Thoreau--from Walden

• Chapter 4--Sounds
  • Language of books vs. language of things
    • Reading what is before you--reading and writing the landscape--"the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen"
  • Past tense narrative paragraph--about life at Walden during the two years he was there.
    • Celebration of leisure and doing nothing--pastoral ideal of otium and solitude, idleness
    • Contemplation, living in the present
    • Tone at end, answering his townsmen: "this was sheer idelness to my fellow townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting" [defensiveness]
    • Didnt need to look abroad for amusement--"fresh prospect every hour"--is this true--how long would it take to get bored? Ed Abbey, Butterfly in Redwood
    • Housework--moving desk and pens outdoors--"they seemed glad to get out themselves outdoors"
    • Description of location of house verging into description of sumac bush at different times of the year
  • Present tense--sit at window summer afternoon--moving from sound of the birds to sound of the train passing--Focus moves to sound
    • [Sounds of the railroad at on Cal Poly Land recorded in journal]
    • "Fitchburg railroad touches the pond...related to society by this link"
    • "whistle...sounding like the scream of a hawk"--sounds the train voices: the exchange between city and country [as trains move in both directions]
    • "lumbering civility, the country hands a chair to the city" [puns]...series of exchanges of natural and processed or civilized ending: "up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them" City is eating up countryside
    • wonder and acknowledgement of the train as demigod--paean to technology "if all were as it seems." Strategy of praise and undermining repeated. The fire-steed
      • if the enterprise were innocent
      • if the enterprise were heroic
    • "Doing things railroad fashion...we have constructed an atropos"--Thoreau on technology=Frankenstein's monster--railroad time..vs. otium
    • tribute to commerce [business]--heroic men on the snowplow
      • celebration of all the goods going by on railroad from ends of the earth, celebrating the technology and transport
    • moving then to sounds and sights of log and cattle train destroying life..."so is your pastoral life whirled past and away...I must get off the track" Mood changing to elegy and loss. The whole sequence like the sound of train coming and passing and going
  • Silence after train passes, then orchestra of natural sounds
    • Sounds of Sunday bells [clock tower at Business school]--contrast the "faint sweet...natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness"...vibration of the universal lyre
    • Cow sounds like minstrels
    • Whipporwill sounds
    • Screetch owls--Miltonic onomatapoeia for wailing doleful sounds--that I had never been booorn
    • Hooting owl: "most melancholy sound in Nature--expressive of a mind which hasreached the gelantinouis mildewy stagte in the mortification of all healthy and courageous thought" [Hi Mom!]
    • Transition from gloom to dionysian revelry: Bullfrogs in stygian lake--[Aristophanes]--passing around the cup at banquet
  • Conclusion
    • Rooster: The great value of this once-wild domesticated bird--celebrated everywhere and domesticated as great vitality of civilization
    • He has no domesticated animals or sounds--"no yard but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills...no gate--no front-yard--and no path to the civilized world.
      • What happened to the train which relates him to society?
    • Cf. "Annihilating all that's made to a green thought in a green shade," or "Shack-wacky"
• Chapter 9--The Ponds--music of the mind
  • Fishing
    • with silent friend
    • Fishing alone in the night--reaching down into the darkness: a Thoreauvian pleasure
  • Walden pond
    • Remarkable for depth and beauty
    • Praise: purity and colors
    • Pulling axe out of wat er [like fish]
    • The shore--descriptive sequence
    • Age of the pond; traces of the past
    • Why the pond rises and falls--unknown; see modern explanation:
      • Creating a margin
      • Indian legens and etymology--walled in pond
    • Coolness of the water
    • Fish it offers
    • The perfect prospect it offers; painter's landscape view--generosity and purity [end of 9A]
    • Pond as eye--descriptive shifts--metaphor,
    • Variations on "the glassy surface of a lake"
      • looking upside down [models of diary entry and essay]
      • The line of water and sky
      • Smoothing out ripples: moments of peace; the mind settling down
      • Mirror --more peace
    • Interaction with breeze
    • Surrounded by fish, which blend into rain
    • Floating; story of inverted tree pulled out
  • Disturbance
    • elegy for forest lost by logging
    • "Devilish Iron Horse"
  • Regeneration
    • it is itself unchanged, vision of serenity and purity
    • God's drop
    • Pure as a hermit in the woods
  • Flints Pond
    • Abusive attack on the pond and the name and the owner
  • Conclusion
    • White's Pond and Walden: great crystals, lakes of light...too pure to have a market value...how much more beautiful than our lives...nature has no humaninhabitatnt who appreciates her