Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

37. Without Bounds

144 verso runningfoot 3 7 . W i t h o u t B o u n d s I desire to speak somewhere without bounds. (218) This mysterious remark, appearing in Walden’s great “Conclusion ,” evokes Thoreau’s regular employment as the village surveyor. His book seems designed to enable our own staking out of things, coming complete with tools (compasses, rulers, dividers) and measurements : the number of rods separating Thoreau’s cabin from the railroad tracks, the exact distance from his site to Concord, the width and depth of the pond, the acreage of neighboring farms and lakes. In “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” Thoreau makes punning use of his occupation by declaring “I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live,” including, in yet another pun, “each farmer’s premises” (58). Quoting Cowper ’s “Verses Supposed to Be Written by Alexander Selkirk” (Defoe’s model for Robinson Crusoe), Thoreau even supplies his own italics: “I am monarch of all I survey” (59). Since Thoreau so often earned his living by marking his neighbors ’ property lines, what are we to make of his “desire to speak somewhere without bounds”? The wish resembles another Thoreauvian longing, also characteristically expressed in spatial terms: “I love a broad margin to my life” (79). The two remarks remind us that Thoreau seemed to experience almost every kind of externally imposed rule, custom, or schedule as an occasion for claustrophobia . In Emerson’s words, “He was a protestant à l’outrance.” Some of Walden’s best critics have argued that this reflexive resistance W recto runningfoot 145 extended to language itself, which, indeed, he often treated as something that gets in the way of living: “It is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time,” he once observed, “because to write it is not what interests us.” Andrew Delbanco goes further, describing Thoreau as “ultimately a despiser of culture.” “What Thoreau discovered ,” Delbanco continues, “was that language itself . . . made him feel dead because it subjected him to the worn and degraded inventions of other minds.” Some evidence supports this position. In an 1857 letter, Thoreau seems to anticipate Flaubert’s dread of merely reproducing the banalities catalogued in his Dictionary of Received Ideas: How shall we account for our pursuits if they are original? We get the language with which to describe our various lives out of a common mint. Almost certainly, Thoreau’s brief against society occasionally extended to language, inevitably a social, communal phenomenon. Hence the dilemma: he hates whatever he associates with mass values and taste, but language’s ability to communicate depends on its being something we have in common. How does this issue appear in Walden? The book represents an attempt to use everyday language in uncommon ways; Thoreau wants to make our language his own. If he entirely succeeded in doing so, we wouldn’t understand him at all. But he remakes the vocabulary of business and economics, dragging those terms beyond their normal boundaries, endowing words like “cost” and “worth” and “capital” with new meanings. “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it” (24). “There are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s” (15). “I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods. . . . I determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital” (16). These are sentences trying to refresh the idiom we share. Thoreau’s attitude toward language has another, more radical aspect, the fear that, as Geoffrey O’Brien puts it, “meanings dull his senses.” “I begin to see . . . objects only when I leave off understanding them” (J, 14 February 1851), Thoreau had written before completing Walden, recognizing the inadequacy of even our most rigorously without bounds 145 146 verso runningfoot obtained knowledge, which almost always involves a linguistic dimension. Thoreau felt acutely that words, as O’Brien puts it, “have the curious power to paralyze the senses. A culture which enshrines a particular linguistic formulation of truth is a zombie kingdom.” Hence Thoreau’s response, a call almost inexplicable for a writer who at first wanted to sell books: “Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand” (Week, 151). This is the side of Thoreau that would celebrate overhearing the Maine...