Reflective Writing Near the Water’s Edge
Walden Pond is alive again with wind and light. I’ve been there often during the past month, admiring its blues and greens (depending upon where I am in elevation and the day’s light) and wondering at its still-clear waters. One day soon I’ll wade in. But for now, as the water warms a bit each day, I’ve only been looking, and, as looking often does, this pond-gazing has triggered memory.
Walden’s Reflective Waters, (albeit in a different season)
Last spring, a student sat down to describe a dilemma she’d encountered while writing about her reading of Walden. “As I write, in part about myself, I don’t want it to seem narcissistic,” she said. This worry followed a description of the expansive pleasures of meeting with friends to talk about whatever ideas were current in the air of school, to talk about something other than the self.
As we talked over her concern, a thought grew. First we looked up the legend of Narcissus and reread the story of his falling in love with his reflection, which he took to be real. Before he saw himself, Narcissus was puzzled and harried because the local nymphs simply wouldn’t leave him alone. “I’m just me, just a man,” he seemed to be thinking as he wandered and pondered this unwanted attention. Then, he came to a pool of water and looked down. All that attention seemed merited now; Narcissus couldn’t bear to leave the pool in which his beautiful image floated, and so he wasted away there.
Then we began to talk about Henry Thoreau and water.
Henry too looked into the waters of Walden often, she noted, but, when he did so, he saw something other than himself; he saw, in fact, another being, perhaps a companion-self – the pond.
All of this got me to thinking that what we were really talking about was the difference between Thoreau’s faith in “I” and our society’s fascination with “I.” At the beginning of Walden, Thoreau points out that he will write about himself, about “I,” in no small measure because he knows no one else so well. But this writing will not celebrate the trivial “I,” the “I” of gossip and small affairs. It will, instead, follow the questing “I,” the one who would learn of the world and send that learning on to others…with the admonition, finally, that they learn for themselves, that they learn the “I’s” they are.
So, to see yourself in a pond, not because it looks like you, but because it lives like you seems the right distinction. As we emerged from our conversation, my student went off to write, and I thought about my faith in the “I” she is and will be.
