The Bean-Field
At the end of the last ice age, a global warming thawed the glaciers and enriched landmasses with freshwater-enabling agriculture to be the defining human mark upon the Holocene period. In claiming property to cultivate, humans took community land from each other and had food surpluses to guard, leading to early forms of governance. Large-scale food production led to division of labor-military for guarding stores and seizing more land, bureaucrats for disseminating food and property, and craftsmen to develop their trades while others farmed. (It is not much different than today.) As masses of people become supplicant to whomever claimed the land (and thereby owned the food) through military enforcement, religions sprouted into existence and civilization marched forward.
Thoreau might not have had access to prehistorical details made possible through archaeology, but like the woodsman he admired, he knew what was true to himself without trusting in others and understood the government of his time as emerging from the seed of agriculture. In cultivating a bean-field, he aspires to invest the land with his energy, sans government. He hoped to avoid falling into the totalitarian monoculture scheme that led to the rise of civilization (and subsequent soil nutrient depletion, herbicides, pesticides) by working a field that is a blend of ancient farming with modern technique: "The crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash; but in all dells and pond holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various crop only unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated." He is opting for the middle ground between civilization and wilderness, a potential aspirant model he might advocate with authority to those whose society he encountered.
Although Darwin had yet to publish The Origin of Species, evolution was generally understood, if not yet widely advocated by the scientific community. The scientist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck pointed to salamanders as proof of evolution in the eighteenth century, and amphibious creatures provided evidence for terrestrial life emerging from the waters. It is appropriate that in his passage on farming-the catapult behind the evolution of complex society, he inserts a potent symbol: "My hoe turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary." He is looking to ancient civilization while musing upon a salamander, alluding to the metastasis of agriculture.
He is repulsed by a gluttonous society so distanced from the land as to be dependent on faraway farms for food, like the minds of bees "bent on the honey with which [their hive] was smeared." Buried in this is the implication of a military critique-the bees have been celebrating the instrument of their conquest, war. Thoreau easily connects farming with imperialism, and couches it in metaphor be more easily consumed by those swarming in the hive.
He continues in this vein with a satirical commentary on patriots and soldiers, or mindless drones of a ruling government: "I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future." His confidence is inexpressible-literally, because he has no confidence in the liberties of Massachusetts and our fatherland. He claims to be so inspired by the patriotic celebration in the nearby village that he felt as if he "could spit a Mexican with a good relish-for why should we always stand for trifles?-and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon." We know from "Resistance to Civil Government" that he abhors civilization and government, and is being playful with a matter he considers to have tremendous gravity.
As a brief aside, I think of it like The Thoreau Code-on the surface he appears to be espousing a remark that will pass safely by those who it might offend, but might do good service upon whom it fits, like the coat described in the opening of "Economy." I have no doubt that, should I revisit this writing upon reaching the levels of social and ecological consciousness that he encourages us to pursue, I'll uncover more latent verbal irony.
Thoreau continues in an anti-civilization vein in critiquing the celebration: "These martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders on the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm-tree tops which overhang the village. This was one of the great days; though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlasting great look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference in it." He mocks the great day, noting that it is simply a day to him, and the motion of the treetops is the pathetic fallacy of the spectators, for they always sway in the sky he sees.
He uses weeding as an allegory for genocide, and links it to the loss of our relation to the land through modern farming: "Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely." As a result, by "regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farm leads the meanest of lives."
Although he does not have confidence in safe harbor through military protection, he confesses his tremendous belief in the sanctity of the sun, and in its ability to look "on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction.... In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity." A modern scholar might go further to suggest that the closer we are to the sun's energy, the better. That is, do not consume ancient sunlight locked up in fossil fuels, but only that which we can collect fresh each day, ad infinitum.
Thoreau might not have had access to prehistorical details made possible through archaeology, but like the woodsman he admired, he knew what was true to himself without trusting in others and understood the government of his time as emerging from the seed of agriculture. In cultivating a bean-field, he aspires to invest the land with his energy, sans government. He hoped to avoid falling into the totalitarian monoculture scheme that led to the rise of civilization (and subsequent soil nutrient depletion, herbicides, pesticides) by working a field that is a blend of ancient farming with modern technique: "The crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash; but in all dells and pond holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various crop only unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated." He is opting for the middle ground between civilization and wilderness, a potential aspirant model he might advocate with authority to those whose society he encountered.
Although Darwin had yet to publish The Origin of Species, evolution was generally understood, if not yet widely advocated by the scientific community. The scientist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck pointed to salamanders as proof of evolution in the eighteenth century, and amphibious creatures provided evidence for terrestrial life emerging from the waters. It is appropriate that in his passage on farming-the catapult behind the evolution of complex society, he inserts a potent symbol: "My hoe turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary." He is looking to ancient civilization while musing upon a salamander, alluding to the metastasis of agriculture.
He is repulsed by a gluttonous society so distanced from the land as to be dependent on faraway farms for food, like the minds of bees "bent on the honey with which [their hive] was smeared." Buried in this is the implication of a military critique-the bees have been celebrating the instrument of their conquest, war. Thoreau easily connects farming with imperialism, and couches it in metaphor be more easily consumed by those swarming in the hive.
He continues in this vein with a satirical commentary on patriots and soldiers, or mindless drones of a ruling government: "I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future." His confidence is inexpressible-literally, because he has no confidence in the liberties of Massachusetts and our fatherland. He claims to be so inspired by the patriotic celebration in the nearby village that he felt as if he "could spit a Mexican with a good relish-for why should we always stand for trifles?-and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon." We know from "Resistance to Civil Government" that he abhors civilization and government, and is being playful with a matter he considers to have tremendous gravity.
As a brief aside, I think of it like The Thoreau Code-on the surface he appears to be espousing a remark that will pass safely by those who it might offend, but might do good service upon whom it fits, like the coat described in the opening of "Economy." I have no doubt that, should I revisit this writing upon reaching the levels of social and ecological consciousness that he encourages us to pursue, I'll uncover more latent verbal irony.
Thoreau continues in an anti-civilization vein in critiquing the celebration: "These martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders on the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm-tree tops which overhang the village. This was one of the great days; though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlasting great look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference in it." He mocks the great day, noting that it is simply a day to him, and the motion of the treetops is the pathetic fallacy of the spectators, for they always sway in the sky he sees.
He uses weeding as an allegory for genocide, and links it to the loss of our relation to the land through modern farming: "Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely." As a result, by "regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farm leads the meanest of lives."
Although he does not have confidence in safe harbor through military protection, he confesses his tremendous belief in the sanctity of the sun, and in its ability to look "on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction.... In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity." A modern scholar might go further to suggest that the closer we are to the sun's energy, the better. That is, do not consume ancient sunlight locked up in fossil fuels, but only that which we can collect fresh each day, ad infinitum.