Thank you, Lawrence. I am oneuped. I did pm Chris and have begun to receive Topic Reply Notification again.

Tom

Tom, I expressed myself poorly there. I meant that claiming that Thoreau is a master of allusion doesn't support any particular passage being read as allusive. That would be a tautology. And I think, by the way, that the term allusion isn't a good substitute for "symbolism" in cases where you are pointing out an extended parallel, such as Collins' shanty to a cathedral.

I appreciate the invitation to read the annotated edition. Maybe I will one day. For now, I choose to have a different relationship toward this book. I use it as a primary furnishing for my own mental house. The particulars of the annotators are not essential to this purpose. I feel I am on solid Thoreauvian ground here, by the way.


Ah, but this matter of intention has always been sticky, not even in good repute with some. Annotators certainly have no corner on this market. What's more, Tom, I get the strong impression that through supposedly knowing the author's intention, you think you will arrive at the correct reading. But does such a reading exist? I would say not. There are both plausible and implausible statements about any text, but a perfect reading is a chimera. The cliche is true: literature suggests many different, plausible, readings to different people at different times in their lives.

A last thing. Aren't you being a little tough on Robert regarding the non-wildness of Walden Pond? Sure, it wasn't wilderness, and HDT never represents it as such, or his life at the cabin as isolated. But Walden was not a "slum," either (which suggests crowding). It served HDT quite well for the purposes intended. It was only necessary that it be a place apart, and it was.

DWill

Thank you, DWill! How could it be otherwise.

Saffron

Yes, Will, there is a true intention Also sense, feeling, and tone. Look, Thoreau's annotators are good people. I like them and the work they do, although Ann Woodlief is looking for huguenots under every bush or under every tree. Jeff Cramer has taken my continual emendations (nothing I enjoy more than finding an error in Cramer) with good graces. Besides, Ann Woodlief is your fellow Virginian and her work is free.

I think I sometimes discover the author's intention by close reading of the text. I do not suppose that anyone finds an author's intention by woolgathering with a book open.

Tough on Robert? I hope not. Robert is the profound one among us.

Tom

[quote="Thomas Hood] Yes, Will, there is a true intention Also sense, feeling, and tone. Look, Thoreau's annotators are good people. [/quote]

A true intention amounting to a Correct Reading? You don't specify. Isn't it also a given that once the author's words are on their way to the reader, whatever he intended or didn't is not often to be discovered by anyone? I agree certainly about sense, feeling, and tone. This would be the reason I could not accept Collins' shanty as cathedral--out of keeping with the charcteristic sense, feeling, and tone of Throeau. But I don't have any doubt about the goodness of his annotators!

Will

What's to specify? Sense, feeling, tone, and intention are standard terms in literary criticism for the dimensions of meaning going back, I believe, to Coleridge. I first encountered them in the works of I.A. Richards.



"Not by anyone" I agree with, because most people read passively, have no training in close reading, and are unprepared and unwilling to do the work. They imagine that just by looking at the words the whole meaning of the text will be revealed to them. Most initial readings of complex literature like the Sonnets of Shakespeare or Walden are misreadings. Mine were. If one dwells on a text and interprets it in terms of objective features of context, then eventually a stable interpretation can be achieved.

Most people do not understand the logic of heuristic reasoning, what George Polya in his classic How to Solve it calls signs of progress. That is, if a hypothesis of low probability leads to confirming evidence, then the hypothesis becomes more probably, sometimes much more probable. What is true can grown.

The cathedral hypothesis did not pop out of my head full grown. Just so you'll know, here is the kind of thing an active reader does:



I hope considerations such as these answer your concerns.

Tom

Quoted from Tom's post:



What if HDT was just reporting the actually dates he purchased the shanty and the ax and merely a coincidence that it happened to be near Easter? This is possible, is it not?

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Saffron, Thoreau did not purchase an axe (he spells it with an e). He borrowed it:



And just as Thoreau does not tell who loaned him the axe, he does not tell the date he purchased the Collins shanty.



