The Nature of Nature 2019

pg. 213 “I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life.”

This passage irritates me because, for the most part, I don’t believe him.  In today’s world with our phones and the internet, we are constantly stimulated.  There is always another social media feed for me to scroll through or some game to play.  For Thoreau, things were different.  While I’m sure living alone in the woods provided him with many chores and responsibilities to keep him busy, I challenge the fact that when not reading or writing in his downtime, he had to have gotten bored and lonely at some point.  I believe that as humans we need some sort of interaction with one another and that life in pure isolation would lead to insanity.  I think this is why he was so infatuated with the Canadian man, he was somewhat desperate for the company of another human being.  We need interaction with others to live long and healthy lives as we can help each other in times of need and also with finding happiness.  Thoreau later states “to be alone was something unpleasant.  But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood and seemed to forsee my recovery” (Thoreau 213).  He then writes about how his love for nature helped him overcome these feelings.  While I enjoyed reading about how was able to use his appreciation for nature to help him, I think that the slight insanity of his mood came from a lack of human interaction and loneliness.

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of time. To be in company, even the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers,” (pg 216).

In this quote Thoreau describes how he prefers to be alone than with other people. From his sentence structure it is clear how peaceful Thoreau finds solitude. To expand on this, the second sentence is longer and is followed by the simple sentence “I love to be alone.” This sentence clearly articulates his stance. The simplicity of the sentence has a powerful impact on the reader. The reader just read about how exhausting people are, but now can take a break and just breathe with Thoreau on how easy it is to be alone. Thoreau also expresses how much he likes to be alone with his word choice. The words “wholesome” and “companion” describe being alone, and “wearisome” and “dissipating” describe being with people. “Wholesome” and “companion” bring to mind simple calming things while “wearisome” and “dissipating” makes one think about tedious, horrible tasks. Personally, I find this passage to be very true, especially the last sentence. I would go so far to say that a person does not need to go abroad to be among men and feel alone, but just be with people who do not understand him/her. Feeling alone can be synonymous with feeling misunderstood. Perhaps, Thoreau did not like people because he thought they did not understand him, and only when he was alone did he feel understood.

“Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with the mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and all, and had clarified its waters and colored them the hue they now wear, and obtained the patent of heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and the distiller of celestial dews. (pg. 250)

Can I just say how much I hate the phrase “distiller of celestial dews?” And this may be an immature point to focus my post on, but it is a terrible phrase. The sound of it makes my skin crawl. “The distiller of celestial dews.” It is the epitome of pretentious, purple prose quotes that make people look at this book and sigh in absolute defeat before even reading the damned book. For as much as he talks about living simply, nothing can simply be. Walden pond can not just be a pond, it must be gods perfect little pond. And remember this is after Thoreau has pointed out that Walden pond was not a grand area: “The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore…” (pg. 247). To read the chapter you would think Thoreau had ascended to enlightenment at Walden pond (and perhaps he believes he did).

It bothers me because I think there are simpler sections (like the part where he loses his axe at the bottom of the lake or the part where he can see the ripples on the lake from one insect all the way at the shore) that explain the idea he’s trying to get across in a much more accessible way. He is saying the water is clear and calm and that that is a rarity in more civilized water sources.

Perhaps you might be saying that “she’s just mad because she doesn’t understand ‘art.'” And yeah, maybe I don’t get why you would want to slog through the beginning of the chapter with abstract imagery that seems to draw me away from the place in question. Maybe there are people for which these images connect better for, but for me it just leaves me lost reading and rereading the same paragraph.

I just wanted to share a link to a song that I like, that I relate to Thoreau and Walden. The song is about both nature and the complexities of society. I think of references from this song especially when reading the section on solitude. Personally I am a fan of Thoreau, but I do find him hard to read occasionally because of his self centeredness. You all by no means have to listen to this song but sometimes it helps to hear Thoreauian ideas from someone other than Thoreau.

