The Senses of Walden

An Expanded Edition

Stanley Cavell

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226098135
• eBook ISBN: 9780226075013
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Stanley Cavell, one of America's most distinguished philosophers, has written an invaluable companion volume to Walden, a seminal book in our cultural heritage. This expanded edition includes two essays on Emerson.

Portions

I have spoken of the sense of loss and of the vision of general despair which Walden depicts in its early pages, and of the crowing and trickery of the book as taking place over them or in the face of them. Despair and a sense of loss are not static conditions, but goads to our continuous labor: “That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way” (II, 14). It is not merely the company of others that causes this. Going to Walden, for example, will not necessarily help you out, for there is no reason to think you will go there and live there any differently from the way you are going on now. “From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats” (I, 9). “How to migrate thither” is the question. We are living “what is not life” (II, 16), pursuing a descending and darkening way. And yet to realize his wish to live deliberately the writer went “down to the woods” (VIII, 3). And downward is the direction he invites us in:

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state. . . . Be it life or death, we crave only reality. (II, 22)

The path to a point of support and origin is not immediately attractive, but the hope in it, and the hope that we can take it, is exactly that we are living another way, pursuing death, desperate wherever we are; so that if we could go all the way, go through Paris and London, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, we might despair of despair itself, rather than of life, and cast that off, and begin, and so reverse our direction.

He introduces his invitation to voyage as a matter of “settling ourselves.” At the end:

I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me . . . not suppose a case, but take the case that is; to travel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resist me. It affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation. . . . There is a solid bottom everywhere. (XVIII, 14)

Settling has to do with weighing, then; and so does deliberating, pondering. To live deliberately would be to settle, to let ourselves clarify, and find our footing. And weighing is not just carrying weight, by your force of character and in your words; but lifting the thing that keeps you anchored, and sailing out. Then gravitation, in conjunction with what rightfully attracts you, might be in an upward as well as a downward direction—or what we call up and down would cease to signify. We crave only reality; but since “We know not where we are” (XVIII, 16) and only “esteem truth remote” (II, 21)—that is, we cannot believe that it is under our feet—we despair of ourselves and let our despair dictate what we call reality: “When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left” (I, 10). The way we live is not necessary, in this “comparatively free country.” The writer generally “[confines himself] to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances” (I, 53), obviously implying that he thinks their case is extreme. It follows that this life has been chosen; that since we are living and pursuing it, we are choosing it. This does not appear to those leading it to be the case; they think they haven’t the means to live any other way. “One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means” (I, 99). But the truth appears to the writer, as if in a vision, a vision of true necessities, that the necessaries of life are the means of life, the ways it is lived; therefore to say we haven’t the means for a different way, in particular for a way which is to discover what the true necessaries and means of life in fact are, is irrational. It expresses the opinion that our current necessities are our final ones. We have defined our lives in front. What at first seems like a deliberate choice turns out to be a choice all right (they honestly think there is no choice left), but not a deliberate one, not one weighed and found good, but one taken without pondering, or lightly; they have never preferred it. And yet this is nothing less than a choice of one’s life.

How does this come about? What keeps this nightmare from at least frightening us awake? It is a sort of disease of the imagination, both of the private imagination we may call religion and of the public imagination we may call politics. To settle, weigh, gravitate, he was saying, is a question of “taking the case that is,” not “supposing a case.” And earlier: “I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no doubt many of my readers would make a similar defense” (I, 102). That is, from our own experience we draw or project our definitions of reality, as the empiricists taught us to do; only the experience we learn from, and know best, is our failure (cf. II, 21), the same old prospects are repeated back to us, by ourselves and by others. We were to be freed from superstition; instead the frozen hopes and fears which attached to rumored dictates of revelation have now attached themselves to the rumored dictates of experience. The writer calls us heathenish. (He calls himself that too because to an audience of heathens all devotions are heathenish; and because if what they do is called Christianity then he is a heathen—he lives outside the town.) Our education is sadly neglected; we have not learned in the moral life, as the scientists have in theirs, how to seek and press to the limits of experience; so we draw our limits well short of anything reason requires. The result is not that the reality this proposes to us, while confined, is at least safe. The result is a metaphysics of the imagination, of unexamined fantasy.

As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond, I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in ’46, with compass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it. I have visited two such Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes “into which a load of hay might be driven,” if there were anybody to drive it, the undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Regions from these parts. Others have gone down from the village with a “fifty-six” and a wagon-load of inch rope, but yet have failed to find any bottom; for while the “fifty-six” was resting by the way, they were paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvelousness. But I can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth. I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accurately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me. The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not one inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. (XVI, 6)

The human imagination is released by fact. Alone, left to its own devices, it will not recover reality, it will not form an edge. So a favorite trust of the Romantics has, along with what we know of experience, to be brought under instruction; the one kept from straining, the other from stifling itself to death. Both imagination and experience continue to require what the Renaissance had in mind, viz., that they be humanized. (“I brag for humanity,” i.e., the humanity that is still to awaken, to have its renascense. And the writer praises science that humanizes knowledge, that “reports what those men already know practically or instinctively,” as “a true humanity, or account of experience” [XI, 1], i.e., one of the humanities.) The Reformation, as in Luther and Milton, had meant to be a furthering of this too. It was not wholly ineffective: “Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints” (I, 109). That is, false saintliness is hypocrisy, but true saintliness will seem to be bad manners to hypocrites.

