Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

32. Spider

recto runningfoot 125 3 2 . S p i d e r Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me. (220) Walden’s “Conclusion” returns to the tone of exhortation with which Thoreau had begun his book seventeen chapters earlier. But while the opening salvos of “Economy” and “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” ring with the morning bravado of the cockcrow (“I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer” [60]), Walden’s final chapter offers a quieter benediction and a different creature for self-comparison. The spider, associated in popular idiom with patience and care, had implicitly appeared in Thoreau’s second chapter, where his words “wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly ” (58) offered the image of a spider spinning its web from a center constituted only by itself. Like a spider, which sets up shop on others’ space, Thoreau had cleared, planted, and built on Emerson’s land, but the world he had made he called his own. Where does this spider lead? First, to The Gay Science, where Nietzsche proposed “eternal recurrence” as the criterion for judging how one chooses to live: S 126 verso runningfoot The greatest weight. What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. . . .” The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? As early as 1842, Thoreau had formulated his own version of this standard, if only to himself: “I wish to communicate those parts of my life which I would gladly live again myself” (J, 26 March 1842). In Walden, that test has become a strenuous imperative: “Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour” (65). Two years after Walden’s publication, however, Thoreau would greet this challenge with sheer exuberance: “I am grateful for what I am and have,” he wrote to Harrison Blake. “My thanksgiving is perpetual. . . . I am ready to try this for the next 1000 years, & exhaust it. How sweet to think of!” In the light thrown back on it by The Gay Science, Walden now appears as an anticipation of this doctrine, a book Thoreau began as a Platonist and ended as a Nietzschean. Like Nietzsche, Thoreau rejected the opposition of “real” and “apparent” worlds (“Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth” [134]), replacing that dialectic, so basic to Western philosophy, with a celebration of this life: In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment. (69) Walden’s spider leads to Charlotte’s Web, whose eponymous hero confirms Thoreau’s faith that writing can literally save a life (Charlotte 126 s recto runningfoot 127 rescues the pig Wilbur simply by writing some pig and terrific in her web, thereby convincing Wilbur’s owner that he has “special properties ” that must be preserved and that he must not just be used for bacon). As the dying Charlotte, exhausted by her labors, says farewell to Wilbur, she uses exactly Walden’s language of faith in the world and the seasons’ perpetual renewal: Nothing can harm...