Category Archives: Literature

Spring’s Songs – Jonathan Franzen and Henry Thoreau and Birds

Posted on April 9, 2015 by | 2 comments

A purple finch showed up in our yard yesterday, just hours ahead of the last (I hope) snowfall. And my daily footwork was again suffused with bluebird song. These birds then triggered a rereading of an essay that had caught my eye but then slipped into the welter of partially-read pieces.

Purple Finch (carpodacus Purpureus)

You, if a reader of this blog, have grown used to our stepping onto the springboard of Thoreau’s journal writings; from there, we often dive into something daily, some moment of the local world. Today we climb a little higher, then drop a little farther from the platform of Jonathan Franzen’s recent essay, Carbon Capture, ( http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/carbon-capture)  in the April 6th New Yorker. From (and in) it, we consider the vast challenge of climate change and the sliver of effect we call personal response. Franzen’s piece, the best response to this calamity that I’ve read, brings us back to Henry Thoreau – not by specific mention, but by its suggestion that local attention and conserving work can be redemptive, can be a daily way forward in a difficult time.

In struggling to come to personal terms with climate change and its vast pronouncement, Franzen writes of birds, of local study and care that echoes Thoreau’s understanding that, when it came to universal concerns and understanding, he had “traveled a good deal in Concord.” Franzen’s central thought is direct: climate change is real and unstoppable; its scale so dwarfs a person’s efforts as to negate them, and so, even as large environmental organizations and figures recommend combating it, focus on climate change draws a person away from work where she or he can have effect, can live a life – working for conservation of habitat for birds and other animals, for example.

As he considers himself and us, Franzen identifies two central strains of thought that divide us: the Puritan, guilty-as-charged school and the positive, life-affirming Franciscan school. In shifting his focus from guilt-inducing efforts to have personal effect on climate change to life-affirming work for bird habitats, Franzen chooses life and whatever measure of joy it may contain. His implied question is a simple one: do you want to live a guilt-ridden, powerless life or a commitment-suffused one?

Franzen is not naive. He knows that climate change will alter habitats, will affect every thing. But he points out that global scale trouble and guilt finally overwhelm and paralyze. If, every time you have an effect – which is of course, every minute – you feel guilty about it, you step finally away from such wearying awareness. If instead, you feel you are working at least some of the time for some small sector of life, local habitat, for example, you can be buoyed by small victories, lifted by your embrace of the local.

Thoreau, of course, knew the lure and redemption of the local. His journal is a record of engagement and, yes, love, of where he walked and what he found.

Journal, April 9th, 1856: 7 A.M. – To Trillium Woods…The air is full of birds, and as I go down the causeway, I distinguish the seringo note. You have only to come forth each morning to be surely advertised of each newcomer into these broad meadows. Many a larger animal might be concealed, but a cunning ear detects the arrival of each new species of bird. These birds give evidence that they prefer the fields of New England to all other climes, deserting for them the warm and fertile south. Here is their paradise. It is here they express the most happiness by song and action.

I have taken a nuanced, developed essay and simplified it (without too much damage, I hope). It is worth reading in its fullness. Just as the birds singing in today’s new snow remind that today is there to live in its fullness.

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Posted in Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

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Spring Words

Posted on April 3, 2015 by | Comments Off on Spring Words

There is, this morning, the long-running voice of water on tin as the snowmelt falls from the gutter through its metal pipe to ground. Our intense winter gives up its ice grudgingly, but the morning sun says it must, and even ice can’t sass the sun on this 50-degree day.

Photo Credit: Bigstock

Photo Credit: Bigstock

Ice and water are on my mind because I’ve been thinking back to the work of teaching. The catalyst is an essay written by a former student, now in college, and sent on at my request. Scott recently reread Walden as part of his studies, and I had wondered in a note what struck him on this pass through. My experience has been that Walden is that rare book that bears rereadings across time and human ages.

So, this morning, as the water ran, I settled into a chair and read Scott’s essay. It was – no surprise to me – insightful and clearly written, but beyond that I was taken by its range. Here was writing that suggested that, for Scott, Walden had become a world in which he was free to wander, that the knottiness of its sentences and propositions had given way to a sort of landscape to be sauntered, known and drawn upon easily.

My experience reading Scott’s work made water of another sort of ice – a teacher’s sense of what happens when his students read a long-studied work freezes at the moment of teaching, in the memory of class. But, of course, students move on, flow on; in truth, there is no ice, no fixed sense, at all in their readings. And I have been reminded of this by the morning work of Scott’s words. A paragraph that makes good sense of Thoreau’s “spring work,” his house-building at Walden Pond follows.