Thoreau did not celebrate religion holidays, but the rest of his family did, and I suppose his mother and sisters would have dressed for the occasion, as is traditional, so he would have known about it. If the Collinses were Irish Catholic, as was likely, then it may be that the date to renew their lives was chosen to correspond to the date of religious renewal. The date of the sale may have been no coincidence. Further, when Thoreau made the purchase, he also was committed to a new life, since he paid $4.25 for it, a considerable sum for a man who worked for a dollar a day. My belief, however, is that the Easter context of the event influenced Thoreau's interpretation of the event, whether or not the concurrence is called a coincidence.

Two additional points: Easter in 1845 occurred on March 23, and it just so happens that Easter in 2008 occurred on March 23 too. Second, the concurrence of events was (or became) extreme important to Thoreau. Much of his later life was devoted to phenological research.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenology

Sometimes a cigar is chocolate.

Tom

Tom, they don't. The attempt is too oblique for me. But I thank you for trying.

DWill

OK, Will. If you don't see it, you don't see it. I admit I am disposed toward the cryptographic. Lawrence thinks:



Sometimes this is true, but sometimes the writer is creative and adds value. I hope you will post about what you do see in Walden.

Tom

I remember reading this as a teen in 9th grade. It was so amazing then to think of a man so bold as to defy the social norms and confront his self imposed limitations. I think the wakening of his neighbors is like sharing his awakening.

Birds do this every day at my home. They greet the rising sun and share the experience with anyone with ears to hear. It is invigorating to awaken to the new day this way. Oh how sweet to let the hours pass as he did easing into the work of the day.

Still, I do not wear a watch after so many years. Allow the world to turn as it will and enjoy the simple pleasures of life as it presents itself around you.

I just discovered this site and I plan to re-read Walden's Pond with a few more years of life behind me. I hope it has not spoiled me too much.

Granny D, I think you will find that Walden too has grown deeper with the years. It has for me.

Tom

I intend to make time to do that, Tom. My interest is in what Thoreau may be trying to tell me and us, which to me is the whole idea behind intent.

DWill

Gentlemen.... while your back and forth intellectual fencing match was interesting, and I too learned and gained vocabulary, the post was hi-jacked and steered way off course from answering the very interesting and complex question posed.

What exactly did Thoreau mean by "waking" his neighbors....?

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation". (Walden, chapter 1)

I believe that Thoreau (correctly) saw many of his neighbors (men and women) as people whose lives were spent effectively "sleeping" by being entrenched in a trade- "Men have become the tools of their tools.", and caught up in the grandeur of their homes- " Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them."
I believe he meant to awaken them in the most sincere way possible- to awaken them internally to what they were missing in their lives.
To open their minds eye to the beautiful world that lays off the beaten path, and just off their doorstep.

Maybe this quote from Thoreau's journal can partly answer the question....?
(July 18th 1851)
"Have you knowledge of the morning? Do you sympathize with that season of nature? Are you abroad early, brushing the dews aside? If the sun rises on you slumbering, if you do not hear the morning cock-crow, if you do not witness the blushes of Aurora, if you are not acquainted with Venus as the morning star, what relation have to you wisdom and purity? You have then forgotten your Creator in the days of your youth !
Your shutters were darkened till noon ! You rose with a sick headache ! In the morning sing, as do the birds. What of those birds which should slumber on their perches till the sun was an hour high? What kind of fowl would they be and new kind of bats and owls, - hedge sparrows or larks? then took a dish of tea or hot coffee before they began to sing?"

I myself truly believe that Thoreau's writing has helped me to awaken my own mind's eye, and as I go about my days I contemplate and concentrate more and more on the simple and beautiful things that surround all of us.

It was a good question- I wish there were more answers as to what this "waking" meant to all of you....

Have a great day.

Art

Agreed, Art. Pleased to meet a fellow Thoreauvian.

Tom