Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

6. Colors

recto runningfoot 31 6 . C o l o r s “Colours spur us to philosophize,” Wittgenstein once observed, but what are to make of Thoreau’s prodigality with them? In “The Ponds,” he begins a description of Walden by casually remarking that “All our Concord waters have two colors at least, one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand” (121). He doesn’t leave the matter there. The ensuing paragraph assembles twenty-nine separate mentions of color to suggest how the neighboring ponds and rivers appear under different conditions and from different perspectives: blue, dark slate-color, green, as green as grass, the color of the sky, a yellowish tint, light green, uniform dark green, vivid green, verdure, blue mixed with yellow, the color of its iris, a darker blue than the sky itself, a matchless and indescribable blue, more cerulean than the sky itself, original dark green, muddy, vitreous greenish blue, colorless . . . as . . . air, green tint, black or very dark brown, a yellowish tinge, alabaster whiteness. In one sense, Thoreau’s seems to have anticipated Wittgenstein’s point that color words impose our sense on the world; they do not simply designate preexisting qualities. Nevertheless, the passage is disconcerting because Thoreau typically offers Walden as the symbol of an ideal permanence, a remainder even of a prelapsarian world: Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied by mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall. (123) C 32 verso runningfoot Recalling childhood visits prompts another celebration of the pond’s constancy: Of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. . . . Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. (132) But if the pond can assume entirely different colorings, then Thoreau ’s central image of stability has itself become profoundly unstable ; and if Walden is unstable, what in Thoreau’s book is not? This question gets at one of Walden’s central difficulties: the book seems unwilling to settle for either straightforward factual recording or aggressive transcendentalist symbol making. And even when Thoreau does insist on making a natural phenomenon stand for something , he can’t decide what that something should be. On the one hand, the pond’s flickering, variable coloring is an image of nature in constant flux. On the other, the same pond’s resistance to the changes brought by men suggests the truth Thoreau found in Virgil’s descriptions of ripening vines and fruit trees: “It was the same world.” Wittgenstein used colors to demonstrate that a word can have meaning even in the absence of a readily available verbal definition. If, for example, someone asks, “What does red mean?” we will usually point to a series of red objects, not offer a dictionary’s explanation. As Severin Schroeder puts it, “Colour-words . . . are not explained by paraphrase, but by ostension.” And so, too, are the things that Thoreau values—the pond, the woods, the seasonal changes, his own exalted moods. Like the color words we know perfectly well how to use, these things resist verbal definition. “This is red,” we might say, pointing to an apple or a rose or a Vermont barn. “This was my life at Walden Pond, and how I lived there,” Thoreau tells us, gesturing toward both the world that he found and the one that he made. (with Brenda Maxey-Billings) 32 c ...