Solitude
Floating through the ether of consciousness in a delirium of spiritual coalescence, Thoreau experiences a rapt unification with the energy of the world: "This is a delicious evening, when the body is one sense, and imbibes through every pore." The inhalation that binds us to the nitrogen that colors the sky is only the beginning of our connectivity to a global existence; he experiences the taste of wilderness by refusing to yield to the separateness of the senses, willing his body into a metabolic synesthesia with the night. He feels the harmony of a balanced ecosystem in which "The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear." There is competition in the race for individual survival counterbalanced by cooperation-the laws of nature dictate that prey are only somewhat effective in fleeing predatory attacks, so they wander fearlessly into the night to confront chance.
Just as physical distance appears to meld adjacent objects into closer proximity, distance of interior perspective makes Walden Pond "as much Asia or Africa as it is New England." We don't have states separated by factitious borders or continents separated by oceans-from afar, "The whole earth we inhabit is but a point in space."
Thoreau is getting to the simple heart of relativity. He feels the equanimity of all beings connected through interchangeable atoms, and without focusing on those traits that differentiate us, he describes the energy flows that bind us. For instance, if the rain "should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass in the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me."
Awareness is stereoptical as he opens himself to a world of awakening, letting the evening nourish his soul. The modern man, he implies, tends to be insensate or dead to the possibility of understanding their position in accordance with the laws of nature, and has a skewed outlook that leads him to bait his "hooks with darkness." The same man might experience the kind of ecstatic, deliciously filling epiphany that he is undergoing through a shift in paradigm. "Any prospect of awakening to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places." It is not the result of awakening, but the conception or "prospect of awakening"-that is all it takes to reach the revelatory parallax, if only one considered the idea.
"Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, but the workman whose work we are." Ontological transcendence is closer than we might imagine because it exists within our relation to the energy around us, whether bottled up in tangible elements or free form consciousness unencumbered by the factitious laws of civilization.
Solitude is relative to one's position-it has little to do with social isolation unless we only choose to conceive of it at that level. One is never alone because the planet is teeming with kindred spirits made of the same carbon chains that link all living things. "Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?" Thoreau muses.
He delves into the puzzle of consciousness: "With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from our actions and their consequences” like a god looking down from a sky at the object that he is, or the sensation of being moved by the ideas of a play more than a tangible experience. He is "sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another… I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it.... When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes." He foreshadows Annie Dillard over a century later, who describes the same doubleness in The Present chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek-once she verbalizes awareness of an encounter in her brain, she is separate from the encounter and incapable of experiencing it as she first did. She explains "It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator-our very self consciousness-is also the one thing that separates us from our fellow creatures."
She gets at the heart of what Thoreau laments: it is not his own solitude for which the chapter is titled, but the solitude of individual men and women who live next to one another in society and refuse to see their correlation with all of earth's creatures, including each other, by a trick of consciousness. He concludes that "The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him." Consciousness is not just a mise en abyme, a mirror inside a mirror inside a mirror that separates us into smaller compartments of our own social inventions, but something capable of seeing the mirror for what it is and reflecting beyond itself.
Just as physical distance appears to meld adjacent objects into closer proximity, distance of interior perspective makes Walden Pond "as much Asia or Africa as it is New England." We don't have states separated by factitious borders or continents separated by oceans-from afar, "The whole earth we inhabit is but a point in space."
Thoreau is getting to the simple heart of relativity. He feels the equanimity of all beings connected through interchangeable atoms, and without focusing on those traits that differentiate us, he describes the energy flows that bind us. For instance, if the rain "should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass in the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me."
Awareness is stereoptical as he opens himself to a world of awakening, letting the evening nourish his soul. The modern man, he implies, tends to be insensate or dead to the possibility of understanding their position in accordance with the laws of nature, and has a skewed outlook that leads him to bait his "hooks with darkness." The same man might experience the kind of ecstatic, deliciously filling epiphany that he is undergoing through a shift in paradigm. "Any prospect of awakening to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places." It is not the result of awakening, but the conception or "prospect of awakening"-that is all it takes to reach the revelatory parallax, if only one considered the idea.
"Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, but the workman whose work we are." Ontological transcendence is closer than we might imagine because it exists within our relation to the energy around us, whether bottled up in tangible elements or free form consciousness unencumbered by the factitious laws of civilization.
Solitude is relative to one's position-it has little to do with social isolation unless we only choose to conceive of it at that level. One is never alone because the planet is teeming with kindred spirits made of the same carbon chains that link all living things. "Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?" Thoreau muses.
He delves into the puzzle of consciousness: "With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from our actions and their consequences” like a god looking down from a sky at the object that he is, or the sensation of being moved by the ideas of a play more than a tangible experience. He is "sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another… I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it.... When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes." He foreshadows Annie Dillard over a century later, who describes the same doubleness in The Present chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek-once she verbalizes awareness of an encounter in her brain, she is separate from the encounter and incapable of experiencing it as she first did. She explains "It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator-our very self consciousness-is also the one thing that separates us from our fellow creatures."
She gets at the heart of what Thoreau laments: it is not his own solitude for which the chapter is titled, but the solitude of individual men and women who live next to one another in society and refuse to see their correlation with all of earth's creatures, including each other, by a trick of consciousness. He concludes that "The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him." Consciousness is not just a mise en abyme, a mirror inside a mirror inside a mirror that separates us into smaller compartments of our own social inventions, but something capable of seeing the mirror for what it is and reflecting beyond itself.