Walden by Haiku

Introduction: To Be Content with Less

Introduction To Be Content with Less The Poet stands by a pond, looking, listening. He lingers long and long, sees the seasons change, thinks of our lives in nature, finds contact, connection . He hears the sound of water and visualizes the jump of a frog, sees the surface of the pond dimple and imagines the busy lives of fish. Swallows skim the surface, a loon cackles. The pond freezes over, melts, ice drifts to the shore, conifers lean over the pond. The Poet watches, he listens. And he wonders about the depth of the pond, wonders what it all means. Are these phenomena of life representative of some deeper spiritual truth? Or are they meaningful in and of themselves, making and displaying their own deeper meaning? He notes the ongoing changes of the natural world, sees that they all add up to constancy, finds the eternal in the ephemeral. Returning to his hut, he writes it all down, what he saw and what he thinks, and the ephemeral stuff of language, too, is somehow rendered into something eternal. For years and years, for generation upon generation , people have read what the Poet saw and heard at the old pond; they see and hear it all anew, and many a reader comes away forever changed, marking a new day, a new life, from the reading of a book. The Poet, of course, is Henry Thoreau, American transcendentalist writer (1817–1862), author of Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854), the classic work of American nature writing, who remains our culture’s most thoughtful and influential observer of nature. The Poet, of course, is Matsuo Bashō, Japanese writer of haiku, haibun , and renga (1644–1694), author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1694), the classic work of Japanese nature writing, who revolutionized the art of haiku, shaping it so as to accommodate plain and colloquial language with seriousness of purpose. In my description of “the Poet” above, the pond is two ponds— Thoreau’s Walden and Bashō’s “old pond,” subject of his most famous haiku, where he links the leap of a frog with “the sound of water.” My [xiv] ambiguous description of “the Poet” and his pond, lifting images, language , and themes from both Bashō and Thoreau, is meant to suggest that Bashō and Thoreau found something similar in their respective ponds, each managing to look past his own reflection to something deeper. Bashō preceded Thoreau by a century and a half, but we have no indication that Thoreau had any exposure to either Bashō’s writing or the art of haiku. We do know that Thoreau was intensely interested in Eastern thought, but no haiku texts were available in nineteenthcentury America, and so, not surprisingly, Thoreau never recorded in his voluminous journals any mention of Bashō or of haiku. But given the commonality of their ponds and their relations with the natural world, I am led to wonder: What if Thoreau had known of haiku? His view of the natural world, full of wonder, so hopeful of oneness, echoes the view so often expressed in the haiku tradition, as initiated by Bashō—so if we transpose Thoreau’s language and observations of the natural world to the medium of haiku, would the content be compatible with the new form? What follows is a venture into that world of “what if,” a literary thought experiment. It will not take you long to figure out what I’m up to here— reducing Walden, chapter by chapter, to a series of haiku. I come to this project as an ecocritic who has long had an interest in the prose tradition of American nature writing—and who in recent years has become fascinated by the art of haiku. And yes, I see links between the two. It seems to me that the high points in nature writing are typically marked by those passages that contain the most haiku-like prose. Those high points are in essence “haiku moments,” when the writer’s awareness of self dissolves into egolessness, a dropping away of the boundaries between self and world such that what we get on the page is an attempt to place us in the world itself, as if the writer and her language were not even there intervening or mediating between us and the piece of the world under consideration. So partly this is an experiment to see if that trait of nature writing can be traced back—as so many...