The work of humanization is still to be done. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. So long as we will not take our beliefs all the way to genuine knowledge, to conviction, but keep letting ourselves be driven to more or less hasty conclusions, we will keep misplacing the infinite, and so grasp neither heaven nor earth. There is a solid bottom everywhere. But how are we going to weigh toward it, arrive at confident conclusions from which we can reverse direction, spring an arch, choose our lives, and go about our business?

Despair is not bottomless, merely endless; a hopelessness, or fear, of reaching bottom. It takes illusions for its object, from which, in turn, like all ill-educated experience, it is confirmed in what it already knew. So its conclusions too are somewhat hasty, its convictions do not truly convict us. This is a prophecy the writer hears from a cat with wings:

Suddenly an unmistakable cat-owl from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice I ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular intervals to the [loud honking of a] goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this intruder from Hudson’s Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and boo-hoo him out of Concord horizon. What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have not got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself ? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! It was one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as these plains never saw nor heard. (XV, 2)

If we find out what is foreign and what is native to us, we can find out what there really is to boo-hoo about, and then our quiet wailing will make way for something to crow about.

What has the writer’s ear discriminated specifically? Evidently he has heard that all the elements of an apocalyptic concord, a new city of man, are present. We need nothing more and need do nothing new in order that our change of direction take place. This is expressed in the writer’s constant sense that we are on the verge of something, perched; something is in the wind, Olympus is but the outside of earth everywhere; there is a solid bottom everywhere; the dumps and a budding ecstasy are equally possible from this spot, we need only turn around to find the track. “Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed” (V, 6). Because we do not recognize the circumstances that encircle us, we do not allow them to “make our occasions”; instead of “looking another way” (II, 22), we permit outlying and transient circumstances to distract us. The crisis is at hand, but we do not know how to grasp it; we do not know where or how to spend it, so we are desperate. But “it is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things” (I, 9). And “It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye” (I, 99). The day is at hand, and the effect of every vision is at hand—for example, of renaissance and reformation and revolution (we are to work our way through poetry and philosophy and church and state), which since the beginning of the modern age have been a “dinning in our ears” (XVIII, 9).

This is, no doubt, mystical to us. But the wretchedness and nervousness this writing creates come from an equally undeniable, if intermittent, sense that the writer is being practical, and therefore that we are not. It is a sense that the mystery is of our own making; that it would require no more expenditure of spirit and body to let ourselves be free than it is costing us to keep ourselves pinioned and imprisoned within “opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance.” Our labors—the way we labor—are not responses to true need, but hectic efforts to keep ourselves from the knowledge of what is needful, from the promise of freedom, whose tidings we always call glad and whose bringer we always despise and then apotheosize (I, 54), which is to say, kick upstairs. It is no excuse to us that few tidings really are glad, that for every real prophet there are legions of false ones speaking a vision of their own hearts, i.e., from what ails merely themselves. We are not excused from thinking it out for ourselves.

This writer’s primary audience is neither the “degraded rich” nor the “degraded poor,” but those who are in “moderate circumstances”; what we might call the middle class. We are not Chinese or Sandwich Islanders; nor are we southern slaves. “I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South” (I, 8). There is no mystery here; there is plain damnation. One mystery we make for ourselves is to say that Negro slavery is wholly foreign to us who are said to live in New England. South is for us merely a direction in which we look away from our own servitude. This is to recommend neither that we ought or ought not do something about Negro slavery; it is to ask why, if we will not attend to the matter, we attend to it—as if fascinated by something at once foreign and yet intimately familiar. We have not made the South foreign to us, we have not put it behind us, sloughed its slavery. We do not yet see our hand in it, any more than we see the connection between our making ourselves foreign to our government and the existence of roasting Mexicans and “strolling” Indians (I, 31) (it was in the years immediately after Thoreau’s graduation from Harvard that the eastern tribes were collected and, following Andrew Jackson’s legislation, marched beyond the Mississippi); any more than we see the connection between what we call philanthropy and what we call poverty. We have yet “to get our living together” (I, 100), to be whole, and to be one community. We are not settled, we have not clarified ourselves; our character, and the character of the nation, is not (in another of his favorite words) transparent to itself (IX, 34).

It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir: How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal and divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. 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 is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. (I, 8)

How did private opinion become a tyrant, a usurper, in service of interests not our own? Its power is such—not merely the magnitude of it, but the form of it—that we feel not merely helpless before it but without rights in the face of it. The drift of Walden is not that we should go off and be alone; the drift is that we are alone, and that we are never alone—not in the highest and not in the lowest sense. In the highest sense, we will know a good neighborhood when we can live there; and in the lowest, “Consider the girls in a factory—never alone, hardly in their dreams” (V, 13). In such circumstances there is little point in suggesting that we assert ourselves, or take further steps; that merely asks the tyrant to tighten his hold. The quest of this book is for the recovery of the self, as from an illness: “The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease” (I, 15).

Why should we explore ourselves when we already know ourselves for cowards, sneaks, and slaves? “But men labor under a mistake” (I, 5). Our labors are not callings, but neither are they misfortunes or accidents which have befallen us. In all, we take something for what it is not but, understandably enough, something it appears to be. That is the cause of our despair, but also cause for hope. We do not know that it is necessary for things to be as bad as they are; because we do not know why we labor as we do. We take one thing for another in every field of thought and in every mode of action. Religiously, our labors betoken penance, hence a belief in works without faith, hence blindness to faith; politically, our labors betoken a belief in fate, hence in a society whose necessities we have had no hand in determining, hence blindness to its origins; episte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Books by Author
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Epigraph
• Words
• Sentences
• Portions
• Thinking of Emerson
• An Emerson Mood
• Notes