Sounds
A curious thing about the point in the history of civilization in which Thoreau was writing is his fascination with and abhorrence of technology. He describes the "The rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and reviving like the wings of a partridge.... The whistle of the locomotive... like the scream of a hawk." At once we conceive of the train as a bird. Then he mixes the metaphor: "I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder." Bird or horse? There's something ominous about the train, at first docile, then a bird of prey, then a brute horse of metal.
As much I like to imagine to early American life as having self-sufficient communities, Thoreau tells us it was not the case, thanks to the locomotive: "Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay." He senses something awful in the train, despite attempts to transmogrify it into an animal of this world. The cloud that "hangs over the engine and floats over the farmer's fields" conceal the sun and cast the distant field into the shade, "a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear." In the shadow of pollution he is foreshadowing climate change, although he doesn't know it.
The sounds of the train bring him a sense of exhilaration, as he feels connected to distant reaches of the world through the variety of things it carries, but he simultaneously avoids its "smoke and steam and hissing" and is concerned that "We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside."
At once he is thrilled by the distant prospect of globalization, and horrified as he sees it manifest before him. There is comfort in distance. All sounds, it seems, are "melodious by distance." He blends the resonations of bells with the "notes sung by a wood nymph." Even minstrels and lowing cows are indistinguishable from afar: "one articulation of nature."
But his favorite sound of all is the wild cockerel imported from the far east, which he fantasizes as the "brave Chanticleer" that would awaken nations with its ritualistic aubade, a call to life for those slumbering in despair, and his alter ego as a spirited independent wishing to summon those around him to higher levels of consciousness.
As much I like to imagine to early American life as having self-sufficient communities, Thoreau tells us it was not the case, thanks to the locomotive: "Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay." He senses something awful in the train, despite attempts to transmogrify it into an animal of this world. The cloud that "hangs over the engine and floats over the farmer's fields" conceal the sun and cast the distant field into the shade, "a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear." In the shadow of pollution he is foreshadowing climate change, although he doesn't know it.
The sounds of the train bring him a sense of exhilaration, as he feels connected to distant reaches of the world through the variety of things it carries, but he simultaneously avoids its "smoke and steam and hissing" and is concerned that "We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside."
At once he is thrilled by the distant prospect of globalization, and horrified as he sees it manifest before him. There is comfort in distance. All sounds, it seems, are "melodious by distance." He blends the resonations of bells with the "notes sung by a wood nymph." Even minstrels and lowing cows are indistinguishable from afar: "one articulation of nature."
But his favorite sound of all is the wild cockerel imported from the far east, which he fantasizes as the "brave Chanticleer" that would awaken nations with its ritualistic aubade, a call to life for those slumbering in despair, and his alter ego as a spirited independent wishing to summon those around him to higher levels of consciousness.