Walden passage

I mainly focused on the first half of the passage. Messy post ahead…

I’m trying to tease out the distinction between Walden Pond and the stream of Time in this passage. Thoreau tells us in later chapters that the bottom of Walden Pond is impossible to see and perhaps know (though he is able to measure it by dropping a line and weight, a technique called “sounding”). Like in this passage, however, he discusses being able to see the sky in the pond, though not in the same way as with the stream. Here, in Time’s stream, Thoreau sees the sky—not through the reflection provided by the water’s surface (as with Walden)—but via the “sandy bottom” which is “pebbly with stars”—the remainder that is eternity. (I like the association of the phrase “eternity remains” and mathematical remainders as Thoreau writes a couple of sentences later, “I cannot count one.”)

In this passage, I think it’s interesting that time and eternity compose the same habitat (if we want to call it that), but time and eternity aren’t the same component of that habitat. In trying to understand the relationship, I’ve been thinking about the idea of the movement of constellations (though I’m not sure how much about the life of stars was known at this point in the 19^th-century). I was thinking about how the “fish in the sky” could be referring to both the visual of literal fish swimming above the pebbly bottom of the stream (eternity), but also the constellation of Pisces, also made up of pebbles (stars).

Here are some analogies that I’m thinking about:

Earth is to the constellations as

the bottom of the stream is to the stream itself (the water) as

eternity is to time.

This analogy "set" is interesting to me because it draws a parallel between earth and the bottom of the stream (which makes sense in their shared groundedness) but also between earth and eternity (which aren’t necessarily the same—earth changes, but does eternity?)

Thoreau also appears to draw a parallel between constellations and the stream (this relationship makes another complicated analogy—constellations are forever moving—like a stream—but they also return to the same place, and I’m not sure that we could argue that the water in a stream does). I also like the idea that we cannot describe the difference between 1) the distance between ourselves and Star A and 2) the distance between ourselves and Star B with the naked eye—in this way, time, history (the age of stars), and distance are all collapsed, similar to the way the intellect and sensory organs are in the second half of the passage.

Finally, I feel like there is an association between the words “I,” “mine,” and “stars.”  “I begin to mine” seems like a clever play between the first person singular nominative and first person singular possessive—interesting that “me” drops out here—while carrying the other meaning of “mine”—extraction, or divining—as one extracts minerals, like starry jewels.

By divining—by “mine”-ing—Thoreau knows he knows nothing, but this is not necessarily how he "knows" everything (eternity), as described at the beginning of the passage. He *sees* eternity at the bottom of the pond—but does he mine (divine) it? Is seeing the same thing as knowing? This might relate back to the idea about Star A and Star B that I was thinking about earlier.

(Also could perhaps create a new type of relationship between the bottom of Walden and the bottom of the stream of Time--

"knowing" versus "seeing" /
 actual observation and metaphor (time as stream) (?)

(though I don't think these parallels are necessarily equivalent)).