Above Time:
Emerson’s and
Thoreau’s Temporal
Revolutions
JAMES R. GUTHRIE
University of Missouri Press
ABOVE T I M E
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ABOVE T I M E
Emerson’s and Thoreau’s
Temporal Revolutions
JAMES R. GUTHRIE
University of Missouri Press
COLUMBIA AND LONDON
Copyright © 2001 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
5 4 3 2 1
05 04 03 02 01
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guthrie, James R. (James Robert)
Above time : Emerson’s and Thoreau’s temporal revolutions /
James R. Guthrie.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8262-1373-1 (alk. paper)
1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882—Views on time.
2. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862—Views on time.
3. American literature—19th century—History and criticism.
4. Time in literature. I. Title.
PS1642.T5 G88 2002
810.9'384—dc21
2001040986
⬁ ™ This paper meets the requirements of the
䡬
American National Standard for Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.
Text design: Elizabeth K. Young
Jacket design: Susan Ferber
Typesetter: Bookcomp, Inc.
Printer and binder: Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group
Typefaces: Rotis
Acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from J. Lyndon
Shanley, The Making of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1957) © 1957 by The University of Chicago.
For Tyler and Lincoln
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1.
A History of Time: Emerson and Lyell, Agassiz,
and Darwin 6
2.
“My Carnac” and Memnon’s Head: Temporal Reform
and Timely Memorials in A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers 46
3.
Circles and Lines: Emerson’s Parade of Days 92
4.
The Walking Stick, the Surveyor’s Staff, and the Corn
in the Night: Thoreau’s Alternative Temporal Indices 131
5.
Answering the Sphinx: The Evolution of the Emersonian
Metamorphosis 173
6.
Inches’ Wood: Thoreau’s Re-membered Cultural
Landscape 201
7.
Extemporaneous Man, Representative Man 235
Works Cited 253
Index 259
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank the Faculty Development Committee at Wright State
University for making it possible for me to write this book during a
sabbatical year. I would also like to thank Gustaaf Van Cromphout
for his sympathetic and informed reading of the manuscript, as well
as for his encouragement. Thanks also go to Robert Hudspeth for his
insightful and helpful commentary. Finally, many thanks as usual to
my wife, Rebecca Cochran, for her support, patience, and fortitude.
ix
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ABBREVIATIONS
CE The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Centenary edition, 12 vols. Ed. Edward W. Emerson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1903–1904.
CW The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Robert E.
Spiller, et al. 5 vols. to date. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, Belknap Press, 1971–.
J The Journals of Henry David Thoreau. 5 vols. Ed. John C. Broderick. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981–1997.
JMN The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo
Emerson. 16 vols. Ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth, et
al. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982.
J TA The Journals of Henry David Thoreau. 14 vols. Ed. Bradford
Torrey and Francis H. Allen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906.
Reprint, 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1962.
W Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1971.
WK A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Ed. Carl F. Hovde
et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
WR The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Concord edition, 5 vols.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906.
xi
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ABOVE T I M E
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INTRODUCTION
We ordinarily understand the term transcendentalism to mean a
favoring of idealism over materialism, or an emphasizing of ideas
rather than things. Yet for the American transcendentalists, at least,
the term also denoted a transcendence of temporality. Consequently,
their larger philosophic and literary project incorporated, especially in
the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, a probing critique of the nature,
significance, and structure of time. During the decades in which the
transcendentalists were active, the times themselves were ripe for raising such issues. The still-nascent republic’s pervasive spirit of reform
was proving receptive to all sorts of new ideas—even, or perhaps especially, those touching upon fundamental assumptions about how life
was to be lived. Within their lengthy agenda for personal and societal
improvement, then, Thoreau and Emerson included temporal reform,
a term we might interpret as comprehending such allied concepts as
change, memory, and history.
