Which Way is Up? (Emancipated Space in "Walden")

My thoughts on this passage have taken two directions, but I suspect they’re related. The first deals with the structure of the passage as reflective of an alternative (emancipated) worldview proposed in Walden. The second hypothesizes an anti-eschatological (and perhaps even anti-religious?) bent based on what precedes the passage (and which forms part of this emancipated worldview).

I've been wrestling with the slippage others have noticed in this passage, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is certainly deliberate. I think Thoreau’s evasiveness here (detailed comprehensively by Mary) reflects a deliberate unwillingness to shackle his prose to a definitive meaning. I see this unwillingness as part of a more general resistance to confinement in terms of physical space – even (especially?) indoors – in Walden. Thoreau professes to avoid enclosed property, describing it in terms of “imprisonment,” and taking pains to exempt his own house from that category: "It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat" (56, emphasis mine). It is also important to him, here, that he "did not feel crowded," even though the view from his door was "somewhat contracted" (57). Horizons seem acceptable – as long as they sit at an appropriate distance. The idea is to obtain "pasture enough for [his] imagination" (57). This all reveals an important assumption about the reciprocity between physical and mental space in Walden – one that Thoreau toys with in this disorienting passage.

Thoreau’s interest in the particular shape of one’s surroundings brings to mind an especially resonant passage from Rural Hours:

[I]t is particularly pleasant to wander about at will over so broad a field, confined to no track, and without an obstacle to arrest one’s progress, all which gives a freedom to these walks upon the lake, beyond what we are accustomed to in terra firma, where roads, and fences, and bridges must be consulted at every turn. (7)

Cooper seems to share Thoreau’s consciousness that modes of enclosure alter the texture of one’s lived experience (and therefore one’s inner landscape). What Thoreau illustrates in this complicated passage is that the same holds true of language. It, too, can be confining, and altering its shape here is comparable to deconstructing Cooper’s roads or fences or bridges; Thoreau emancipates meaning, or extends the mental horizon, to carve out a space large enough for contemplation.

Second: the passage’s stream/sky disorientation (located by Hiromi in the idea of the fish-bird) reproduces that “which way is up?” feeling we’ve all experienced in water. I think this is precisely the confusion Thoreau wants to evoke, hoping that we emerge from this passage with an altered perspective – literally – a new sense of which way is “up.” 

To contextualize this a little: the previous pages ponder our tendency to abstract ourselves from the here and now, “imagin[ing] rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system” (57). He pairs this observation with the idea that we have: “somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify god and enjoy him forever”” (59). Thoreau seems, instead, to propose a heavily presentist mode of existence, eschewing all distractions (into which category he seems to relegate things like...the afterlife!) from what is “real” (64). What this progression suggests (and what culminates in the final passage of this section) is that if we reorganize physical and mental space in a particular way, we can find space enough for meaningful contemplation right here, without sending our thoughts to some distant (or unknown/hypothesized/fantastical) location (or by projecting them onto an infinite being) where they have room to expand. If one only has the right kind of space here (which, as we see in the passage, is a state that might be partially obtained through language), one might discover the vastness of the celestial in a stream. This is how one lives here, now – or, as Thoreau terms it, “live[s] deliberately” (59). This worldview implies a bold shift in the locus of the “real” (64), which Thoreau locates not in God (or in heaven, or hell…) but on earth, or where we live now.