Reading and Sounds

AGENDA:

For your papers:

Transcendentalism in the Modern World
http://trancendentalism.weebly.com/modern-transcendentalism.html 

http://prezi.com/pjyjiqbvgnas/transcendentalism-in-modern-society/ 

http://modern-transcendentalism.wikispaces.com/Transcendentalist+Views+Of+Contemporary+Americans 

http://ahshonorsamlit.blogspot.com/2009/12/is-it-possible-to-be-transcendentalist.html

With a partner, read and discuss the following summaries and analysis.  Post your responses to the questions on the handout on the blog today!

HMWK: Read "Solitude" and "Higher Laws" for Monday.  Begin to work on your papers.

KEY POINTS:


 "Reading"

• Thoreau encourages reading, although he admits that even he had trouble finishing his copy of Homer's Iliad while he was farming.
• According to Thoreau, reading ancient Greek authors such as Homer and Aeschylus  in the original Greek is crucial to a real education. It requires a kind of slow, intense process of reading that trashy books just don't.
• Real literature is closest to life, he says, and it is essential to bringing out man's intellectual potential.
• Thoreau proposes that the entire village become a university – why should learning be confined to just a few students at university? Working together, the entire village could collectively generate wisdom, and ultimately a better life.

"Sounds"

Chapter Four "Sounds"
Summary:
Thoreau reminds the reader that focusing only on books neglects a more universal language. It is important to always be alert and to see all of life. That first summer at Walden, Thoreau didn't read books and he was not always occupied hoeing his beans. Some days, he would sit on his doorstep from dawn till noon, amid the trees and the birds, always smiling and answering their trills with chuckles. This taught him about contemplation, valued by Eastern philosophers. He lived in the moment and though his townsmen would have thought him idle, he was living as naturally as the birds and flowers.
He found every aspect of his life to be a "pleasant pastime" and promises that if people pay close enough attention to what they are doing, they will never be bored. On days when he cleaned his house, Thoreau enjoyed getting up early, putting all his furniture outside, and scrubbing the floor with sand from the beach, finishing by the time the townspeople woke up in the morning. He was happy to see his furniture outside among plants and animals, like a part of nature.
Thoreau now describes the location of his house, on the side of a hill overlooking the pond at the edge of the woods, and the plants which surround it -- sand-cherry, whose "scarcely palatable" berries he tasted in May and sumach, whose berries grew so heavy in August that they broke the plant's limbs. On one afternoon, he sits at his window, watching a hawk, pigeons, and a mink in the woods. He can also hear the train on the Fitchburg Railroad, located a hundred yards south of his cabin, next to the pond. He uses its tracks to walk to the village.
Summer and winter, Thoreau can hear the locomotive whistle and he imagines it making merchants' announcements about their goods. He compares the train to a comet and suggests that men have so harnessed nature in making it they are almost a "new race" worthy of inhabiting the earth. In an extended metaphor, he talks about the "iron horse," awakened early in the morning and flying about the country even until midnight. Its actions are amazing and unwearied but not at all heroic. The railroad has so influenced life in the towns that people measure time by the train's coming and going, and life goes on at a faster speed than before, "railroad-fashion." Thoreau describes man's creation of the railroad as "a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside."
There is bravery and enterprise to be found in commerce. Writing on the morning of a snowstorm, Thoreau says he is more affected by the men who work despite the weather and long hours than by men in battle at Buena Vista. Smelling the goods from distant parts on the freight train as it goes past, Thoreau is made to feel like a citizen of the world. He smells and sees sails, who rips tell stories of storms at sea, that will be made into paper; rags of all different types of cloth that will become paper of one color on which "true" stories will be advertised; salt fish, "the strong New England and commercial scent;" Spanish cowhides, with tails still intact, to be made into glue; and molasses and brandy on its way to Vermont. From the opposite direction, coming down from the Green Mountains, are carloads of cattle and sheep, which makes Thoreau imagine sheepdogs barking back in the mountains, looking for them.
When the train passes, he is once again alone. On some Sundays, he hears church bells from surrounding towns, depending on which way the wind is blowing, made magical by their passage through the woods. In the evenings, he sometimes hears cows or once, boys whose singing sounded like a cow, which Thoreau liked because it connected them to nature. At almost exactly seven thirty every evening in the summer, the whippoorwills would sing for half an hour. Later in the night, the screech owls, whom Thoreau likens to ghosts of humans lamenting their deaths, cry, as do the hooting owls, whose melancholy "hoo" reminds Thoreau of ghouls but nonetheless is pleasant to his ears. Owls, he says, should do the "idiotic and maniacal hooting for men."
Late at night, he hears distant wagons going over bridges, baying dogs, perhaps another cow, and along Walden's "Stygian lake," bullfrogs, whom he imagines passing a cup in a medieval banquet under the surface of the lake, bellowing "troonk." Though he never heard a cock's crow from his cabin, he suggests that the rooster (whom he calls "cockerel") be naturalized, so that his call would call everyone to awakeness. But in his cabin, Thoreau had no "domestic sounds," no roosters, cats, dogs, or even rats in the walls. Instead, his sounds are squirrels, whippoorwills, owls, loons, and foxes. Instead, nature reaches right up to his door. He doesn't have to worry about digging a path through the front yard in a snowstorm because he has "no front yard,--and no path to the civilized world!"
Analysis:
In his first chapter, Thoreau proposed to explore his connection to nature and to portray human beings as part of a continuum of nature, rather than a separate, dominating force they were thought to be during the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. In this chapter, Thoreau contrasts two disparate views of humankind through his description of the sounds he hears in the forest. While the passing of the locomotive is just as regular as the sunrise in Thoreau's world at Walden, the juxtaposition of these two daily occurrences illustrates the inescapable effects of the Industrial Revolution on the natural world.
Thoreau uses hyperbole in his descriptions of the locomotive, likening it to a mythological dragon or winged horse, and calling it heroic. His effusive and overblown descriptions of the locomotive are deliberately excessive. They serve to parody his nineteenth-century contemporaries who worship technological progress, like those people he says profess to do everything "railroad-fashion." In saying that these people have created fate in the form of the railroad, Thoreau is not praising them. Rather, he is illustrating the irony in their actions -- in creating the railroad as a way to make their lives easier, people have created something which ultimately controls them.
In contrast with the railroad, Thoreau depicts the sounds which emanate from nature. That he is "more alone than ever" after the railroad passes by is not a bad thing. Thoreau, in his recorded observations of nature, proves the proposition he makes at the beginning of the chapter -- that intelligent people can avoid boredom by close attention to their environment and actions. Just by listening closely to the changing wrought on them by the woods through which they pass, Thoreau can turn the echo of church bells into magic. He uses simile -- "as the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest" -- and personification -- "the natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence" -- to emphasize the strength of the link between himself, as a human being, and nature.
Thoreau's embrace of nature and criticism of the influences of human technology must not be read as a whole-sale dismissal of human culture and civilization. One of his most creative original moves in these two chapters, as in Walden as a whole, is to link literature and nature as natural, noble phenomena. Though Thoreau spends much of the summer sitting on his doorstep, watching and listening to nature, rather than reading, he is not rejecting literature in doing so. Rather, keeping his eyes open to nature is the natural progression of the deliberate attention he pays to books. He makes allusions to classical mythology -- calling Walden Stygian, or like the river Styx, and naming the locomotive Atropos, the name of one of the three Fates -- and to English literature -- describing the screech owl's scream "Ben Jonsonian," a reference to seventeenth century poet Ben Jonson.