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18. 4 July 1845
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recto runningfoot 75 1 8 . 4 J u ly 1 8 4 5 When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is began to spend my nights as well as my days there, which, by accident, was on Independence Day, or the fourth of July 1845, my house was not finished for winter. (61) At least since Stanley Cavell’s influential The Senses of Walden (1972), we have assumed that Thoreau’s choice to move to the woods on the Fourth of July was no “accident.” Calling his venture an “experiment,” Thoreau was, in Cavell’s terms, reenacting the original settlement of America, a continent itself accidently discovered, whose betrayed promise Thoreau now took on himself to redeem. It’s a compelling argument, one that would connect Walden to The Great Gatsby’s rapt conclusion: Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the J 76 verso runningfoot last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. Although Thoreau was, in some ways, simply squatting, barely a mile and a half from his family’s house, on Emerson’s land, Walden represents his venture as a heroic isolation, an exploration designed to get things right at last: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he declares, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach (65). Thoreau’s “capacity for wonder” at his discovery often equals Fitzgerald’s: Where I lived was a far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. . . . I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. . . . I was really there, or at least at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. (63) “We are the subjects of an experiment” (94), Thoreau writes, speaking perhaps for all Americans, and implicitly acknowledging the Fourth of July’s symbolic significance. In one of the Week’s most urgent passages, he had already appropriated the frontier metaphor to dramatize his own existential project: The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, further still, between him and it. Let him build himself a log-house with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can (Week, 304). There are signs, however, that Thoreau cared little about the collective activity called “America.” From 1837 to 1860, not a single Fourth of July journal entry mentions the national holiday. He is too busy recording the landscape and the weather: 76 j [44.201.64.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:27 GMT) recto runningfoot 77 July 4, 1853: The cotton-grass at Beck Stow’s. Is it different from the early one? High blueberries begin. July 4, 1854: A sultry night the last; bear no covering; all windows open. . . . A very hot day. July 4, 1860: Gentle rain in the night (last). . . . Standing on J. P. Brown’s land, south side, I observed his rich and luxuriant uncut grass-lands northward, now waving under the easterly wind. . . . None of his fields is cut yet. Walden makes explicit his indifference to public memorials. Describing the “martial strains” of a military band, honoring either Independence Day or the Concord Battle, he comments sarcastically, “This was...