Thoreau lecture notes

v Economy

§ The “I”—Romantics’ “egotistical sublime”

v Socrates, Augustine, Montaigne, etc: know thyself; study thyself; journaling; sincerity

§ In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives;

§ http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/Publications/Shepherd/shepherd.html

§ Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination — what Wilberforce (17) is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions (18) against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. ...

v Blake

v bound and weary/I thought best/to sulk upon my mothers breast--Infant Sorrow

v Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

v In every cry of every Man,

v In every Infant's cry of fear,

v In every voice, in every ban,

v The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.--London

§ Wordsworth

v that blessed mood,

vIn which the burthen of the mystery,

vIn which the heavy and the weary weight

vOf all this unintelligible world, 40

vIs lightened:

v The world is too much with us; late and soon,

vGetting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

vLittle we see in Nature that is ours;

v We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

§ Age and youth--p. 5...mornings, spring time, new beginnings p.5

§ Blake: The Garden of Love

· And I saw it was filled with graves,

· And tomb-stones where flowers should be;

· And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

· And binding with briars my joys & desires.

§ Wordsworth: Immortality Ode

· Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

·Shades of the prison-house begin to close

·Upon the growing Boy,

·But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

·He sees it in his joy;

·The Youth, who daily farther from the east

·Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,

·And by the vision splendid

·Is on his way attended;

·At length the Man perceives it die away,

·And fade into the light of common day.

§ French Revolution: Wordsworth

" [...] 'Twas in truth an hour

·Of universal ferment; mildest men

·Were agitated; and commotions, strife

·Of passion and opinion, filled the walls

·Of peaceful houses with unique sounds.

·The soil of common life, was, at that time,

·Too hot to tread upon."

·(The Prelude, ix, 163-9)

·

·"O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

·For great were the auxiliars which then stood

·Upon our side, we who were strong in love!

·Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

·But to be young was very Heaven!" (The Prelude, x, 690-4.)

§ The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man — you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind — I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

§ Blake MHH: 1 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age 2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight

v Sounds

vBlake:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, in-finite-/For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern

§ Wordsworth:

Therefore am I still

§A lover of the meadows and the woods,

§And mountains; and of all that we behold

§From this green earth; of all the mighty world

§Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create,

§And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

§In nature and the language of the sense,

§The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

§ The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

§Of all my moral being.

v Solitude

§ delicious evening  84

§ mood in solitude: melancholy and exaltation--the contraries 85-86--

§ Wordsworth:

§ that serene and blessed mood,

§In which the affections gently lead us on,--

§Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

§And even the motion of our human blood

§Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

§In body, and become a living soul:

§While with an eye made quiet by the power

§Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

§ We see into the life of things.

v Spring

We need the tonic of wildness, -- to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, -- tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence

v What the hammer? what the chain?

v In what furnace was thy brain?

v What the anvil? what dread grasp

v Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

v And water'd heaven with their tears,

v Did he smile his work to see

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

When I see on the one side the inert bank, -- for the sun acts on one side first, -- and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me, -- had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype....Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of waterplants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils...It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic.

Blake: Final line of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Everything that Lives is Holy!