 Hi everybody. My name is Adam Tushinsky and I'm the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and I want to thank those of you who are here on such a beautiful day. I think when we plan this event it's always a bit of a danger but you wouldn't think it would be so nice in May and October but I think people may actually start flowing in and out for the rest of the day. So this is our kind of the beginning of our thorough bicentennial symposium. I'm not sure there's anywhere else in the state that's really honoring the thorough bicentennial. I know there are quite a few events that are happening all over the country and I think it's important to have one in this state given the importance of thorough domain and the importance of main to thorough. I used to teach a first-year seminar on thorough and many of the students used to get quite disenchanted with him when they kind of learned that Walden Pond was about a mile from the Emerson house and you know they would come to me in class and you know is it true that his mother did his laundry? Is it true that Mrs. Emerson made him Sunday dinners? And some respects it is largely true and I think the students often had the expectation that Walden Pond was a wilderness experiment on the along the lines of John Krakauer that it was a sort of a confrontation with with with raw nature and and what I often have the privilege of explaining to Maine students is that's what in some respects what Maine really represented to thorough and yet at the same time when he arrived in Maine he was following trails that had long been established by native peoples and who are and we're already being carved out by the lumber industry so in many respects the the idea of wilderness that thorough confronted in Maine was really an imagined one and I even sort of might know the first time I even visited visited Maine was to climb Mount Katahdin and I you know carried a little copy of Walden with me when I came here and kind of started to have the realization that I couldn't even really experience nature or experience wilderness without experiencing it through the lens that had been kind of carved out by this generation of romantic intellectuals so anyhow you know Maine is a both a physical place but also a place of the imagination and so I'm very excited for the range of events we're having to honor the bicentennial today and if you look at the back of your program there's going to be a film on campus a prominent Maine documentarian Huey just produced a film on on thorough and then our Maine Museum of Photography is doing a exhibition of landscape photographs primarily that are inspired by thorough so before we introduce Professor Gerr I just wanted to say a quick thank you to many of the people who kind of helped put the range of these events together most notably USM staff Penny Glover and my co-convener Libby Bischoff who is holding the door open right now downstairs and she'll be up soon and also the panelists are here and the panelists who will be coming and especially Barry Rodrick who was a humanities professor here at the University of Southern Maine and was the principal organizer of this event through July when he took a job in India and so he wanted to wish us well and if you have any extra copies of transcendentalist literature he's trying to with what does thorough say that he'd sort of drinks out of the Ganges in Walden he's sort of bringing transcendentalism to South Asia much like South Asian literature was processed through thorough anyhow so thank you all for coming and our keynote speaker today I'm so excited to see again after so many years full disclosure he was on my dissertation committee which was important but he was also fed us at Mexican restaurant every Wednesday night after seminar which was perhaps even more important than the dissertation defense and he is one of the most well respected and well-known historians of American literature and culture both in the 19th century and also the 17th century he received his PhD from Harvard in 1977 taught at the University of Colorado Boulder he moved to the University of North Carolina in 1987 and where he in the year 2000 became the William S. Newman distinguished professor of American literature and culture professor Gur has sort of making fun of him last night about the amount that he publishes it's almost too many publications to list but I think what's most remarkable about his work is its intellectual range he's published books on early American literature and culture one of the books that was on my comps list for example a glimpse of science glory Puritan radicalism in New England he's published books on music history including the banjo in the 19th century he's also a banjo practitioner as well as a scholar he's also published books that have sort of straddled the line between scholarly and educated audiences I would say and most importantly from my perspective as someone who has taught the history of transcendentalism and have kind of struggled to synthesize it as a movement and I oddly it's a movement or a period in history that is often written solely through biography and in 2007 he published a history of American transcendentalism and I think the sort of finest one-volume work on the period as a whole and one of the things I think makes his work so remarkable in this respect is obviously he's published a lot on Emerson thorough the well-known figures but much like his latest book romantic reformers in the coming of the Civil War he also writes on a less widely known figures like Orson Fowler or William Bachelor Green and and so he has sort of managed to bring to life a sort of a wider subset of American reformers and crackpots and dreamers and idealists and so I'm so pleased to have him up where he should be in New England so thank you it's the pleasure to be back here in Portland this morning I have many happy memories of this place beginning about 20 years ago when Joseph Conforti recently retired had invited me to evaluate his NEH grant on American regionalism he had a wonderful program going between the University of Mississippi and this institution and students from that campus visited here and people from here went there and we went along with them so people learned in Mississippi from Maine about barbecue and crawfish and and people learned about clams up here was wonderful and of course Adam I won't say much about that dissertation meeting but well he did get through I haven't been picked up by many deans in my life but I had a ride from the airport yesterday with him so I'm very proud of you Adam it's a particular pleasure to be here in October see the fall foliage again it reminded me of Richard Wilbur who died last week as I mean if you know at the age of 96 and particularly the poem he published in the New Yorker in 1960 called October Maples in Portland so I'm going to actually begin by reading a part of that the leaves though little time they have to live were never so unfallen as today and seemed to yield us through a rustled sieve the very light from which time fell away a showered fire we thought forever lost redeems the air where friends in meeting pass they parley in the tongues of Pentecost the gold ranks of temples flank the dazzle street it's a light of maples and will go but not before it washes