Thinking of eyes, I have a part of the county I call my "eye" much as Thoreau had "his" eye - Walden Pond. My "Walden" lies about 22 and a half miles northeast of his, somewhere in South Peabody, and is a bird's eye compared to his human-sized one. This "eye" is the pond or lake that reflects heaven and your own spiritual appreciation of nature. I have mine: he had his. Bathed in mystical elements as such metaphors can be, Thoreau was less full of Hindu brouhaha more than some writers thought (Joseph Wood Krutch for instance). Thoreau - believe it or not - sought to be a practical spokesman of spiritual (as well as mental?) health in a scientific society bent hellfire on technological control using money as its operating fuel. (Gee? Does this message seem appropriate for our time? I ironically wonder...)
He was many things, was Thoreau. A peripatetic philosopher usually is and I have said so about Thoreau elsewhere. Poetry cleanses: his own classical education at Harvard (in those days, you had to master Latin and Greek if you were to graduate) imbued him with this lesson (one repeated by another Harvard graduate a century and a quarter later: John F. Kennedy). The religious climate afoot in Concord in those days was a blend of brimstone from hell, and euphoria of nature's bounty and beauty as translated by the deist religio-philosophers Cotton and Increase Mather and the minister, Jonathan Edwards - a string of astute Harvard and Yale men if there ever was any. So, too, does Thoreau take the message from the pulpit and into the fields as some kind of reincarnated St. Francis. He at times chides the dull laborer and alternately admires him. The laborer is a noble man as he goes about his business, the living embodiment of his craft or crafts. Yet the same laborer coarsens himself too much if his labors take him away from his humanness - away from beauty in its natural forms. If the laborer seeks only "seeking": of gain, fame, power, etc. then the thread to seeing the spiritual in nature is destroyed, and so too, are you diminished in your humanness. Do what you do, be it banker, baker, or clock maker. But let it not detract you from the sky above, the ground at your feet, nor the bird in the sky as it utters poetry and beauty - in rationality - in nature.
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