- Our ThingsThoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives
Distantly related things are strangely near.
—Thoreau, Journal, May 23, 1851
Thoreau is as much obsessed with things as he is with oak trees. Things play a central role everywhere in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Most obviously, the Thoreau brothers make a boat and then turn it into a central character of the narrative, so that the boat, which is supposed to transport them leisurely from the Concord’s stream of death into the Merrimack’s waters of life, is elevated into a sort of amphibious ontological phenomenon. Promoted as both capable of flying like a bird and drifting on water like a fish, it is a creature capable of drifting flights, which Thoreau imagines as an excellent mode of existence. But there are other objects also: arrowheads just under the surface of the earth, churches spoiling the beauty of a Sunday landscape, houses, monuments indiscernible among the stones, and cemeteries grown into moss. In A Week, material culture is always immersed within animated processes, history turning into forests, archaeology into geology, objects into creatures. Similarly in Walden: from Concord houses to pyramids and coffins; from Indian baskets to oversized English suitcases; from the pots and pans Thoreau uses for cooking [End Page 157] to chairs, lamps, and pencils; from trains to the Kouroo artist’s equipment—objects are always either juxtaposed to or intertwined with natural things (landscapes, apple trees, leaves, flowers, birds, or flows of wet sand), and material culture is reproached when it distinguishes itself from corporeal life. Not all things are the same for Thoreau, and in fact, when he talks about things he excludes many things.
For instance, what counts as a thing for Thoreau is not an isolated, inert entity that we can confront, use, and possess. A thing does not reduce to the obsessive focus of a collector’s desires, being thereby imbued with qualities it doesn’t have but which the mind of its owner infuses into it, turning a commodity into a fetish, as Marx would put it. Moreover, a thing is not a commodity at all; it is not something that can be reified and exchanged for money, as capitalists desire. No flows of capital circulate through it. But neither is a thing a pile of formed matter that the human invests with sentiments, nor is it matter from which affects emanate in some remarkable way; a thing is neither a souvenir nor an archaic totem. Things in Thoreau are not inert relays linking a present perception to a past experience, as they will become in the modernist experience formulated by Proust. But nor are they bodies hosting images that render them corporeal, as they will become in the modernist experience formulated otherwise than in Proust, according to William Carlos Williams’s famous dictum “no ideas but in things.” Above all, what counts as a thing in Thoreau is not a thing in the sense that Heidegger famously gave it: it is not a shrine full of meaning transcending human existence, which even when withdrawn from humans, lets them inhabit the world by assuring them that the world is here to stay. For assurance of “staying” is the thing’s central ontological operation in Heidegger; made of the earth and the air, of clay and heavens, and thus, by extension, of mortals and immortals—at the very intersection of Gods, humans, and animals—the “thing” mixes in mutual belonging the corruptible and the eternal, the material and the divine. The thing is what preserves this mixture through its own immobility or staying, which assures mortals of their own “staying” in immortality. In Heidegger, that is the main, most generous gift of a thing: [End Page 158] through its own staying it gives staying: “it stays earth and sky, divinities and mortals,” in their mutual belonging. Thanks to clay, mortals belong to gods, and as long as the jug is not broken the gods remain with humans.1
In the first part of this essay I will proceed, positively, to offer an account of what counts as a thing in Thoreau. I will argue that a...