eye and brain with such a tincture such a sanguine glow as cannot fail to leave a lasting stain it goes on for a bit more but I thought I'd honor him by reading that we're not here to discuss Wilbur but Thoreau the by centennial of whose birth we celebrate this year first let me explain my title thinking through Thoreau because the pun is intentional as his close friend William Mallory Channing remarked at one point in everything he writes there's a philological side this needs to be carefully considered Channing said thinking through Thoreau as in pondering his life and career and thinking through Thoreau as in pondering what it means to consider for ourselves the lessons he offers I've been thinking about him in both senses remarkably for 50 years now so first I want to share parts of my long dialogue with him and I do this not because I'm self-centered enough to think that my experiences are somehow special rather I hope that you might find them emblematic of how great writing continues to be important to us even when electronic media have so taken over our lives now more than ever we need the guidance of great minds who are not blind to the complexity of the moment and show us the truth without mincing words and who better to speak of the perils and joys of a brave new world than a man who encountered similar challenges as the first industrial revolution irrevocably changed his life just as the computer revolution has changed ours I came to him in middle school and I can date my epiphany fairly accurately I was barely a teenager in a November that stands out from all other damp drizzly November is by the horror of gunshots in Dallas one afternoon a side of field of unharvested hay I saw a choke cherry tree full of chattering yellow birds only as large as robins in their aura they seemed immense surreal black on their wings and with oversized finished bills working their way through fermenting fruit with such dispatch that I watched the ground chalk beneath with their droppings I'd walk the woods enough even then to know that twice as big and amazingly bright these were not golf inches against the crystalline autumn sky these birds were garish so noisy as to be brash and unforgettable when five minutes later as oblivious to me as I was entranced by them they flew in that last cherry was gone Harbinger of all other birds that I would see this visitation transform my life as completely as though as the 17th century philosopher John Locke would put it I'd encountered a new simple idea it changed everything but I didn't know what they were and when I discovered that my small sound library had no book on the shelf that pictured them with the librarian's help I set about compiling a list of natural history museums who scientists I was convinced would eagerly want to know about my discovery as a 12 year old I sent off handwritten letters to each addressed to the curator of birds they didn't know their names months past without answer but one day as mysteriously as the birds themselves they're appeared in the mailbox a letter from the Museum of Natural History in New York City a few lines hastily penned by the curator of ornithology undoubtedly evening gross speaks a large cousin of the goldfinch signed Dean Amidon my next trip to the library yielded Roger Peterson's field guide serendipitously returned by whoever checked it out prior to my first foray and they were my birds evening gross speaks their visit was not the remarkable thing it turned out for in severe winters they often wandered from northern forests to feed in New England rather as I subsequently learned what was remarkable was that one of the world's foremost ornithologists had taken the time to answer schoolboys scroll that note was the beginning of it all for me from that point birds continued to bring surprises and in marvelous ways in the winter of the gross speaks for example the backyard feeder was even more unusual if not quite as striking with visitors from the far north a cadian or as they were called back then boreal chickadees as a few days later I mentioned them to a friend's father because in his living room I had seen some pictures of birds as I expected this man knew something about them and told me that my chickadees were rare they stayed all winter long eating suet peanut butter even ripe bananas sensing my growing interest as spring approached this generous man began to take his own son another neighbor about my age and me on bird walks throughout the area he talked about yard lists year lists life lists and how to record my sightings he allowed me to pour through field records of his from 15 years earlier in much I eagerly read of species many of which have become rare that he had seen in places where we still walked he taught me bird song so much so and so well that within a year there would be mornings when before daylight we noted 40 species without having seen one bird now half a century later coming upon some obscure warbler I not only can still identify it but can recall where I first heard it song he loaned me books from his naturalist library books in which I read about rare species that I had never seen books of course that included the set of Thoros journals in the turn of the century Riverside edition at this friend's suggestion and with Thoros my inspiration I filled notebooks with my daily records of this species and each Sunday I sent to Samuel Atkins Elliot Junior a Smith College professor of English and the Dean of birders in the Connecticut Valley a weekly digest of what birds I had seen and where and when by return mail I would learn from a postcard or letter in a tiny precise hand what he scores of others had found and how my sightings related to those I still have these missives years of them bundled with elastic bands communication between a retired professor his grandfather was the great Charles William Elliot President of Harvard bundled with elastic bands communication between a retired professor in a teenager who didn't even know what a seven sister college was earnest of a man's compulsive desire to know all that he could of the birds of Western Massachusetts he was I realized one of my first inspirational teachers I remember such things evening gross beaks brown capped chickadees a rare Lawrence's warbler to goss hawks defending their nest and the people with whom I saw or shared news of them because for a decade such things were what mattered most to me day by day I grew bird by bird that which would become unmistakably and indelibly me already encoded in hundreds of unique and yet absolutely quotidian experiences these wing creatures allowed me to know by the age of 16 things few others ever would to see for example in the stillness beyond time 15 feet away the bright yellow eye of a bald eagle or a twilight to hear a hundred feet above the alder thickets the woodcock and remarkable courtship flight in such things it was as though as Melville put it I could see God's foot upon the treadle of the loom I soon realized that such obsessive birdchasing and record keeping set me apart needless to say for mother adolescents but through my immersion in nature I grew as thorough himself said like corn in the night indeed birds took me first unawares from the thoughts of the killing fields in Southeast Asia or the riots in Watts