The transcendentalists’ reconsideration of temporality received
added impetus from contemporary scientific discoveries that were
inevitably beginning to contradict traditional notions of chronology
long promulgated by Christian orthodoxy. In a sense, the responsibility for determining the origin, duration, and meaning of time was
gradually shifting away from the church to the sciences. This trend
culminated in the 1859 publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species,
in which time was effectively transformed from a rationalization for
man’s being and development to a vast, directionless, and impersonal
mechanism within which the twin cogs of accident and competition
meshed to produce man, his predecessors, and potentially even his
successors.
A new uncertainty about the earth’s true age and doubts about
whether time reflected any sort of telos tended to refocus the transcendentalists’ attention upon the immediate moment. Rather than
concerning themselves overmuch with a neat, linear sequence of past,
present, and future, Emerson and Thoreau began reenvisioning time
as an endless series of present instants, or what Carlyle, in Sartor
1
2
Above Time
Resartus, called “the everlasting now.” Emerson took up the topic of
a perpetual present in “Self-Reliance,” joining his overall theme that
the strength of the individual originates in self-trust to the desirability
of learning to live in a continuously elapsing present, such as Nature
knew. The following passage in “Self-Reliance” concludes with the
phrase from which this study’s title is drawn:
These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or
to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.
There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every
moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts;
in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is
no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature in all moments
alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present,
but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that
surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be
happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above
time. (CW, 2:38–39)
Emerson’s phrase “above time” falls at the end of a trajectory of
carefully chosen temporal tropes. In referring to the rosebushes, he
begins with the relative pronoun “These,” generating a rhetorical
illusion of real time in which he, in the act of writing, simulates the
immediacy of the roses’ presence beneath his window. The rosebushes’
vertical growth is implicitly contrasted with the posture of man, who
too often turns backward to lament the past or “stands on tiptoe” to
foresee his future. Unlike man, the rose does not exist in time—at least
not as we conventionally comprehend it, that is, as the sum of past
and future. By living always in the present, the rose exists anterior to
time, or “above” it, so that the rose’s actual, vertical growth becomes
integral to its upward transpiercing of time itself. Any one stage of the
rose’s development is not a means to an end; rather, growth merely
represents a series of changes, with each stage expressing the rose’s
entirety. Nature, Emerson says, does not concern herself with time, but
only with the rose, which, by satisfying its own nature, also satisfies
Nature. Thus any man who could cultivate the quality of self-trust
might also be able to perceive not only his own cognitive growth, but
also his authentic role in nature.
On one level, at least, Emerson’s predication of a kinship joining man to rose merely exemplifies the transcendentalists’ impulse
Introduction
3
to discern “correspondences” in nature. These correspondences they
formalized as symbols or “hieroglyphics” that could be decoded to
discover the animating presence of eternal laws. Yet the transcendentalists hoped to go beyond merely understanding nature to achieving
a kind of passionate identity with it, and they believed that such a
union could be achieved only by overcoming both materiality and
time. In their essays and poems, Emerson and Thoreau adopt a series
of philosophic, psychological, and rhetorical strategies (such as those
we see Emerson employing in the passage above) designed to jolt
their readers out of conventional perceptions of time. Emerson represented his task as being to “invite men drenched in time to recover
themselves and come out of time, and taste their native immortal air”
(JMN, 7:272).
Yet Emerson’s and Thoreau’s own ideas about time continued to
evolve over the course of their literary careers, and an examination
of their major works reveals that they too occasionally puzzled over
the significance of time, particularly as it was being redefined by contemporary science. They were as deeply impressed as anyone else by
the discoveries being made by naturalists such as Sir Charles Lyell
and Louis Agassiz. Lyell’s new uniformitarian geology indicated that
the earth was much older than anyone had imagined, and Agassiz
demonstrated that ancient global catastrophes such as the expansion
of polar ice had marked the earth indelibly. In the biological sciences,
Goethe and Lamarck had already written extensively about organisms’
responses to time’s presence through the linked processes of metamorphosis and heredity. The net result of all these scientific inquiries
was to render time considered as a whole increasingly abstract and
meaningless, so that the individual’s experience of temporality was
reaffirmed and validated.
