Fishing in the Sky: An Explication of Thoreau’s ‘Time is but the stream…’

Travis Shaw

L632

“Fishing in the Sky:  An Explication of Thoreau’s ‘Time is but the stream…’”

In the passage “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in…” (93), Thoreau shows his flair for shifting between modulations of time and space, quite unexpectedly, and between polar perspectives of the minimal and maximal, the microcosmic and macrocosmic, the mundane and the celestial, and the transient and the timeless.  The key metaphors Thoreau employs draw on the height of the “stars,” the shallow depths of the “sandy bottom,” and the movement of the stream’s “current.”  The image begins with Thoreau leisurely fishing in the shallow stream of “Time,” watching the “thin current” of water slide “away” over the “sandy bottom” of the bedrock.  It is an ancient trope:  the river is a symbol of time’s transience and the material world’s impermanence.  But Thoreau makes a surprising move, drawing a comparison between the sand and stars, bringing together the mundane and the celestial, so that only “eternity remains.”  In short, he is now in transcendental mode:  “I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars” (93).  What has he just said?  To Thoreau’s transcendent imagination, the difference between the stars in the sky and the sands at the bottom of the stream are eternally indistinguishable.  They are not the same—Thoreau wants to move beyond the transience of the pebbles and experience the “deeper” transcendence of the “stars”—but for Thoreau, they are are vitally connected.  The ordinary, everyday enterprise of fishing opens with way for the spiritual enterprise of fishing “in the sky.”

The next section of the paragraph extends this play on perspectives, but here Thoreau shifts his interest from the metaphysics of time to the epistemologies of space.  By clearing away the systems of knowledge he has learned in society—he says he “cannot count to one” and does not know the “first letter of the alphabet” (93)—by becoming as “wise” as an infant, Thoreau makes a Cartesian move, skeptically ridding himself of inherited knowledge (as if that were possible) in order to build a new system of knowledge upon a reliable foundation.  He has already begun this move this in the previous paragraph when he calls on the reader to “spend one day as deliberately as Nature” and move “downward” with him through all of the “mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance” that serve as an opaque surface to the “hard bottom” of “reality” (92).  Like Emerson, reality for Thoreau is not to be found in surface of appearances but in the spiritual realm beyond or beneath materiality.  Thus, society, the site both of materiality and transience, becomes for Thoreau (and Emerson before him) the “alluvion” through which he must “work and wedge” his way to a “point d’appui” (92), the base or support upon which he will build his knowledge.  More literally, this “point d’appui” can be regarded as an analogy to the material foundation upon which he builds his cabin.

The next key point in the passage regards the “intellect,” which is the tool (“a cleaver” (93)) that Thoreau will use to penetrate the temporal and spatial appearances of society and reach the “secret” of the spiritual realm.  In other words, Thoreau will use his “head”—he will read, write and think; he will lead the life of the philosopher-poet in the woods—and he does not want to labor with his “hands” any more than he is “necessary” (93).  To think:  that is mostly what the cryptic phrase “my head is hands and feet” means.”  Thoreau’s “best faculties” are “concentrated” in his rational mind (93).  But also, he is making a more universal comparison between the human’s animal nature, likening the human sensorium to that of a mole-like species whose “head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws” (93).  With his intellect and imagination, Thoreau will burrow his way toward eternal reality, which he senses is nearby in the woods. 

The last key point is the “divining-rod,” the second tool mentioned explicitly in the passage.  In the context of fishing, the “divining rod” is a reference to the fishing rod Thoreau casts into the stream of Time.  That it is a “divining-rod,” though, implies that this is a rare fishing expedition.  Taken literally, the dowser’s rod is used to locate the presence of underground water or minerals, and thus, the fish Thoreau would like to catch represent nature, or the reality of the natural world.  But the “divining-rod” also carries the sense of making nature divine, and in this use of the word, the metaphor signifies the poet-philosopher’s pencil, which is the extension of the intellect and imagination.  As we see in the next chapters, the celestial “thin rising vapors” ascending toward the sky continues the motifs in this passage.  The “stars” represent the transcendent and timeless poetic language Thoreau aspires to write, while the transient vapors signify the common speech of ordinary life.