to my own special places the tidal flats of Monomoy Island the high ridges of Mount Greylock at the opposite end of Massachusetts Plum Island salt meadows Cape Anne's granite outcroppings to great meadows well-fleet in other wildlife refuges and more than anywhere else for a few years almost daily to the pristine Quarbon reservoir watershed whose immense waters served as metropolitan Boston's drinking supply here on thousands of well-protected acres four miles from my home wildlife lived as it did in the 19th century there in all weather and in all seasons my father the laborer who did not finish high school and I spent the countless hours of my waxing in his waning adding to our lists I came to believe as thorough did in the forest and the meadow and in the night in which the corn grows and all of this at the expense of my Catholic upbringing but most importantly birds took me as I just said to thorough it was journals I had sampled that my older friends home and to whom I now turn for wisdom caught as I was with millions of others in the turmoil that was the 1960s I had realized soon enough that the insatiable listing that's occupied my time proved inadequate finally to the depth of my experiences and so to the cryptic notes I sent to Sam Elliott well I was learning of the world required different tools to measure in the different language to market and these I found as serendipitously as I had stumbled upon the evening gross speaks when a junior high teacher trying to keep a precocious student from boredom one day suggested that if I like nature so much I should read Walden I leaped at the opportunity in the lovely wrought description of thoroughs life in the woods wrong concrete I found mirrored my own deepening relationship to nature do not underestimate the value of a fact he had written it may one day flower in a truth to see a fact flower into a truth was an ambition particularly suited to the flower power youth of the late 1960s but rather than becoming an out and out hippie I tried to affect my magical mystery tours through the virtual of walking and journal keeping that thorough had perfected what are you doing now Emerson had asked you keep a journal so I make my first entry today thorough I wrote and thus began the composition of what became like Emerson's a life's work and so too I cited this very passage as I wrote my first words every evening laden with the potluck of the day birds people events books poems quotations I visited my journals blank pages and an hour later left them filled with what I came to view as an organic extension of myself like chasing birds from dawn to dusk the journal keeping eventually became obsessive and while not left behind for 15 years eventually became less and less identified in my mind exclusively with thorough but his significance never diminished for I eventually discovered that he wrote so movingly about nature because he understood society so well in other words I finally found a thorough of civil disobedience and life without principle and returned to the first two chapters of Walden he was pity sentences suddenly began in the turmoil of the 60s to grace everything from Sierra Club posters to flyers for next week's anti-war rally to a generation disgusted with the seemingly universal complicity and evil of any who supported what they call the military industrial complex thorough offered heady and restorative tonic permit me one more reminiscence before I turned to more substantive matters about him I was ending my freshman year in college I'd seen my classmates dragged off by state police for occupying university property to protest the presence of ROTC I'd run through tear gas in the streets outside of my dorm was all very exciting to a country boy but I also had to grapple with things close at home like choosing a field of study I had decided to apply to a special major called history and literature and to enter this program I had to be interviewed I had to declare an area or country of interest and I wanted to do French history and literature I had been like many others for that period in trance by Camus Satra jeed in these French writers but to my chagrin the interviewer said there were no more places left in the French history and literature program we kept talking he asked me what else I was interested in I mentioned nature and birds and my affection for thorough his response another of those amazingly significant turning points was why not major in American history and literature the very field in which he specialized and that he is the very eminent Richard Rabinowitz the museum designer who did all the major programs at the New York Historical Society of the last 10 years the slavery in New York and things like that he became an independent historian he was the one who was the interviewer before I left the room I was a convert in my scholarly and intellectual life subsequently unfolded pedal after pedal article after article book after book it really was a moment of grace when I left the room from the interview and so I went on to study exactly what Adams said I did American history and literature specifically from the period of the land's initial exploration by white Europeans through the 19th century but it all started with thorough on whom I did a major part of my dissertation and on whom I've continued to write after all these years indeed I published my first essay on him as a graduate student hard to believe in 1975 why what it what is the nature of the continuing attraction let me try to tell you with reference to one of his lesson on books not the main woods but Cape Cod I realized this may seem like an odd choice given that this conference celebrates thorough in Maine but you're going to be hearing much about that you're being here in Portland on the sea makes me think it might be salutary for you to think about the ocean rather than his mountain book you know he wrote one river book week on the Concord Miramac River is one pawn book Walden of course and one book about the sea Cape Cod Cape Cod has worked that I've come to love and appreciate as a complement to his more famous Walden and one which treats a topic the ocean in the shore particularly close to the hearts of so many of you here Cape Cod has at its center Thoros encounters with another form of the wilderness he so movingly describes in the penultimate chapter of Walden when he need when he speaks of the need man has to witness his own limits transgressed man can never have enough of nature he observes and must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor vast titanic features the seacoast with its wrecks the wilderness with its living and decaying trees the thunder cloud and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces fresh it's a particularly resonant phrase even our country's written experience with floods but he knew to that nature need not be extravagant to move one with its power he of course had seen as he put it the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees on his trips to Maine and on Mount Katahdin and some of you know he was absolutely terrified for there he wrote vast titanic inhuman nature had got him at a disadvantage caught him alone and pilfered him of some of his divine faculty so it was a Walden pawn he found his emerson had counseled in his