Henry David Thoreau may be best known as the guy who disliked society so much that he went to live in the woods.  Well, also to squat.  As he writes, he improved the portion of woods by squatting on it, a crude,  ornery joke that has a pungency that Nancy Isenberg’s discussion of squatters in her chapter on class in the Jackson era helps make clear (see White Trash, 102-177).  But, mocking critic of society that he was, Thoreau was not anti-social.  He was a well-read explorer of thinking who went to woods to engage in social enterprises, to write a book—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers—and to keep the journal that would become the anything but private Walden.  Walden is a book by a bookish man.  If readers haven’t caught on to that aspect of the writer during the first two chapters, Thoreau tells them in the third chapter—“Reading”—that taking in the kind of book Thoreau writes requires one to be literate—in the sense being both widely read and alert to the possibilities of meanings contained in words, an alertness gathered by being both widely read and concerned about social dealings.

One particularly bookish chapter is Thoreau’s prose version of the georgic, “The Bean-Field,” which, among other works, quotes from Virgil’s Georgics.   The chapter is playful.   It opens with Thoreau’s reporting his weeding of his bean field as if, in doing the chore, he were fighting an epic battle (Virgil anticipates him in describing weeding as battle).  Besides weeds, among his enemies, Thoreau tells us, are the “woodchucks,” which have, he complains, “nibbled . . . a quarter of an acre clean.”  The chapter is full of allusions, the allusions allowing Thoreau to incorporate traditional thinking that helps him question practices based on current dominant thinking.  And in the final paragraph of his georgic he seems to surprise himself with an emergent thought, a thought so seemingly emergent that it has yet—in 2016— to become widely shared.   (I borrow the notions of traditional, dominant, and emergent thought from the Marxist critic Raymond Williams; Williams’ term for what I call traditional thought is residual thinking.)

Thoreau alludes to the georgic tradition when he points out that “husbandry was once a sacred art”; cultivators of the earth once led “pious and useful lives.”  This notion—that farming was sacred—helps him complain about how farming has come to be “pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness.” “By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding soil as property or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature as a robber.”  The emphasis of this passage is that people live their lives in ways that are—in contrast to earlier, tradition-based lives—demeaned.  But what we need to notice here is a strain of thought that is not much present in the rest of Walden.  Thoreau usually focuses on the vitality and resilience of the natural world, but in this passage he implies he is worried about how people, their activities informed by notions such as property, harm the earth they cultivate.   He worries that the meanness of farmers deforms the landscape and turns them into people whose way of making a living is tantamount to theft.

Remarkably, Thoreau doesn’t stop with these suggestions.  Instead, with a shift in perspective, new thoughts dawn on him.  It is as if he asked himself, can I possibly move beyond this contrast between traditional and dominant thinking to pay closer attention, more generous attention to how the world works?   Here is the paragraph in full, a paragraph that leads Lawrence Buell to the notion that a possible environmental stance is one in which a person adopts an “aesthetic of relinquishment”:

We are wont to forget [Thoreau writes] that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad field which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly?  . . .  How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer’s barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.

Thoreau is being facetious here—or, as he would say, “extravagant,” out of bounds.  What husbandmen, be they gardeners, farmers, or agricultural corporations, will ever “cease from anxiety”? When, while we still live, will humans relinquish “all claim”?  But he is asking readers to attend to the world as it actually is.  He is prompting us to focus more closely on the actualities of our experience. He echoes and plays against the Romantic notion of the imagination by noting that it is, of course, the sun (rather than the potency of an inspired poet) that makes the earth “glorious.”  Thoreau is having a good time, but he wants us to correct such thinking as that which led earlier Romantic writers like Coleridge to suggest that Nature does not have a life outside human perception.  He imagines the world from the point of view of a trusting, magnanimous sun.  He imagines the world from the point of view of woodchucks, of squirrels.  He asks us to imagine relinquishing all claim, to entertain the needs of weeds and pests.  Thoreau is working his way toward trying to view the world accurately.   He sees clearly that “This broad field  . . .  looks not to me as the principal cultivator.”  He is discovering a new way to think of the human relationship to the world.  Biocentric did not enter the English language until sometime around 1885, (and my Microsoft spell check keeps telling me I am making a spelling mistake whenever I type biocentric), but here in  1854 in Thoreau’s georgic chapter we can see an instance of biocentric thought emerging.

But does this paragraph actually express an emergent thought—or is it a thought that comes out of the tradition of the georgic mode?  One of Thoreau’s hopes in writing Walden is that he will instill the notion that creation is always ongoing—that spring is always coming to change things, that our institutions are plastic and not fixed, that all practices are questionable.  With Virgil’s first georgic in mind, we can see that, in a way, Thoreau’s hoeing puts him in touch not just with the tools—the arrowheads—or earlier cultures—but also takes him back and forward to a time before people recognized the need for agriculture.  Dryden translates Virgil’s description of the time before agriculture with these words:

. . . no peasant vexed the peaceful ground,

Which only turfs and greens for altars, found:

No fences parted fields, nor marks nor bounds

Distinguished acres of litigious grounds;

But all was common, and the fruitful earth

Was free to give her unexacted birth.

And at least for a moment Thoreau seems to call for such an openhanded husbandry. We might take him to be suggesting that the way to be make the georgic mode—and farming— as generous to the world/planet as it needs to be is to imagine oneself in a world where the activities that the georgic focuses on are not (are no longer/have never actually been) necessary.

–Bill