Reflections on a Child's Water Wheel

REFLECTIONS ON A CHILD'S WATER WHEEL / Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau's remark in Waiden that he had for a long time been a "reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation," was a fairly grim private joke. Since leaving college in 1837, he had kept a journal that would eventually swell to forty-seven manuscript volumes and over two million words by the time of his death in 1862. Writing steadily several mornings a week at his desk on the third floor of the family home in Concord, sometimes adding several volumes a year to those already on the homemade shelves next to him, Thoreau could have had no hopes of its ever attaining a very wide circulation unless it was to be posthumously. As his reputation grew during the decades that followed his death, the importance of the Journal to his imaginative life and to his aims as a writer gradually came to be recognized, and it began to find its way slowly into print. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ellery Channing inserted brief extracts into their biographical portraits. During the 1880s, Thoreau's friend and literary executor, H. G. O. Blake, compiled a series of seasonally organized volumes, such as Early Spring in Massachusetts, from the original manuscripts in his possession. Finally, a fourteen-volume, supposedly complete edition prepared by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen appeared as part of the Waiden Edition of Thoreau's writings published by Houghton Mifflin in 1906. But much of the Journal was still unavailable or unknown to Torrey and Allen, and they choose not to print other portions. They were men of their times in regarding Thoreau more as a kind of spiritual father of American natural history writing than as the major literary figure and cultural critic we now judge him to be. Currently, a comprehensive new scholarly edition of Thoreau's Writings, published by Princeton University Press, is in progress under the direction of Elizabeth Hall Witherell at the University of CaliforniaSanta Barbara. The Journal is being re-edited from the original manuscripts for this edition, which will print for the first time all the extant material as Thoreau originally wrote it. To date the first two volumes, covering the period from 1837 to 1848 have appeared. The following extracts, heretofore unpublished, are reproduced from the forthcoming Journal 3: 1848-1851, edited by Mark Patterson, William Rossi, and Robert Sattelmeyer. The manuscript in which this brief narrative appears is a fragmentary notebook of considerable biographical interest from 1848-1849, encompassing a period of profound change in Thoreau's life. In it he expresses his disappointment at the commercial failure of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), and more disappointment and even anguish over his recent estrangement from his friend and early mentor, Emerson. At the same time, though, the volume also records Thoreau's discovery, not unlike the one made by Faulkner some seventy-five years later, that his own little postage stamp of native soil around Concord offered The Missouri Review · 97 inexhaustable riches for a writer. In this notebook he first began recording details of the walks that were becoming the focus of his daily life, material that he would eventually transform in the essay "Walking" into a lyrical manifesto for the preservation of wilderness and what might be called the purposive non-purposiveness of the saunterer's calling. The brief extract which foUows describes his discovery on one of these walks in March, 1849, of a child's toy water wheel in a smaU brook outside town. He never used this vignette in any of his published writings, but we may observe the writer self-consciously at work here, recasting his material in the act of encountering it, beginning to shape a narrative, and searching for the correspondences and the larger implications that would repay his newfound resolve to travel a great deal in Concord and faithfuUy cover his beat as a reporter to the Journal. —Robert Sattelmeyer ISOMETIMES DISCOVERED a miniature water wheel—a saw or grist mill—where the whole volume of water in some tiny rill was conducted through a junk bottle, in at...