seminal little book nature the miraculous in the simple he had as he put it traveled much in concrete but thorough occasionally urine for deeper drafts of that tonic of wildness he had tasted in Maine and at different times in his own neighborhood not given to complacency he relished the opportunity to front the immense fact of nature in all the variety and to gauge its effect on him more ever in the 1850s such encounters did not require elaborate preparation or far distant travel even to the main rivers and lakes he could take a train from Boston to the stand which on Cape Cod and meet the wild face to face or he could take a ferry from Boston province town and meet the wild face to face in this case where the land ran up against the Atlantic Ocean on the outer arm of Massachusetts he visited the Cape four times between 1849 and 57 he placed a few essays about these visits and magazines but the book that we know as Cape Cod did not appear until 1864 the year after his death or two years after his death prepared for press by his sister Sophia and his friend and walking companion Willie Mallory Channing whom I quoted earlier having already used a similar format in his week on the conquered Miramac rivers he assembled his account of Cape Cod as a travel log the popular genre and grafted material from his subsequent trips onto the original excursion he had taken in 1849 pair of hikers Channing he had traveled by foot along the entire great beach the side of the Cape fronting the Atlantic to province town they returned to Boston by steamer across Massachusetts Bay and as one would expect in such a travel book there was much talk of the land and sand and sea but what most engages his imagination is the way in which the immense fact of the ocean constantly impinges on the lives of the Cape's inhabitants how nature lest we forget it surrounds us and determines all aspects of our lives even we think that through our technology we control it in other words sorrow's trip to Cape Cod allowed him further insight into the complexity of man and nature that always occupied him but the reader does well to understand that unlike what one comes to expect from Walden where the spiritual knowledge gained through nature is restorative here it often is unsettling his grizzly first chapter the shipwreck quickly demonstrates this for in painstaking and painful detail he describes wandering amidst the wreckage of a brig bound from Ireland to the new world most of its immigrant passengers drowned within sight of what they believed their new land of opportunity the seas sheer indifference to man numbed thorough he described for example the many marbled feet and matted heads as the cloths were raised and one livid swollen and mangled body of a drowned girl who probably as he put it had intended to go out to service in some American family but finally he learned the lesson that he repeats frequently in the course of his narrative people who live close to the sea must not expect any favors from nature and thus must accept its raw inhuman power without sentimentality watching some townspeople raking and picking seaweed that the storm had tossed ashore he marveled at their seeming callousness to the tragedy at arms length drown who might he observes they did not forget that this weed was a valuable manure and had to get on with their lives simply put the shipwreck he wrote had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of society just as it had not affected the majesty of the sea itself thorough quickly drew the lesson if this was the law of nature why waste any time in awe or pity amidst all the talk of explorers fishermen in the harsh impoverished landscape of the cape always we hear this refrain like the sound of the breakers themselves for thorough the sure became a sort of neutral ground he wrote a most advantageous place from which to view the world but a place different from the dreamy moonlit room his conquered neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne described in virtually the same words and neutral territory and in which he found the atmosphere conducive to writing the scarlet letter such internalized realms of the imagination that entranced his conquered friend did little for thorough true to his experience at Walden he sought as he put it to front only the essential facts of life and on the great Atlantic beach front them he did there everything that he encountered he wrote tersely told of the sea and while the landlubber might think that the ocean is but a larger lake as civil now as a city's harbor a place for ships and commerce was incumbent on us to recognize that it could quickly be quote dashed into a sudden fury this gentle ocean will toss and tear the rag of a man's body like the father of mad bulls he wrote just as a river forced its channel forced from its channel by rain will reclaim the floodplain around it thus the ocean was simply more than a larger and deeper Walden pond the people whom he encountered on Cape Cod the well fleet oyster man the keeper of the Highland light the men and boys who sailed from Provincetown Harbor in the mackerel fleet all could read the immense landscape of the region a literacy that thorough came to admire and eventually to emulate from an outsider's perspective the Cape Coders and their compatriots were rough crude people and their domiciles like the shacks built along the beach for the safety of stormwreck sailors as Spartan and salty as the native speech yet thorough realized that they survived in this harsh and weather beaten landscape because they learned how to make do to take as Emerson put it so memorably in his essay experience the potluck of the day and to make a meal of it they lived every day with only the bare necessities of life as thorough wish to do and as he had done for a while at Walden in return they were given frequent glimpses at least as deep into the world's mysteries writing of the rec masters appointed by a town to oversee the disposition of property washed up after storms he wrote Riley but while we not all records contriving that some treasure may be washed up on our beach that we may secure it a main thread in his book then is the finding and recognizing the treasure in the flotsam and Jetsam of our lives of knowing the difference between appearance and reality a skill acquired by the Cape Coders as they acknowledged that over much of life they simply had no control he noted the shimmering mirages raised by the sun over sand and water a deception of the senses when one is confronted with the simplest object on the beach at a distance for example a few bones in the sand looked like the entire for the entire world like beach spars and such hallucinations figured the larger cipher of the ocean which skewed all attempts to know it and by the implication of the universe itself thus looking one day at the numerous vessels of the fishing fleet in open water and realizing that as he wrote as far as they were distant from us so were they from one another thorough and his companion were deeply moved by a sense of the immensity of the ocean and what proportion man and his works bear to the globe the longer and father they looked the water grew darker and darker and deeper and deeper till it was he said awful to consider he had ventured he had measured the depth