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From Walden Out
- University of Iowa Press
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From Walden Out "We wished to associate with the Ocean until it lost the pondlike look it wears to a countryman." This remark in the penultimate chapter of Cape Cod reiterates the opening paragraph of the book and shows how far the excursion has advanced. The essential act involves sight, the look of things, or, if you will, a change in views, which of course involves a changed opinion of what is viewed. Cape Cod is a travel book in which travel is, variously, discovery , adventure, meditative walking, and seeing, the last of most importance to those nineteenth-century travelers in search of the picturesque, of scenery, of views. Thoreau's initial sentence seems to offer that visual inducement: "Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean, etc." What follows suggests that the view will be worth the trouble, especially to inlanders like himself; it even suggests, in the allusion to Moby-Dick ("the ocean ... covers more than two-thirds of the globe"), a strange new world, "another world," as fabulous as heaven. However, in the play on "fresh" and "salted" it apprises us of lost innocence, and Thoreau, in providing his credentials, notes that he was accustomed to make excursions to the ponds but "latterly [pun1I have extended my excursions to the seashore." Walden Pond is familiar, and what recommends Walden is the familiarization by which it becomes place and answers to the most intimate necessities of self. But the sea is not familiar-is unaccustomed, with13 out custom. And seashore is exact, a boundary of opposites, the boundary of his experience, the farthest extent of his excursions in behalf of views. At the beginning , then, Thoreau reminds us to view Cape Cod in the perspective of Walden. And vice-versa. Note the change in statement. He now capitalizes "Ocean" and speaks of associating with it. He will get a better view of it by being with it, not merely by seeing it, and even so it will not become familiar. Ocean, by this time, has become Okeanos, "Deep-running Ocean" in the citation from Homer, a reminder that, then and now, '''the Ocean is the origin of all things."' Immemorial , unchanging, primordial, it is that which, as Heraclitus says, all things are (in Charles Olson's words, "Okeanos the one which all things are and by which nothing / is anything but itself, measured so"). "When once we began to look," Thoreau says in an account of the ocean's immensity, "we could see what proportion man and his works bear to the globe.... we looked off, and saw the water growing darker and darker and deeper and deeper the farther we looked, till it was awful to consider." Awful (aweful) to consider a bottom that in effect is bottomless because"out of sight"; awful because, as the Veda reminds him, there is nothing to cling to-nothing hopeful like the green weed at the bottom of Walden Pond, only seaweed fifteen hundred feet long for which he finds no correspondence; no deep, as Emerson would have it, opening on another deeper deep. And the "distant shore," recalling the spiritual haven evoked in the chapter on the shipwreck, is at best a distant hope, as distant, in fact, as heaven, which Sir Humphrey Gilbert is quoted as saying is as near by sea as by land, a claim Thoreau repudiates by saying, "I saw that it would not be easy to realize," the pun here doing good service. What he does realize, and merely from the vantage of the shore, is enough: that the sea is an other that is not fallen or ruined, lending itself to picturesque vistas, but source; that "we, too, are the product of seashme"; that the sea is also"a vast morgue"; that it is the wildest of wilds, water, unlike that of Walden, that bears no relation to his shore. Like Hart Crane, who takes over Melville's view in "At Melville's Tomb," he, too, sees "the dice of drowned men's bones"; like Crane, watching the kids play on the beach in "Voyages," he knows "the bottom of the sea is cruel"-"naked Nature," he says, is "inhumanly sincere." Though he doesn't give us the correspondences as Whitman does in "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," the evidence he supplies suggests that he has realized that the "sobbing dirge of Nature" is also for himself and that the self that makes...