live in the local, dream in the global

I confess, this is the first time I’ve ever read Walden, and having always understood it to be the original anthem to navel-gazing and the immediate appreciation of nature, I’ve been surprised at how much of the world outside the woods he actually lets in. Sure, he revels in the sensory details of his the details of his immediate space, the sounds of cows and whippoorwills and bullfrogs and screech owls, but the world outside of his little house and clearing and woods is, imaginatively, never that far away. While he listens to the freight train going by, for instance, in “Sounds,” he feels “more like a citizen of the world” for being able to imagine its possibilities, where it’s going, or been, what it’s carrying, what parts of the world it’s connecting; products from Long Wharf, Manilla, or Spain may be on those cars. In “Reading” he adores the ancient and distant cultures which produced his favorite Greek and Roman classics, texts which have nothing to do with his local environment, but he finds it as much an insult to human experience that most people don’t regularly read The Iliad in the original Greek, as it is that most people are caught up in “affairs” and have never found the “hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality” (70). In both cases, people are too caught up with light, shallow, trivial things – “Little Reading” on the one hand, institutions and delusions on the other – to understand what really matters, what is really important and meaningful.

While it isn’t exactly issues of global ecology that occupy Thoreau in his house in the woods, it is the way that the world is perceived imaginatively. He finds that in moving to the woods, “both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me” (63); he has, imaginatively, moved into one of his heroic epics. Things here, without the distractions of those pesky “affairs,” are more significant, even grandiose; a mosquito sings the wrath of Achilles, bathing in the pond every day is a religious ritual, and waking up in the morning is waking up (63-4) one’s soul, to the “real” experience of human life. The evident smallness of local things take on a consequence to put them on the same imaginative plane as heroic epic, as eternal, transcendent things. Imagination is tied up in perception, too; by casting off all but the essentials, Thoreau imagines he can find that rock-bottom of reality that he seeks.

At any rate, I’m not sure those two paragraphs are actually talking about the same thing, but I'm sure I'll figure out a connection eventually.