of Walden and and wrote about it in his book but they wrote here of what use is the bottom of the ocean if it is out of sight if it is two or three miles from the surface and you were drowned so long before you get to it before we refinished Cape Cod we realized that for thorough such questions are for unsettling when we first phrase them finally have become rhetorical such bottoms indeed have their use if only to teach us our place in nature I did not intend this for a sentimental journey he wrote for this was no common guidebook he understood his trips to Cape Cod as nothing less than journeys of exploration in a literal sense as he linked himself through so many of his aside to those Europeans who had seen the same shore and in a metaphorical sense represented so beautifully in the conclusion to Walden as he meditated on the importance of exploring as he put it one's own higher latitudes on one level for example he delights to think that his experiences are comparable to those of the early explorers as when he ate a large clam by cooking it in its shell only to find it a severe a medic he improved the gastronomic lesson through his discovery of a comparable moment in Mort's relation of the Plymouth colonies first years it brought me nearer to the pilgrims he royally observed to be thus reminded by a similar experience that I was so much like them yet he also sought to understand what initially had possessed great travelers to take the risks they did and concluded that it had to do with their willingness to take their own measure as well as that of the world around them via Columbus he wrote in the conclusion to Walden to whole new continents and worlds within you opening new channels not of trade but of thought explore the private sea he said the Atlantic and Pacific ocean of ones being alone for that is where the true discoveries are made on Cape Cod he was alone with himself just as he was in the main woods or in his hot the Walden pond or as we can be on the outer banks or on Mount Mitchell or in Maine's wilderness in such places one comes face to face with that which makes us reconsider the complacency in which most people live just as we have had to do after the hurricanes that so devastated our country in recent years the ocean is a wilderness reaching around the globe he wrote wilder than a Bengal jungle fuller of monsters washing the very wharves of our cities in the gardens of our seaside residences and too few of them knew it but just as he had traveled much in Concord had taken himself and his readers to new levels of experience so on Cape Cod the mere 50 miles from Concord he would do it again in a different but similarly accessible landscape in Cape Cod then we learn that the first region regions first explorers and present inhabitants made thorough understand more of the mystery of his own relationship to the natural world in my extension to the eternity it shadows here we might consider how Cape Cod fits the contours of those higher laws that thorough had glimpsed in the Walden pond years for despite our tendency to associate him with the tenets of transcendentalism in Walden and in other works from the 1850s thorough move toward a very different understanding of the universe than that suggested by his contemporaries even the most radical among them I think particularly of the striking passage toward the conclusion of Walden's second chapter when he announces God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the laps of all the ages and we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble he continues only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us at times like this it seems to me thorough ceases to be a transcendentalist that as he clearly tells us they desire to transcend reality to move as Emerson urged through nature to spirit is fatuous nature is not to be used as Emerson in his book of that title suggested as a ladder on which to move to some higher consciousness rather acceptance of nature drenching ourselves in the reality around us until we realize as he wrote that shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths while reality is fabulous is the same way the view of the world here then as a past part two to thorough is mature writings for once we recognize the true radicalism of his vision which we might best call out of a nature is we begin to see how much of what he writes seemingly has figuration and he means it literally consider for example when the spring chapter of Walden appears into the messy railroad cut through which men have laid rails for the iron beast he observes that he was as affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the artist who made the world had come to where he was still at work sporting on this bank and with excess of energy screwing his fresh designs about the rawness of thorough sentiment this view into the earth had suggested among other things at least nature has some bowels and there again his mother of humanity only increases a few pages later there he notes we should be cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us and deriving health from his repast even the overpowering stench from a dead horse in his path only serves to remind him of the strong appetite and inviolable health of nature truly to know the world to know what as a thorough rather than as an emerson would is to see it read in tooth and claw it also is the marvel as he put it that life is so that it is so rife with life that myriad can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another without any harm to its overall health the impression made by nature on a wise man he wrote is that of universal innocence such passages and thorough is great work provide the larger framework for appreciating the achievement of Cape Cod for therein to we come to learn albeit in different ways that poison is not poisonous after all nor are any wounds fatal to speak otherwise is to be merely sentimental thus as he puts it when he explains why he had so it was so taken with the idea of walking up the Cape in that way he said I had got the Cape under me as if I were writing it bare-backed it was not as it is on the map he wrote or seen from the stage coach but there I found it all out of doors huge and real Cape Cod it cannot be represented on a map color it as you will the thing itself then which there is nothing more like it no true or picture or account which you cannot go further and see of course those so inclined might observe that at one level this passage is about the desire for representation and how it is seemingly always doomed to failure but it also is much if not more about his wish to push against the divine envelope in which we live by drenching himself in the reality that surrounded him to know know something first hand not to know it through someone else's words or maps what then did he go to the Cape to see the ocean is a wild ranked place he tells us and there's no flattery in it strewn with crabs horseshoes razor clams and whatever the sea casts up a vast morgue it is with the carcasses of men's and beasts together rotting and bleaching in the sun and waves and each tide turning them over in their beds there on the great beach is naked nature he concludes inhumanly sincere wasting no thought on man such knowledge and assurance with a choice