“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.”
BY NURAN YILDIRIM
“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable,” the novelist and poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his remarkable collection of ten letters to Franz Xaver Kappus.
Nearly a century later the philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) channeled the beauty of the nature with a unique narrative in his splendid 1854 work titled Walden – that gave us the answers to the questions concerning Thoreau’s mode of life in the woods.
In March 1845, Thoreau went to the woods to build his own house on the shore of a small pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and he lived there alone for two years and two months. He decided to go to the woods because of his longing for the essential facts of life and the solitary dwelling.
Thoreau begins his book with reflecting on the construction of his house in the midst of an extensive forest with his bare hands. He considers building a house as so simple and natural occupation just like a bird building its own nest; he explained:
“There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! We do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveler with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter?”
In the following chapters, he devotes a great attention to the beauty of the nature, the philosophy of the life, and Walden Pond. He finds the scenery of Walden near his house very beautiful and so pure for its depth. He writes:
“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 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 fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered nations’ literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain? Or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet.
Thoreau describes a lake as a peaceful phenomena and a perfect forest mirror:
“Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms , no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; – a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush – this the light dust-cloth- which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.”
Reflecting on what the naturalist and philosopher John Muir famously observed that “in every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks,” Thoreau concludes:
“White Pond and Walden are great crystals of the earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than pool before the farmer’s door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her.”
Published seven years after Thoreau’s return to the “civilized life”, Walden is a beautiful read – that gave us Thoreau’s timeless wisdoms on a wide range of subjects from how to grow beans to cultural politics. Perhaps what makes his work so beautiful and enjoyable to read is Thoreau’s ability to write about the most common things in his very own, unconventional style.
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