May each of you find the flow of spring in your own mornings these days; it seems, as Thoreau knew, just the right time to construct another year.

“The remade origin-myth of Walden Pond runs parallel to the autobiographical account of how Thoreau set up housekeeping there. The communicative closeness with divinity that Thoreau feels so intently during his recorded year is an outgrowth of the etiology that he forms for his “experiment.” It is not incidental that he begins to build a house “near the end of March,” at a time when the “torpid state” of wintertime transforms into a “higher and more ethereal life”; here begins the narrative of seasonality at Walden, which will conclude itself by coming into the same springtime which nurtures Thoreau’s optimistic impulse. As springtime is the morning of the year, it shares the sanctity of the antemeridian hours. “What should be man’s morning work in the world?” Thoreau asks, fervently, in “Economy.” “Morning work” is both sanctified and sanctifying, and what Thoreau chooses to do in the morning – to build a house and thus found his experiment – gains an equally spiritual dimension. Emerson posits, “The knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, vespertina cognitio, but that of God is a morning knowledge, matutina cognitio.” To work in the morning is hence a higher calling which begets a superior form of understanding. House-building, a seemingly human activity, nevertheless has the potential to make Thoreau conversant with the higher truths of divinity. Long after the house is finished, in “The Pond in Winter,” Thoreau recounts that after a turbulent sleep, “I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight.” This is the “morning knowledge” which he has gained, and for which the pond has acted as an intermediary between his human, questioning state and the godly answer.”                     – Scott Berkley

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Posted in General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, The Roost, Thoreau Quote, Walden

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Cosmopolite Geese (plus swans)

Posted on March 25, 2015 by | 2 comments

By Corinne H. Smith

“Why not keep pace with the day…and the migration of birds? … The wild goose is more a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Susquehanna, and plumes himself for the night in a Louisiana bayou.” ~ Thoreau’s journal, March 21, 1840

The Austrian Alps may be alive with the sound of music., but today in the farmlands and suburbia of southeastern Pennsylvania, the skies are alive with the calls of waterfowl. It’s “Goose music,” as Midwestern nature writer Aldo Leopold once called it. The Canada geese and the white tundra swans fly (and chatter) over us in Vs, in straight lines, and in disorganized and dynamic swiggles. They use the mile-wide gray ribbon of the Susquehanna River as their North Star. Our leftover cornfields and fine-trimmed farm ponds make good touchdowns and rest stops. Then, after a time, the birds take off again, in a whirl of whipping wings and whoops and hollers.

geese1

The geese could probably stop anywhere. The tundra swans, however, are heading for the shorelines of Hudson Bay and Canada’s Nunavut territory. They’ve still got a long way to go before reaching their summer home.

Tundra Swans

Tundra Swans

Our friend Henry Thoreau used exaggeration for effect when he claimed that a Canada goose could cross the north-to-south width of our country in just one day. (And why he had the bird flying south in a journal entry written in March is a mystery.) One online source I found said that Canada geese travel north at about the same rate as the season advances. 34° Fahrenheit is the key temperature they use to move. No wonder we’ve seen and heard many migrants recently. Our recent daytime temperatures have averaged around this mark or higher.

Whenever I hear the distant honks and whoops, I have to go outside and look up. I need to catch sight of the birds, hurrying on their way to wherever. I want to follow them someday, I think. I could just get in the car and keep an eye out and drive as they fly. The birds tend to take overland routes and to go “cross lots,” as Henry used to say, where no roads lead. Following them could be tough. And if they stopped to rest with other flocks, how would I recognize which batch was “mine” upon take off? I would have that pesky they-all-look-alike-to-me problem, at least at first. Darn.

For now, I guess I’ll have to watch the geese and travel with them vicariously. I’ll imagine the sights they’ll see along their journeys, both from the air and then on land. I’ll admire their instinct and tenacity.

When I return to the writings of Aldo Leopold, I find that he was also fascinated by seeing these guys in spring. And he imagined their later lives, too.

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring. … By this international commerce of geese, the waste corn of Illinois is carried through the clouds of the Arctic tundras, there to combine with the waste sunlight of a nightless June to grow goslings for all the lands between. And in this annual barter of food for flight, and winter warmth for summer solitude, the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March.” ~ Aldo Leopold, “March,” in “A Sand County Almanac”

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Posted in Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

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