is fruit of thoroughs parapetitic exploration of Cape Cod amid all the talk of mackerel fishing and hard scrabble farming and the trench and observations on the manners and more ease of the inhabitants the detailed descriptions of flora and fauna and the antiquarian lore gathered from the town histories and gazetteers always there was the stark fact of the Atlantic as profound in its way as Walden pond the reader must not forget that the dash and roar of the waves were incessant he observes and thus it would be well if he were to read my book with a large conch shell at his ear he takes pains to remind us that what we hear therein might be as unsettling as the stench of carrion yet finally as indicative of nature's bounty and health in that shell as in Cape Cod thorough wants us to hear nothing less than the sound of our own mortality and he asks us first to accept that knowledge and then to find joy in it understanding that we are a part not apart from nature towards such worlds of knowledge then thorough explore the sands of Cape Cod and to claim such wisdom he wished to associate the ocean until it lost the pond like look which it bears to a countryman in Walden he had presented his deepest understanding of the natural world through the frequently invoked imagery of the cycle of the seasons but in Cape Cod such imagery is replaced fittingly with that of the cyclical tides there are steady patterns affecting us as powerfully as the pulse of our own heartbeats in Walden we learn as thorough did that nature's variety indeed its very vitality is to be understood through the inevitable return of spring so beautifully evoked in the chapter of that same name but in Cape Cod nature is reduced further to its lowest terms to its hourly pulsations there as he wrote famously in Walden one could front only the essential facts of life and he wanted to see if he could not learn what it had to teach and not when he came to die discover that he had not lived if you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact you will see the sun glimmer on its surfaces he continued as if it were a cemetery and feel its sweet edge dividing you through heart and marrow such was the painfully sweet knowledge he sought and found on Cape Cod as in other places commensurate to his capacity for wonder Cape Cod cannot ever replace Walden but it can stand fittingly next to it as another testament the thoroughest commitment to know man's place in nature and thus to know himself always honest sometimes to a fault to Emerson's observation that the study nature and to know oneself or the same thing he took from such scrutiny the hard knowledge that this life is all that we have in any weather he wrote I've been anxious to improve the nicker time to notch it on my stick to to stand on the meeting of two eternities the past and the future which is precisely the present moment and to tow that line that he was able in spite of such knowledge to fill the world with such beauty and further was able to convey that beauty so memorably in his prose marks thorough as one of America's treasures what are springs and waterfalls he asked rhetorically that Cape Cod's conclusion here is the spring of springs the waterfall of waterfalls a man may stand there and put all America behind him for the Cape was a place from which one could see one's origins and thus where he was at home and come to know that place for the first time limbed in various essays at the height of what historians call the transcendentalist period but published at the end of the Civil War Cape Cod offers an important clue as to how thorough view the carnage perpetrated by his countrymen like Whitman's drum taps written by another so-called transcendentalist Cape Cod finally is a book for the realist shelf thank you for indulging this ungainly mixture of appreciation and literary evaluation among other things I've tried to show you how an author stays with one even as one grows and develops in new ways over half a century 50 years ago as a budding naturalist I started reading thorough 50 years later as an academic I still read him for the aesthetic pleasure he provides but more for the deep wisdom about the place of man in nature this is the lesson I wish to bring home to you that he remains a living presence to us someone to whom we can turn to keep our company what to write our moral keel for when we read a really great book we associate ourselves with a mind that can only clarify and improve our own usually limited views such books are both mirrors that reflect us and windows through which we can see further we come more we understand more and we appreciate more than we ever could before who would have thought that all this could come off my one day having taken the time to stop and watch a tree full of yellow bright birds may our own lives be filled with such moments and such books as I find thorough would want it that way and remember one last thing that he wrote life is like a stroll upon the beach as near the ocean's edge as we can go thank you let me let me elaborate a few things and then take some questions this is about my deep sense as I said a few minutes ago that excuse me that we really do them into service to always claim that he's Emerson's disciple because I think really in these later works he's coming to see the world in a very different way and that very last thing I said about the the Cape Cod essays perhaps reflecting his own sense of the of the horror and disaster in the Civil War years he died just after it started but he he certainly read the early reports seems to suggest that if he had lived he would have become a very different and distinguish himself much more from the Emerson about whom we think and write so that's part of the argument I was trying to make in the in the story but also this sense of the kind of magic or reality of every moment being drenched drenched in reality I love that word it's like he's standing it's not raining though realities coming down on him instead of the rain falling falling upon him sort of standing in a swamp looking for an orchid something like that is into a picture of what he wants to experience that's different from Emerson Emerson is much more cerebral and I don't think it would be comfortable with the kinds of ideas that Thoreau was moving toward in the later part of his life so anyway I find that when I was thinking about this it might be fun for you to think about the ocean instead of a caton all the time with with Thoreau in Maine but I'll be glad to answer questions that you have about what I said or your comments about it. Yes, sir. I'm interested in your experience as a teacher in terms of how drenched they are in reality or drenched in what can be termed artificiality the virtual world which seems to have overtaken so many people not just students but many adults too. What struck me most coming into the room was that poster back there I don't know if you've seen it but it's what to do if there's an active shooter in the room. I hope there's an inactive one. I hope there's an inactive shooter in the room. I don't think we have to worry. Prime has been going down in America. This is probably the safest thing in the country. So what that represents to me is lack of reality, the sense of artificiality that comes through the media, which