The final paragraph of the
second chapter of Walden, “Where I
Lived, and What I Lived For,” can be read as the lyrical climax of a prose
passage that alternates between concrete observation and philosophical
speculation. The lyricism of this paragraph
is characterized by four elements: The
comparison of time to a stream (or dynamically flowing body of water); the
repetition of “drink” in sentences 2-3; the ambiguity of referents for the
final words in the short sentences: “I cannot count one,” and “I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it”; and the dissolution of
boundaries between water and air (i.e.
sky), between discrete body parts (head/hands and feet), between animal/human
features (head/”snout and fore paws”), and between animal/human behaviors
(burrow/mine).
The fourth element, or the dissolution
of boundaries, is prefigured in the chapter’s earlier paragraphs. An example of this phenomenon is identifiable
in the indoor/outdoor opposition previously observed in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s
Rural Hours. In Walden,
this opposition is experienced by the writer as arbitrary within the porous
cabin in which he declares:
“I did not need to go out doors to take the air, for the
atmosphere within hadlost none of its freshness. It was not so much within doors as behind a door
where I sat, even in the rainiest weather” (56).
It is also within this
arbitrarily airy space that he experiences his extreme proximity to birds. This experience of proximity to “those wilder
and more thrilling songsters of the forest” (56); the perceptual interchangeability
between indoors/outdoors; the nebulous threshold between air and water when the
pond’s surface evaporates in spectral mists—all culminate in the surreal image
of “fish in the sky” (64) in the chapter’s final paragraph. Fish in water morph into birds in sky as
they sprout avian wings in a consciousness that attempts to simplify human life
through the dissolution of preestablished boundaries circumscribing discrete
phenomena. This fish-into-bird, bird-into-fish
metamorphosis recalls M. C. Escher’s Sky
and Water I (1938) or Predestination
(1951).
The Escher reference is great, though the multiple birds do make this a kind of collective experience that Thoreau does not seem to be talking about. Or does he? Are we implied in the process that he allows us to experience? I love what you see about the ambiguous references in the text—they support what Mary has observed about the experience of reading the passage. I agree with you regarding the birds, but I would also note that birds aren’t mentioned in the passage; by the time we reach the end of this chapter, we are so attuned to him that we transition effortlessly from fish to birds. If the stars are the bottom of the sky, what is the top?
ReplyDelete