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40. Zanzibar
- Indiana University Press
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156 verso runningfoot 4 0 . Z a n z i b a r It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even until you can do better, and you may perhaps find some “Symmes’ Hole” by which to get at the inside at last. . . . Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. (216) Thoreau’s concept of worth is simultaneously intriguing and inconsistent. Although he rejects meaningless tasks like counting the cats in Zanzibar, he spent his own time carefully cataloguing every apple in Massachusetts, detailing Walden’s rich organic life, and measuring the pond’s exact depth. And, of course, he also knew about Zanzibar, which clearly stands for an exotic world rejected by Thoreau, but one that tempted him—note the contradiction here: he can only dismiss “Zanzibar” because he had been reading about it (in Charles Pickering’s 1851 The Races of Man). Thoreau regularly returned to travel books, finally limiting himself to one a week, a constraint suggesting an addiction (“I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived” [71]). This contradiction provokes curiosity about Thoreau’s values. He partially reconciles his own inconsistency by advising, in preacher’s diction, “yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some ‘Symmes’ Hole’ by which to get at the inside at last.” What is the lesson here? That, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “description is Z recto runningfoot 157 revelation”? That even relatively mundane occupations, if purposefully and honestly pursued, can lead to revelation? But don’t these conclusions simply reintroduce the question of worth? Doesn’t Walden have as one of its central purposes the goal of distinguishing among everyday tasks, classifying some as possible first steps towards self-discovery and others as hopeless wastes of time? The passage’s context—the repudiation of the exotic in favor of the everyday (“Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards who run away and enlist”) accompanied by the insistence that the true explorer sails inward—recognizes that the tools necessary for selfknowledge (ambition, dedication, discipline) can develop in such routine work as measuring and recording the facts of nature, including the number of cats in Zanzibar. Hence the consoling words: “Yet do this even till you can do better.” This advice indicates that Thoreau regarded Walden as a training manual, designed to demonstrate how a reconceived everyday life might serve our most elevated desires. Thus, “do this even till you can do better” preaches not to the sinner but to the beginner: practice these scales, Thoreau seems to say, and you will be able to play celestial music. I learned this, at least, by my experiment, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. (217) (with Hanif Ali) zanzibar 157 [18.118.120.204] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 23:08 GMT) 158 verso runningfoot ...