people are drenched in some of the different ways. So what do you see? I'm just curious about your first. I'll tell you one anecdote comes to mind. I've measured to a few people. I get my mail at the post office which is across from the campus where I walk through the campus every day 30 years I walk that walk and barred owls live in the trees. You know, there are all kinds of birds singing, squirrels everywhere. And people would walk there, 10, 15 years ago, be talking, going to class and now every single person has earbuds in, even if they're walking together. They're listening and going away. So I'm just thinking not only are they not hearing these things that are all around them, they're not even communicating with each other in that way. So I certainly second what you're saying. On the other hand, I find that if I talk about Thoreau in these ways, some of them get it. It isn't his bailing out of society so much anymore. That's how it was in the 70s when I began teaching him. People are interested in his criticism of the American way, the American economy, of course, of Vietnam War. But once Reagan came in the 80s and into the 90s, the students found him too cranky, too ornery, unrealistic, who would want to do that now? But I think really with the growth of the environmental movement, with the growth of different kinds of consciousness about global warming and things, the kinds of things I was mentioning here actually do get through to some of them when you teach Walden, which is usually what I teach to the undergraduates. So I'm not in as much despair as I was, let's say, 25 years ago when I thought that he really wouldn't be appreciated in that way. But I agree with you totally about our inability to distinguish what's real any longer. I'll tell you another great moment I had to show you the miracle in the moment. A friend of mine gave me a few Luna moth caterpillars. And he said, this is the kind of tree that grows on, why don't you grow these things? I said, what's going to happen to him? He said, well, they're going to eat these leaves every day, they're going to poop out this stuff, you clean it out. And then one day, the caterpillars going to go in a leaf and begin spinning a cocoon around itself in its leaf. Well, I didn't believe him, of course, I wasn't going to see us. And so I took and I came home once. And from my jar, I kept hearing a noise. And I couldn't figure it out. And I lifted the jar up. And inside a leaf was this shuddering, this movement, and he was spinning his silk around himself and that thing. I mean, I've observed things for years, years, I thought this was simply amazing, right? And within half a day, it was totally enmeshed in that. What kids stop to see that kind of thing these days, how many of us take these things are happening right outside in different ways. So, you know, Walden sometimes awakens them to the fact that there are beautiful things in the simplicity around them. And that's, you know, again, one of the treasures I think that he brings to us. Anyway, the other part of the story is, so then it's there, it's in this cocoon. And I came home at one night, I left it outside, it was still fairly warm. And, and I kept hearing this rattling as I opened the door. And I thought a moth was stuck in my window and all this. And I look and there's nothing there. And I look in the jar, and there is the green loon of moth. It had come out and it was flapping to get out. So I actually saw both ends of the metamorphosis, so to speak. It was really quite remarkable. Anyway, I saw another hand of, a minute ago, I thought I did. Other questions? Yes. I have two questions. One is for students in the room, of which there are some, we all are. And listening to you read your piece, I was taken with how seamless it is and yet how clear, through long experience, that your voice enters, your voice enters, it's fluid backing towards. One of the things we talk about a lot in teaching, teaching, writing, teaching literature for students perspective is, is how, how challenging and difficult that can sometimes be to write in response. How do you bring someone else's words into your own sentence, your own paragraph? How to do that? Especially if someone's words are so unlike your own. You have text to speak and you're writing about the road. So I would be just grateful for all of our students in the room with any kind of tips over long experience of doing that. Well, I mean, you've kind of put your finger on something. I mean, I'm kind of saturated with him. I mean, that's what I was trying to express at the beginning. I mean, of all the writers, I've lived with him the longest. I could never do that seamlessly with Melville, who my love to read and teach, but I couldn't, couldn't give a paper like this, using his language and have my words move into his because it's so different and dramatic. So I don't know, I simply say that well, you obviously, you obviously know this means something to me. So you know, you have to have some sort of feeling about the language, some kind of feeling that, you know, that that it's saying something to you that you want to somehow incorporate into your own comments about writer of the book that he's portraying. But I don't know, I just like I say he comes naturally to me right now. What was your other question? Oh, my other question is, I don't know if it's more straightforward or less, throw on verbs. Yeah, there's a lovely little book that came out, I think in the 70s or so, where someone excerpted from his journals, all of the observations on bird life. And of course, back then, of course, he, he, most people were still shooting them to identify them, all of the great ornithologists of the 1840s and 50s were collectors and in their, you know, their birds and hour in the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge or places like that, or where Dean Abaddon's are in New York City, war rather. And even into the 1940s and 50s in Massachusetts, if you saw a rare bird, let's say a bird not native or rather, that was an accident, as they call it, the great birders had a permit to shoot it so they could collect it for one of these museums. But my point is, he was still working pretty much, maybe with a small scope at the most, but without binoculars and without guns. So sometimes he didn't get, he didn't get things fully right. But he he certainly, what he knew most about was botany. And there have been one or two books recently about someone did a wonderful book about conquered now and the difference in the botany of what's there and what was there in the 1840s and 50s as one can pick from his journals and things. So the journals remain a wonderful source for all kind of a sort of historical study of these, these creatures. But but birds, birds certainly were a passion of his as well. Yeah. And of course, most of the larger animals, mammals had been really extinguished from the area. He wasn't even seeing deer and things in conquered in the 1840s and 50s. We see deer everywhere, not where we live. Other thoughts? Anyone want to? I was wondering if I could jump in with a question. That's okay. You're sort of a career is somewhat distinctive. It was feels like academic life now has become so specialized and most academics are kind of churning out monographs and ever