Chapter 4. Sounds

Thomas Hood · Thu Jul 17, 2008 9:22 pm

Summary

life off the clock

wild plants

wild activities of the day

1. the train

2. bells

3. cows

4. whip-poor-wills

5. screech owls

6. hooting owl

7. rumbling of wagons over bridges

8. dogs

9. cows

10. frogs

11. the cock

12. domestic sounds

13. wild sounds

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendenta ... ter04.html
Walden Study Text

Saffron · Wed Aug 20, 2008 7:29 am

I think that the following quote maybe my favorite or rather the one that hits nearest to home for me. I am most comfortable in the world when I feel I have a broad margin.

"I love a broad margin to my life"

The quote is taken from the second paragraph in IV Sounds. I think this paragraph articulates the crux of what Thoreau learned from his time at Walden Pond.

"There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revelry, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works."

Saffron · Wed Aug 20, 2008 7:37 am

Here's an interesting little aside inspired by the following quote:

"It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy's pack."

There is a wonderful book, Material World that is a collection of photographs of people around the world with all of there belongings spread out in front of their house's.

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
In honor of the United Nations-sponsored International Year of the Family in 1994, award-winning photojournalist Peter Menzel brought together 16 of the world's leading photographers to create a visual portrait of life in 30 nations. Material World tackles its wide subject by zooming in, allowing one household to represent an entire nation. Photographers spent one week living with a "statistically average" family in each country, learning about their work, their attitudes toward their possessions, and their hopes for the future. [i]Then a "big picture" shot of the family was taken outside the dwelling, surrounded by all their (many or few) material goods.

http://www.amazon.com/Material-World-Global-Family-Portrait/dp/0871564300

Thomas Hood · Wed Aug 20, 2008 11:46 am


	Saffron wrote: I think that the following quote maybe my favorite or rather the one that hits nearest to home for me. I am most comfortable in the world when I feel I have a broad margin. "I love a broad margin to my life"

Anne Woodlief's note says: "This is one of his most loved lines. Note the idea of "margin" here in context of what he has just said about "reading nature." It may be such leisurely margins for reflection that allow the "reader" to "annotate" what is seen in nature (you could say to "hypertext" it!)" Doesn't "margin" here mean a freedom for personal response?

Tom

Saffron · Wed Aug 20, 2008 12:00 pm

Tom


	Quote: Doesn't "margin" here mean a freedom for personal response?

This is how I read it.

DWill · Sat Aug 23, 2008 4:00 pm

I like the passage Saffron showed us, too. For me, though, the broad margin is simply the freedom from entanglements that would prevent us from spending time on things that the rest of the world tells us are inessential.
I do wonder how characteristic it was of Thoreau to spend his time in this way, without any purpose. Did he really do this that often? I have an image of him as a very productive person during this time, in fact: tending to his notebooks; reading; getting his first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers" ready for publication; writing much of the material that would later appear in "Walden." Is it possible that the "loafer" is in part a literary creation? He left the woods probably in large part because of his need to get things done.

DWill[/i]

Thomas Hood · Sat Aug 23, 2008 8:58 pm


	Saffron wrote: Here's an interesting little aside inspired by the following quote: "It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy's pack."

This set me to wondering what Thoreau's furniture was doing in a chapter on sounds. Curiously, he comments on the sound his furniture makes:


	Quote: It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house.

Thoreau typically transitions a chapter by reference to the previous chapter: "But while we are confined to books" (4.1), and books are usually indoors whereas his sounds are all outdoors, I think. And if he is thinking in contrasts, then "confined" should lead to unconfined, that is, outdoors. Putting his furniture outdoors may be a symbol (Will's preference) of making public the furniture of his mind.

My sister gave me a blower for Christmas, and when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It occurred to me that I could blow out buildings too. She teaches line dancing and has a dance hall. I opened front and back door and blew out the place in the direction the wind was blowing. It worked well.

Tom

Saffron · Sat Aug 23, 2008 9:21 pm


	Thomas Hood wrote: ... when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It occurred to me that I could blow out buildings too. Tom

what an amusing image!

DWill · Mon Aug 25, 2008 7:16 am


	Thomas Hood wrote: Thoreau typically transitions a chapter by reference to the previous chapter:

Interesting that he transitions to "Sounds" by first talking about seeing: "the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen." The opening section here seems to be a continuation of "Where I Lived--What I lived For." Then he gets down to sounds. Saffron and I were talking about how he doesn't view himself as a sensualist (see Chapter 11), but of course he is a sensualist par excellence considering the exquisite development of his senses of sight and hearing.

