process of evolution. In the journal we can follow Thoreau on every step of his expedition, through one experiment after another, accumulating evidence, testing theories, building hypotheses. We can see him hopeful, disappointed, successful, desperate, acquiescent.

The methods Thoreau used to find the ideal world

Here are the instruments of Thoreau’s transcendentalism, his doors to the ideal world:

solitude
natural history
scholarship
writing
walking

He forged them well and kept them sharp, but he frequently laid down one to pick up another, and he used them practically and efficiently toward one end only and without concern for other uses which they might serve.

Subjects of the scholarship of Thoreau

Thoreau studied the following: poets, prophets, histories, chronologies, and traditions.

The purpose of the scholarship of Thoreau

The purposes of Thoreau’s scholarship were:

To look for written revelations where things he may have missed could be found.
To study the lives of great men and how they lived (he investigates their lives before he reads them).
To look for confirmations of his own experiences.

What Thoreau read

What Thoreau read:

natural history
Greek and Latin classics
oriental scriptures
English poets
New England history and legend
data on the North American Indian (early accounts of travel, adventure, and exploration)

Readings Thoreau valued most

Thoreau valued the classics most. The oriental scriptures also held a high place in his esteem.

Thoreau studied antiquities because they were closer to truth

Thoreau studied antiquities because he believed they were closer to the beginning and, therefore, reality.

Thoreau studied primitive man because he was young in nature, which means he is closer to nature and natural insight.

Thoreau believed that the truest accounts of things were given by those who saw them first.

Thoreau cultivated wildness as an act of surrender to natural influences, which could make him closer to natural insight.

Thoreau went as far back as he could.

Why the literary production of Thoreau was limited

Thoreau’s literary production was limited.

Thoreau was not merely a writer. He was a poet—one who receives and communicates truth.
If all that a man writes must be truth, his production will be limited.
Thoreau revised endlessly to clarify his thoughts and experiences in his own mind, reducing them to their essence, and to eliminate rather than to achieve style.
He reduced the communication to essentials.
Transcendental conviction: “the matter is all in all, and the manner nothing at all.”

Why Thoreau walked

Walking was the material manifestation of his journey through life, his quest for “the other world” which was, as he said, “all my art.”

Thoreau did not constantly work on his quest

There were intervals in Thoreau’s life where he wasn’t actively engaged in the quest because either he felt he has reached his goal or he had lost his way.

The three reading periods of Thoreau

Thoreau’s three reading periods:

Literary period (post-college): Homer, Orpheus, Greek lyricists (Anacreon and Pindar), Aeschylus, Plutarch, Jamblichus, Porphyry, Vergil, Horace, Persius, Ovid.
Agricultural period (post-Walden, early 1850s): Cato, Varro, Columella, Palladius, Sophocles, Lucretius.
Early naturalists period (late 1850s): Pliny, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Aelia, Heroduts, Strabo.

How Thoreau read

Thoreau’s readings were a personal selection directed toward his special purpose.

Thoreau was misled by general literary ambition during the Dial days, but he quickly eliminated certain authors who did not fulfill his requirements.

The Antigone influenced his Civil Disobedience.

Thoreau’s reading method highlighted focus: the heart of the matter.

The heart of the matter is what answered to one’s individual genius.
He read but accepted only what was for oneself.
One could also read one’s own meaning in another’s words.
Read to look for ideas that are strictly your own.

How Thoreau wrote

Thoreau valued compactness and clarity, which he achieved through numerous revisions. He used words accurately.

He was a clever imitator of individual styles.

How Thoreau translated

Thoreau believed that works should be read in the language in which they were written.

Thoreau did translations of the classics he read into English. He revised them the same way he revised his prose.
Thoreau translated only what spoke to him. He stripped passages of circumstance, all that was local and temporal and particular, and has kept only the universal.
When Thoreau translated for himself, he only wanted the heart of the matter.

References

Seybold, Ethel. “Proteus.” Thoreau: The Quest and the Classics, Yale University Press, 1951, pp. 1–21.

Vince Imbat

Protheus by Ethel Seybold