narrow or subjects. And as a historian, we sort of rarely venture American historian rarely venture out of a decade or or or a generation. And your work has been so broad in terms of time and also discipline, you've got range and discipline. You know, this piece in some respects argues like that unlike Emerson, that he doesn't use nature as a ladder but becomes fully immersed into nature. And yet in my sense of horror has been some respects like, you know, in in these grass, Whitman kind of experiences like the urban crowd, he says with a side curved head, he was both in and outside of the game and sort of watching it and then also reflecting on it. And it's only been kind of my sense that, and as you refer to the period that he was writing in that, that thorough was the first person to experience nature or the most important person to experience nature. And the way that we experience it now, where it is, you're sort of outside it, immerse yourself into it and experience it almost therapeutically, like a middle class person. But as you're taking on thorough, that in some respects, that he was able to sort of go beyond that or let me go back to one line here. Because I want to explain it. It's the line about poison is not poisonous nor any wounds fatal. Remember that line? And I said that that he went beyond that kind of sentimentality. A chipmunk or a whale or a, you know, a fish doesn't think about itself that way. Doesn't think oh, I ate a poison. I'm gonna die or oh, I've been hit by a sword. I'm gonna lose myself now. And I think what when he's describing that he's talking about how everything he sees in natural world, everything that we call terrible. Oh, it's fatal. Oh, don't eat it. It's poison. These kinds of things have been put there by by men by by people that we've impressed this kind of thing on nature. But really, any wound is fatal. I mean, and not fatal, we're all gonna be fatal. We're all gonna die at some point. So he said, why do we have to identify with these kinds of actions or these kinds of words? So to do that is a kind of backing away from the reality saw of the violence, the sort of given take of the constant power of nature to control our lives. So I really see him, you know, again, in that sense to quite quite remarkable and very modern in that sense to, I mean, I know what you were saying about some of us find nature quote, therapeutic. But but the point, of course, of Walden is that he saw that wildness, even at Walden pond of miles, members in his house, you know, he saw what wildness, I saw wildness in that moth. You know, that's the kind of thing you have to train yourself to see. And then you and what you learn from those experiences is your position in the world. And it's, you know, so you're not going there therapeutically, you're in it. This is what it's all about like this. Anything else we got to range around here or other topics that I've suggested? Yes, what, what in the end, do you think this is a little abstract, but you're such a scholar of their own, you got an answer to what do you think of his view of human nature? What do you think of people when you look at the whole purpose? Well, I think you I think he was basically fairly disappointed in human nature. You know, the other thing that we all have to remember is that late in life, and I've written about this in my most recent book, late in life, he became a very fervent abolitionist and a strong supporter of John Brown, really the first one in the country to praise John Brown and to kind of make him into some kind of martyr or other people or condemn him as a mad man. And Thorough's trilogy for him was going to reprint it in many national papers. So, you know, he, he understood that he didn't drop out all the way. Let's put it that way. He understood finally that there was a need for social action and social improvement at some point. Again, this happened later in his life. And that's in the late 1850s. So the Walden period I always see as a kind of the phrase we used to use, he was getting himself together. You know, he was going there as you know, he only went for two years, two months and two days. That's, that's exactly the length. And he didn't have to leave. It was Emerson's land. He could have stayed there as long as he wanted. But he said, memorably, I had more lives to live. Didn't spend more time on that one. And so that's when he reenters society and becomes again, more part of the town, more part of the town of Concord, he lived with his parents, he worked with his father in a in his pencil factory, these sorts of things. So, you know, again, I think he, he was disappointed by people's economic capacity. But you know, he loved to hang out with children, he loved to hang out with the ne'er-do-wells, those who weren't committed to any kind of labor in factories, that sort of thing. He thought that that life was dehumanizing. Remember, this is a period when if you ask someone in 1820, what's your job? Very few people would understand that the way we do. In other words, that there was one thing that you did. So, what do you work at would be more apt. You know, if you were a farmer, if you were a minister, you still had your own garden, you still had a cattle, you had to take care of these things. It was becoming a time when there was just a movement toward having one position, one job. And he thought that was, I think, very disappointing. It pulled away people from understanding more about the natural world, the kinds of things he knew by his very varied work. He was a surveyor. He was a carpenter. He was a pencil maker. He did all these things in a sense like someone 30 or 40 years earlier. The sad thing, of course, is that the industrial revolution was not going to be stopped by that point. It was already in full steam. You had a job. You got a wage. You bought food. You bought clothes. You went to stores. You didn't have to produce them any longer. But in doing so, he began to see how that leads into an ethic of accumulation of excess. And I think that's what disappointed him very much by humanity. But I always stress the fact, you know, he was not a person who didn't care. He cared a lot about slavery and fighting it, of course. And that's significant. So, yes. Well, with the context, what we can just expound upon the phrase, what on man's cell? Do you remember that from war? Remind me. The men are always on a committee planning something or they're always striving to set up a next parade. Okay. Okay. One thing about him and many of the transcendentalists, in fact, is that they continued to insist that the answer to the ages problems lay in the reform of the individual of the person. And what he disliked were things like temperance meetings or sowing societies or things like this. First, the conscience had to be changed. That was the important thing. And then there would be a kind of replication of that in other people. So, he didn't like reformed by that kind of organizational fiat. But as I'm suggesting, you know, toward the end, again, with slavery, he certainly contributed to Concord's anti-slavery movement. But this sense that we can solve a problem if we make a group come together for this. No, that's not what he believed. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Very much fun. Thank you. Okay. Great.