This chapter is quieter than the previous ones, andante to their fortissimo. The writing reminds me that Thoreau is prized as he is mainly for his literary execution. We wouldn't care very much (at least I wouldn't) about his ideas if he wasn't one of the prose masters in English. It's funny how some view his writing as kind of an offshoot, not the main business that he was about. But he saw his field as that of letters, and obviously he worked as hard at getting the style of Walden right as he did the substance. Maybe he himself contributes to the perception by not mentioning writing much, if at all, in Walden, though it was a main purpose for going to the woods. I am not familiar enough with his Journals to know whether he is given to talking about the writing life.

The chapter also shows that he doesn't adopt rigid positions on the railroad or on commerce, as one might suppose. He can't help but be impressed by them both, because he admires bold actions. Like some of us moderns, he wavered between deploring the effects of technology and progress and marveling at it.
DWill

Thomas Hood · Tue Aug 26, 2008 8:37 pm


	DWill wrote: Saffron and I were talking about how he doesn't view himself as a sensualist (see Chapter 11), but of course he is a sensualist par excellence considering the exquisite development of his senses of sight and hearing.

Sensory sharpness is incompatable with sensual excess, I think. Alcoholics do not savor the flavor of wine.

But there's another reason Thoreau wasn't a sensualist -- especially a Lockean sensationalist. Thoreau was part of the Romantic revolution, the rediscovery of feeling. And the fundamental Romantic insight (as I understand it) is that feeling is as objective as sensation. Here is an example of the objectivity of feeling: imagine an angry person driving a car. Movements are abrupt and angular; G-forces are excessive; starts and stops harsh. These features are objective emotional correlatives of anger.

Tom

DWill · Wed Aug 27, 2008 9:19 pm

Tom, I think I was doing with the word "sensualist" something similar to what Thoreau himself liked to do--reconsider a word based on what its root suggests, rather than go along with the commonly accepted meaning. Thoreau seemed to hold sight and hearing in higher regard than the senses of taste and touch--the senses a common sensualist would be be likely to prize. Still, they are senses just as much as the others. The Eastern mystical ideal that he reveres would entail freeing oneself from attachment to all the senses, not just to the "grosser" ones of taste and touch.

Romaniticism as the rediscovery of feeling? The 18th century had plenty to say about feeling, but this was pre-Romantic. Doesn't it have more to do with the discovery or belief that human feeling finds some correspondence in nature, has a home there? This may be why the so-called pathetic fallacy did not seem such an error or stretch to Thoreau.

DWill

Thomas Hood · Thu Aug 28, 2008 12:05 am


	DWill wrote: Romanticism as the rediscovery of feeling?

Yes, it is my understanding of European cultural history that Romanticism rediscovered feeling. Science discounts feeling on the ground that it is imposed by the viewer and is similar to a prejudice. In shallow reactions I grant that the expression "poetic fallacy" does apply. However, sincere poetic perception involves discovery of objective feeling.

I do not have a good handle on how this insight into the nature of things occurs, but I believe it is covered by modern psychology in the terms sensorimotor, ideomotor, and gestalt. Through our enactment in imagination, we experienced the feeling of the object in accord with the James-Lange theory of feeling.

This thread may be relevant to the topic:

http://www.booktalk.org/post36964.html#36964
Ch. 1: The Feeling of Knowing

Tom

WildCityWoman · Fri Sep 05, 2008 1:09 am

This reading of both chapters 3 and 4 tonight, led me to go to the window and feel the natural breeze, watching the trees sway for a few minutes.

And I wonder if that's just what the author intended . . . if he was conscious that someday people would read his story and enrich their lives with it.

Saffron · Fri Sep 05, 2008 8:51 am

Thomas Hood


	Quote: Yes, it is my understanding of European cultural history that Romanticism rediscovered feeling....

I don't really think you can call Romanticism a rediscovery of feelings. No one ever forgot about feelings. The Rationalist in their zealous embracing of the scientific method, rationality and reason had discounted intuition and feeling as legitimate ways of knowing. They elevated reason and the scientific method to the highest form of seeking truth and knowledge, relegating feeling to the bottom of the trash heap. Romanticism rejected this notion of reason as the only true path to knowlege.

The following passage, copied from the Brooklyn College website, is useful. I have condensed a bit.


	Quote: Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three concepts. Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason...Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within. The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity...On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it. Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge described it with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty which enables us to "read" nature as a system of symbols.

Saffron · Fri Sep 05, 2008 9:11 am

Thomas Hood


	Quote: However, sincere poetic perception involves discovery of objective feeling.

Tom, could you explain this? I'm not sure I am reading this correctly. What do you mean by objective feeling?

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