To fish/a fish: reading confusion in Walden

I find this a tricky passage, due at least in part to the shifting meanings of words and sentences.  Thoreau offers definitions for several words: “The intellect is a cleaver,” “My head is hands and feet,” but also (as Jessica notes in her post below) seems to have studded the paragraph with words that have double meanings or unclear referents: fish, the animal and the action; one, perhaps one of the stars, but also a number; mine, both burrowing in the earth and a word describing possession.  Syntactically, each word can be aligned to a single meaning – Thoreau says “I will begin to mine,” not “I will begin mine” – but I wonder if the alternate meanings of each word also float in the passage, and in the reader’s mind when reading it.

With “one,” for instance, I found myself re-reading the passage several times to determine what was meant.  The bottom of the sky is pebbly with stars; Thoreau cannot count one; he does not know the first letter of the alphabet.  Initially, I took the “one” to refer back not to a single star, but rather to his inability to count – “I cannot count one” (and two, and three, etc.)  Perhaps this is just poor reading on my part, but also, perhaps Thoreau is manipulating the reader into such poor reading.  He builds on “I cannot count one” with “I know not the first letter of the alphabet.”  One (myself, and any reader, I think) looks for meaningful connections between sentences – and so I took “one” to be not one of the stars, but knowledge of counting in general (which links nicely to knowledge of the alphabet.)  But this doesn’t solve the problem of connecting “I cannot count one” to the previous clause, “whose bottom [the sky’s] is pebbly with stars.”  “Count one” must mean both things simultaneously: counting one of the stars and (lacking) the ability to count.  As such, it stitches together two quite different ideas, stars and the alphabet, in the sentences prior to and following it.

Along the lines of two quite different ideas, it is also interesting that the paragraph contains so many references to separation: water leaves, eternity remains; the intellect is a cleaver (as Brooke shows, a weirdly violent word choice) which discerns and rifts; Thoreau sees himself mining to tap into and remove “the richest vein.”  Making a single word mean two things at the same time could perhaps be seen as part of Thoreau’s project of extending or blurring ideas: a book/a house; nature/human, etc.  But he also wants us to be attentive to the potentially positive effects of separation – it is in separating himself from wider society that he learns to live deliberately.  Perhaps the pedagogic function of this paragraph is to teach us to be more attentive to finding and making meaning, both mining and making “mine” what we find.