I'll deal with that you can be sure. Be sure and study allagory, metaphore and similie. We are going to have a high old time. Chris, do we have to wait until July? L

That is, if a reader demands that the text have only a one-dimensional literal significance, then the reader will not grow -- experience the spiritual depth of the book. The first several times I read Walden, I misread it.
If on your own you can make sense of this brief last paragraph of Chapter 2 in less that six hours, you're a better reader than I am.

Tom, is there a better way to do it than on your own? The passage is a transcendental flight of fancy, and a good one. But do we have to parse everything out, consult sources, and risk losing the spirit of the man, which was anchored in the concrete and particular (but not limited to it)?
It was not Thoreau who said this, but rather his sometime mentor Emerson, but I believe Thoreau would endorse the sentiment: never read a book about a book ("The American Scholar," I think).

I think there is no worry, anyway, about reading the passage as one-dimensional and literal. I won't stand in anybody's way who likes to delve into criticism and such, but the tools to understand (even if not analytically) this passage, are in us. Or we may not fully understand it yet still know that it says something to us.

Two different approaches to literature.

DWill

"If the angles sold messages from God to humans they would be corrupted by commerce."

Are these his words? It wouldn't surprise me if he got into such a mood. But I think he usually kept an uneasy truce with commerce. He appears to have accepted the railroad grudgingly as well. After all, it got him up to see the Maine woods. I guess saying more would be going too far at this stage....

DWill

lawrenceindestin wrote:. . .I think the main spring driving Thoreau was his hate for commerce. He hated commerce as a drug counsler hates crack cocaine.

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. -- Walden, 4.11

Thomas, you're worse than a Baptist quoting only that part of the Bible that makes his point.

In the context of the chapter Thoreau is simply giving the devil his due. But the whole thrust of the book and his testing experience at Walden was to determine if we really needed more than the basics. His conclusion:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation

because they work in commerce rather than study life.

I think we've started the discussion whether they were ready or not.

lawrenceindestin wrote:Thomas, you're worse than a Baptist quoting only that part of the Bible that makes his point.

Whoa, Lawrence. I've been trying to get away from the Baptist since I was seventeen. Is it that obvious? But isn't this desperation (1.9) from a false conception of ourselves -- a false subordination to external interests? Along with other forms of servitude Thoreau does consider the teamster in 1.8, but this is followed by an apparently pro commerce observation in 1.10: "Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is."

Tom

DWill wrote:

Tom, is there a better way to do it than on your own?

Will, I didn't do so good on my own. I read Walden in high school, in college, and again after college, and -- for example -- I did not catch a single pun, not even the obvious Coenobites pun. About four years ago I was looking for applications of Chinese metaphysics in American Transcendentalism, and lo and behold (Baptists talk like that ) the eighteen chapters of Walden parallel the first eighteen hexagrams of King Wen's sequence. There are also textual allusions, but I have yet to prove that Thoreau held a copy of the I Ching in his hands. I'm working on it. Anyway, my apparent discovery renewed my interest in Walden, and I began to see the depth I had originally missed, thanks in part to the Yahoo Waldenlist group.

Tom

I was looking for applications of Chinese metaphysics in American Transcendentalism, and lo and behold (Baptists talk like that ) the eighteen chapters of Walden parallel the first eighteen hexagrams of King Wen's sequence

Ho boy! Here I am looking at a goofy Yankee and you are going to examine all three trillion cells. This is going to be a ride.

Well Thomas, I've been thinking and it occurs to me Walden may be your new bible and Henry David a guru. In respect of that possibility I will no longer poke fun at your citations and make every effort to learn from your observation. Like a wise man once told me "Your citations are valuable. You have explored avenues of life that I have never been down, and it is a help to me to know what you have found worthwhile and lacking."

That being said I think it will be useful for you to get my "take" on HDT and Walden. I see an ordinary 30 year old New England shiftless loafer living off of his (mother and sisters or Aunt and cousins? Which is it Thomas?) Can you just imagine the dinner table talk for 7 years? "Did you find work today Henry David? Well did you even look? You know you're not going to put you feet under my table forever without contributing something. I work my fingers to the bone trying to keep body and soul together and make ends meet ....Yatata yatata yatata." Hell it's no wonder he went to Walden to get some peace and quiet. He loved the peace (give us the citation Thomas hereinafter "qcv." It's no mystery to me why he liked solitude. (qcv Thomas).

I've camped out in the pines of Canada on their clear lakes. I've spent the night under the stars on a Kansas prairie and in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. It is spectacularly beautiful. I was alone and I thought. I was alone and I looked and saw. I saw a beautiful maidenhair fern unfurling its leaves. I saw beautiful delicate wild flows sprouting in craggy folds being visited by colorful butterflies. Then I saw an ant carrying some critter home for dinner. I watched a blue jay snatch a worm and a hawk grab a turtle dove out of the sky leaving a cloud of feathers. Then I saw a snake eat a mouse. Then I thought.

How can such incredible violence exist within such incredible beauty? And that is what HDT did. He found solitude. He looked and saw beauty. And he thought. In his thinking the awareness of his tranquility and the pleasant tactile personal experience delineated where he was from the coarseness of his neighbors in Concord living a life of commerce and strife (to which he already had a natural aversion). (qcv Thomas)

Then he wrote. He wrote about what he saw, what he thought and what he came to believe about the meaning of it all.

Well Thaaaaaaat's all folks

Hi DWill! Here is the exact quote from page 66 of my text. (Thomas qcv)

But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.