Thoreau Beside Himself

In class we discussed a tension in Walden between Thoreau’s desire for knowing the local and for defamiliarizing himself, and others, from it. One thread of this tension is to be found in Thoreau’s vexed attitudes towards other people (both specifically and in the abstract). His famous call for authorial “sincerety” to be an expression “from a distant land,” is part of one trend in Thoreau’s thought tending towards reverence for individual alterity (a reverence in direct opposition to his swift condemnation of so many of his peers). The figurative distance between two individuals, the “sort of space” that prevents any “exertion of the legs” from “bring[ing] two minds together” (93) seems to support Thoreau’s antipathy towards the technological innovations that claim to, in what Leo Marx describes as the greatest “stock phrase in the entire lexicon of progress : “annihilate space and time” (Marx 194). Perhaps the ambiguity Marx sees in Thoreau’s alternating enthusiasm for, and hatred of, technology can be explained by the fact that Thoreau’s thinking is bound to what he believes to be a more ancient form of the annihilation of space and time—a meditative, creative, literary access to the Real, the eternal foundation below the time he “goes fishing in.” This abstract removal from the events of perception is inhibited by the wedding of the clock and consciousness, and thus the train (the invention—besides the clock--most responsible for the standardization of time) poses a threat to the possibility that individuals can have their “own” locality. Thus, it seems to me, that the intense defense of localism in Walden is really a defense of a space that can promote a plurality of individually perceived spaces (“distant lands”). Maybe another way of expressing this is to say that Thoreau’s “ecological” tendencies—of exploring the interrelatedness of things tending towards unity—can also be seen as strategically splintering them.
The supposed national and international unity provided by technology is subsequently perceived as a false unity. Compare, for example Thoreau’s comments on the telegraph, summarized by a localism opposed to the “need for speed” (e.g., “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate”) with William Cullen Bryant’s celebration of the Atlantic Cable:
"to those vast depths where repose the mystic wire on beds of coral among forests of tangle, or on the bottom of the dim blue gulfs strewn with the bones of whales and sharks, skeletons of drowned men, and ribs and masts of foundered barks, laden with wedges of gold never to be coined, and pipes of the choicest vintages of earth never to be tasted. Through these watery solitudes, amon the fountains of the great deep, the abode of perpetual silence, never visited by living human presence and beyond the sight of human eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in darkeness, in calm and in tempest, currents of human thought borne by the electric pulse which obeys the bidding of man. That slender wire thrills with the hopes and fears of nations; it vibrates to every emotion that can be awakened by any event affecting the welfare of the human race"


I quote Bryant at such length (mostly because it’s a cool passage I came across yesterday) but also because it seems to provide an interesting parallel to Thoreau’s own attempts to plumb the depths of Walden. I think the sober empiricism that Buell describes in Thoreau’s plumbing of its actual depths strengthens the mysticism he applies to its metaphoric depths (at once dispelling mysticism to confront, as Marx describes it, Concord’s dwelling solely in the realm of "the Understanding"), while Bryant’s mystification of the wire (the “rhetoric of the Technological Sublime") results in a far less critical evaluation of the interpersonal and environmental impacts of science and technology.
Perhaps more interesting than all of this is Thoreau’s relationship to the more “primitive” technology of writing. For in the “Reading” chapter Thoreau has no problem mystifying this technology: “A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art…It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;--not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech” (73). I sense there may be some interesting parallels between Thoreau’s attitudes towards this “choicest” of technologies and his reflections on the “doubleness” that makes him strange to his neighbors:
“Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, but the workman whose work we are….With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense [my emphasis]. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences…[I] am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes” (94).
A lot could be done with this cryptic passage, but I am interested in the way in which the reflection on “awakening”, which entails a collapse in time and place, is juxtaposed with this disembodied “aloofness” which is part the Nature “next” to us and (like Whitman’s “other that I am”) part the Nature that we are, “beside ourselves”. I find this interesting in large part because of a coincidence: I have been reading a book by Brian Rotman about the relationship between communications technology and embodiment: “Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being.” Part of Rotman’s argument is that the alphabet is a technology that originally enabled the type of disembodied subjectivity that Thoreau worships in “Reading.” Only in Rotman’s case this collapse enabled belief in disembodied agencies—God, Nature, the virtual I—beings beside our physical, gesturing, breathing selves. While with certain privileged texts Thoreau sees the moment of writing and reading as collapsed, atemporal, breathily present—he seems to be aware of the placelessness of the virtual, technological “I” of Walden; that is, of the “Walden” he is creating beside Walden. As his aim was to distribute this virtual Walden years in advance of its writing, it seems no surprise that he is critical of the doubleness that makes him a poor neighbor—he is, I think, in some sense demonstrating an awareness that the distance between him and Walden, and between us and Walden is not collapsible. His own skepticism towards the technologies reducing the “distance” between places, perhaps, makes him skeptical of the technology that enables him to construct his own "distant land".