July Walks As Autumn Talks

Peabody, Massachusetts: There's a formation of hills here on three tiers; level, deep, deeper, with hills in a semicircle. At the base is found a small pond. This place is my Walden Pond - my reflecting pond - and serves me as my "eye." By this I obviously mean something spiritual or metaphysical.

I did not invent this terminology of the inner "eye." It was, however, a metaphor of the trancendentalists. These were American philosophers best known for their ability to walk and connect nature's dots circa 160 years ago and roughly twenty U.S. miles west of here, in and around Concord, Massachusetts.

Concord is an ironic name for a place where a world revolution began in 1775. "Concord" means harmony; it was a place in ancient mythology representing harmony and peace's home. As the storm's eye in a revolution, perhaps this explains Concord, Massachusett's sleepy bridges and hazy, summer angelica-laced fields. But as America's martial tradition is engraved here in stone and brick, another tradition - that of the American scientific philosophical tradition- is etched deeper, still.

In its widest sense transcendentalism is daily life's subjective experience sublimating deeper meanings. Ralph Waldo Emerson - king of the American transcendental crew - like the American Deist/ministers before him, attached this method to doings of a rational God. But if Emerson was the horse stable owner here, then Henry David Thoreau was the stable's blacksmith.

All advanced cultures, other than sophisticating warfare, sophisticate further upon a fat and thick layer of words and concepts. This is mainly Judeo-Christian in our tradition. Judaism, Buddhism and Islam are all similarly composed. They all have a thick book or books, a founder, profess beliefs and pose discordant metaphors that help you understand God. But a curious thing happened about two hundred years after the Christian tradition exploded into scientific rationalism. Christian religious philosophy sprouted another branch in the form of a scientific metaphysical tradition that would sustain Christianity in a machine-age. Nowhere is this branch detected best than in Thoreau's now-famous journals and books, jotted down in a time when trains were loud, dirty, and of little value and large farms were the measure of labor, family, and wealth.

As the Bible, for instance, should help you to know God, so should Thoreau's journals let you know nature. If Christian religious philosophy is composed of hard-to-unite metaphor requiring ministers to explain, then Thoreau-like scientific philosophy similarly needs explainers. Such a chubby body of literature is not a quaint exercise in charting "one man's inner voyage," and a non-pragmatic one at that (as has been claimed of Thoreau). Rather, such a compilation of seeing and reflecting -in words- is a basis for yielding insight into nature, as well as coming to terms with scientific progress. We detect that, now, in Thoreau, which draws him to us. He was not the progress-alarmist Marx was, but progress's priest. Scientific progress is oil that greases our overly complex society, like it or not, and we depend on it more for its insight than its measurement. He watched nature unfold not in thin mathematical terms - mostly in chunkier, verbal ones. He observed and described natural processes as they unfolded. In winter's barrenness, for instance, he already saw the spring and summer's bloom. In a July walk he could see August's coming and beyond this, the ruin of autumn. At the same time, he strove to make these descriptions enjoyable as science-art. Perhaps this was Thoreau's technique for engaging his reader without the need for having an explainer? Thoreau prodded beneath conventional façade. Human limits to patience and conflict were accepted by him with a psychiatric technician's calm and explained in the vastness of experience as a part of the human heritage, past and future, beside - if not always within- nature.