                 Eddie Vedder – Society (HD)               

Knights Hallow is a beautiful little refuge on the north side of the College of Wooster campus. For the very short walk, trees surround you and about half the time you are greeted by the trickling of water down the creek. Everything about this place has been man made, from the planted trees, to the outdoor classroom complete with a whiteboard. The creek is actual an aesthetic way of draining water. But look back a few million years and the entirety of Ohio would have been underwater. Aquatic fossils are common place in sedimentary stones. I even found a the imprint of a fossilized shell on the side of the stream in Spangler Park last year when I was helping a friend look for salamanders.

Bring time back to today and the underwater span of true nature has been reduced to a drainage system that often doesn’t have water and moved stones and planted trees. The reduction of water was the natural change of climates, the rest was us.

As a busy and sleep-deprived college student I write this piece from a study room in Lowry; the room is cold with stagnant air surrounded by man-made materials. I look outside to “nature” and see the sun shining down upon lustrous emerald grass, bleaching the stone steps outside of the scot center. There are no birds, squirrels not even insects to take my attention away from the beauty of what I previously perceived as nature. I grew up on a farm with a large space of woods that led to a creek. In my childhood, I remember being so happy about walking through the woods to that little creek. The path to the creek and the “nature” around campus is all man-made; it’s a fake to appease us who have forgotten what real nature is like. This summer I decided to walk back to that little creek; the path was overgrown with fallen trees to navigate through. It was not the clear weed-free path of my childhood. My first thought was of how inconvenient all the extra footwork was. How the bark of the fallen tree scraped up my legs along with the itchy feeling of weeds brushing against my skin where my sock and pants did not meet. The reality is that in real nature you are not comforted instead it is something exciting, terrifying, and beautiful. This nature does not follow rules it does as it pleases placing weeds here or there. A few trees are thrown to the ground to join the brush after a powerful storm with no consideration of us walking in the area. I had to find new paths to get where I wanted to go; at points walking in directions where I wasn’t even sure if I was going the right way. The place from my childhood is now wild bringing me more excitement than it ever did previously.

The very first tree that drew my attention was a Black Cherry tree, or prunus serotina.  The bark was jagged and richly colored, and it immediately caught my eye in contrast to the surrounding beech and oak trees.  I only needed to glance a yard away from the trunk to discover its species: between the boardwalk and the tree stood a small signpost.

The boardwalk’s path shifted direction.  A tree had been uprooted directly where the angle changed, and it might have laid across the boardwalk for people to climb over.  The base of the tree, a few yards from the boardwalk, was messy to someone so used to order and organization.  Roots jutted out haphazardly and clods of dirt hung from them.  Where the fallen tree met the boardwalk, the trunk was cut cleanly; a boardwalk-width sized section was gone, probably cut away to allow people to wander through.

A thick, sturdy oak tree towered over the boardwalk, standing out among the thinner, younger trees in its vicinity.  On the other side of the path, just a few yards away, there stood a beech tree of comparable width.  The oak’s bark was still rough.  To my untrained eye, it appeared to be untouched.  The beech tree’s once smooth bark was carved with various letters and initials.

Something wonderful about trees, anywhere you might find them, is the effect of sunlight peeking through pseudo-canopies where foliage at different heights paint strokes of variable and translucent greens and yellows which overlap each other. It is a seemingly infinite collection of stunning layers, with your eye travelling up and up until instead of a new shade of green there is only the blinding sun. Noticing this foliage effect always takes me to a place of wonder, but walking into Johnson Woods for the first time, alone and just before the sun began to set, was like being transported to an entire world of that wonder.  Once I was deeper along the trail I could spin around and see nothing else. No sounds were there to distract me: no other visitors, not a bird peeping. There was only me, the green, and the enigmatic hum of an unseen insect army.

 

Nature is often thought about in ways of plant life to native animal species to geography and so on and so fourth, but in many cases we glaze over an important characteristics of nature, like color. The visuals of Johnson’s Woods could range through the entire color spectrum. From one end, there were dark, black mud patches in the murky swamp-like portions of the forest to the pale white color of the Beech tree bark. Out of all the variety that was available at Johnson’s Woods that I found to be interesting, I thought the mycena leaiana, the orange mushrooms that were scattered across the forest floor. Their vibrant orange bodies growing on brown logs pops out to any casual onlooker.An example of what they look like is added below for reference to what they look like in person. Overall, this forest was a special treat and I am grateful for the opportunity of observing the colors of the natural world.