Author Archives: Sandy Stott

One of the pleasures (and occasional curses) of deep familiarity with a book is our tendency to “see” it in other readings. While this tendency may at times make us into so many Procrustes (the mythic Greek blacksmith and (of course) son of a god, who showed his hospitality by stretching or cutting his visitors to fit his guest bed rather than adjusting the other way), more often, it enlivens our readings and adds new visions to them.

Here’s one such mash-up brought to me during recent reading. I wonder if you have the same sort of experience when reading Thoreau?

Thoreau and Bly – What We Drag Behind Us

In A Little Book on the Human Shadow (Harper and Row, 1988), Robert Bly writes about what we express and what we hide as we grow to be our adult selves. Chapter 2 is a short essay entitled “The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us,” and, for me, the image has always made me think of Henry Thoreau and his move to the pond. Bly suggests that, as we grow and decide what parts of us to show, we put the other parts – often those that are socially difficult – in our bags. But, of course, because our bags are full of us, we must take them along wherever we go. It is labor to drag such a bag behind oneself.

Each time I read Walden with students, this image returns to me. There, in 1845, is the 27-year-old Henry Thoreau, building his 10′ by 15′ house in the woods by Walden, and as he works – getting “well pitched” by the “tall arrowy pines” that are becoming this house, another sort of ‘bag’ – he must be thinking about what he will put into it. What will he carry out from town in his cart? How will he furnish it? What, in short, is “necessary?” Who will he be out here?

What Thoreau makes clear in “Economy,” his long stumbling- block of an opening chapter, is that answering these questions carefully is vital to the life that will follow. And so some 60+ pages into the book, he thinks about furnishing his house:

Furniture! Thank God that I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse. What man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going up country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men…

And – no surprise – Thoreau goes on to tout a minimalist approach to such possessions. He wants his cart to be light, easy to pull; it is practical advice. But then a shift in imagery and tone arrives, and the reader realizes that Thoreau is – no surprise here, either – intent on making metaphor of his thoughts on furniture:

If you are a seer, whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen furniture and all the trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and he will appear to be harnessed to it…

Here is a version of Bly’s long bag we drag behind us, a mix of possessions and pieces of self that we feel we must have and, at the same time, hide. Such work – this walking and hauling of self out into our own lives.

Perhaps this is what Thoreau means when he nudges himself (and us) toward realization – when we both realize who we are and what choices we have made to become that person. And, in doing so, we make that person real. Perhaps then, we unpack, sell off what we don’t need and set off lighter into our lives.

By Corinne H. Smith

“Of course it is the spirit in which you do a thing which makes it interesting, whether it is sweeping a room or pulling turnips.” Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, November 26, 1860

Last week with this positive attitude in mind, I headed outside and grabbed the rake. The community pick-up trucks were due on Monday, and I had many hours’ worth of work ahead to gather up all of our leaves and deposit them on the front curb.

Our big back yard is home to four large trees: a red oak, a sweet gum, a white pine, and an indeterminate deciduous tree whose leaves turn black and curly. Two houses west, a tall maple litters the landscape with progeny that comes our way with every wisp of the wind. Get the picture? I had raked and gathered just two weeks earlier, but now I found myself wading through another thick layer of leaves. They were back. Let the games begin.

Could leaf-raking be undertaken as a transcendental activity? I thought so. I dismissed the use of the landlord’s gas-powered leaf blower, which was stored in a nearby shed. Such devices are an affront to the eyes, ears, and nose, in my opinion. And too many of my neighbors relied on them. I wanted to be deliberate, be outside, be quiet, and become one with this small part of the world. For just a little while.

It was a bright but brisk and windy November day. I soon had to go back inside to get my winter gloves and scarf, though I was dismayed when I could not find the matching woolen hat. My ears would have to suffer. The wind also gave the leaves their last chances to dance and to fly. I often found myself herding a flock instead of leading a charge.

Eventually my brain ceased to dally with its daily cares and instead focused on sounds. We’re never far away from the mechanics of civilization. With my full attention drawn downward, I could still hear a small plane flying overhead, regular traffic on a nearby highway, an occasional siren from a passing ambulance, and the pointed stops of buses that carry our suburbanites to the nearest city. At least these buses are now powered by natural gas and not by diesel fuel.

In the midst of it all, the act of raking itself created a satisfying sound. It was soothing to listen to the flat wooden fingers as they stroked the leaves, the grass, and the ground. By comparison, the same action turned suddenly harsh when the rake moved across the wooden deck and the asphalt driveway. Over them all, I kept an even pace. Rake, rake, rake. Drop batches onto a plastic tarp. Drag the tarp to the front sidewalk. Slide the leaves onto the sidewalk. Over and over, again and again. Even thrice-weekly workouts at a gym didn’t exercise the kinds of muscles I was using now. I would be sore for days. But it was a good, healthy feeling.

A few lines of noisy Canada geese steered across the sky above me. I stopped to watch as one group turned itself around and headed back to where it had started. Silly geese. Then little birds came to inspect the territory I had just uncovered. Juncos and tufted titmice looked for tiny unearthed goodies. We shared the yard for the rest of the afternoon.

When I was finished, hours later, ours was indeed the largest and tallest leaf pile on the block, and I was darned proud of it. When I admired it from our front picture window, I was reminded of another familiar Thoreau passage:

“Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work.” From“House-Warming” in “Walden”

And so this woman could look at her leaf-pile with a kind of affection too, knowing that its bits and pieces would soon be transformed into mulch. Someday it would all help something else to grow, somewhere else.

We section off time to mimic the sun’s rolling passage, and we shape our round days to resemble each other in the way close cousins sometimes do. Slowly, it often seems, imperceptibly, we roll along until we reach a marker that signals difference. We step step again, and suddenly, we are in new land- or timescape.

First Ice at Walden

So it is for me when the month of light, November, ends and the month of late afternoon, December, begins. A December day feels always on the verge of darkness to me, and to counter that feeling, I begin to brew afternoon tea, and I look for a long book.

I experienced a similar feeling recently, when I left the light-filled pages of Walden after an Nth reading.

On a Monday early, we went to Walden Pond as punctuation for our readings of Walden. On Friday, we had closed the book. “The End,” Henry writes (and a student pointed out). I’d never paid attention to those two words, though, given the long drafting of Walden, I should have. There they are, set apart as if to say, “okay, no more comfort of linear travel along these lines of print. Out with you; get out of the little rectangle of my house, out of your house too, out under the light of the morning star.”

And outside those close confines, here each of us is, in the bumbled world of jumbled experience and time, or in the jumbled world of bumbled time and experience.

“O,” we say, disconcerted by the simultaneity of it all, “let’s begin again; let’s reread; we’ll even study!”

“No,” we hear. “I mean The End, when I write it. Time to live,” he answers.

And so, there, beyond The End, we were. We had special permission from the state park to arrive and park and visit the house site before official opening. I had secured that permission after a test walk on the trails that approach Walden from the west had convinced me that the sneaking that appealed to me took more time than we had.

Sanctioned, official, upright, we crossed Route 126 and descended to the pond, bearing right then along the northern edge. The water level was the lowest I can recall, opening a fringe of sand that nearly circled the pond. Tendrils of fog rose from the water like gray snakes. It was, as always, perfect. We walked in silence and in file.

Then, the “morning star” rose over the ridge to the south of Pine Hill. The train shot through.

Time reassembled itself. We boarded for December.