The transcendentalists’ emphasis upon the present moment also
necessarily called for a reevaluation of the past, both as it was constructed culturally (as history) and individually (as memory). Thoreau,
who was an amateur local historian as well as an amateur local natural historian, did not deny the importance of the past; nevertheless,
he questioned its trustworthiness as harbinger of the present or the
future. In a journal entry for June 7, 1851, he wrote:
We believe that the possibility of the future far exceeds the accomplishment of the past. We review the past with the commonsense—
4
Above Time
but we anticipate the future with transcendental senses. In our sanest
moments we find ourselves naturally expecting far greater changes
than any which we have experienced within the period of distinct
memory—only to be paralleled by experiences which are forgotten—
Perchance there are revolutions which create an interval impassable to
the memory.
With reference to the near past we all occupy the region of common
sense, but in the prospect of the future we are, by instinct, transcendentalists.
We affirm that all things are possible but only these things have been
to our knowledge. I do not even infer the future from what I know of
the past. I am hardly better acquainted with the past than with the
future. What is new to the individual may be familiar to the experience
of his race. It must be rare indeed that the experience of the individual
transcends that of his race. It will be perceived that there are two kinds
of change—that of the race & that of the individual within the limits of
the former. (J, 3:246–47)
Here Thoreau affirms the validity of time experienced subjectively,
saying that even by most objective standards, the past has not proven
a dependable guide to the future. To a greater extent than Emerson,
Thoreau employed his senses, his knowledge, and his art to transfer the immensity of conventionally constructed linear time to the
intensely experienced present moment, an activity he figured in his
journal and in Walden as enlarging the “nick” of time. Moreover,
he reconceived memory itself as a network of personal experiences,
factual discoveries, and relationships to nature, all of which found
an answering “correspondence” in the appearance of the landscape
itself, so that rather than having memories, we could be thought of
as inhabiting them. In the sense that Thoreau’s vision of organic
time received confirmation from the material world through which
he moved, his temporal revolution may be construed as having been
somewhat more successful than Emerson’s, which represented an attempt at some level to salvage Christian teleology, even after Christianity’s outward forms, symbols, and ceremonies had been discarded,
as having become outmoded. Nevertheless, Emerson’s spiritual intensity gives his endorsement of the present moment a rhetorical power
and pathos that his more scientific disciple’s somewhat more detached
observations achieve only rarely and partially.
In hopes of generating a dialogue between the two great transcendentalists, I have devoted alternating chapters to each. I have also or-
Introduction
5
ganized this book chronologically (as befits, it seems to me, an inquiry
into time), proceeding from Emerson’s and Thoreau’s earlier works to
their more mature productions. In the first chapter I have tried to lay
out the historical and cultural groundwork upon which the rest of this
study implicitly or explicitly depends, especially contemporary developments within the sciences. Chapter 2 examines Thoreau’s displayed
animosity toward time in his first extended literary effort, A Week
on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Chapter 3 addresses Emerson’s
recurring figure of the processing day, an image that I suggest may
have been rooted in his reading and in personal experience. Chapter
4 focuses upon three interconnected temporal images in Thoreau’s
major canonical works Walden and “Walking,” namely, the walking
stick, the surveyor’s staff, and “the corn that grows in the night.”
Chapter 5 examines an important Emersonian concept integrally related to his predications of time’s illusoriness: the metamorphosis, or
change experienced beyond or outside of time. Chapter 6 treats the
last phase of Thoreau’s life, when his outlook became increasingly
quantitative and scientific while nevertheless remaining continuous,
I argue, with his previous, more conventionally “literary” interests.
Chapter 7 consists of a shorter and more subjective essay in which I
examine how Emerson and Thoreau may have interpreted (or misinterpreted) each other as “extemporaneous men,” that is, as exemplars
of temporal reform.
1
A HISTORY OF TIME
Emerson and Lyell, Agassiz, and Darwin
Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom,
the last thing of the soul; nature being a
thing which doth only do, but not know.
—Plotinus, epigraph to Nature, 1836 edition
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
—epigraph to Nature, 1849 edition
When Emerson asserted, during a stretch of exceptionally fine
weather in the fall of 1833, that there had to be some explanation for
“this attractiveness which the face of nature has for us . . . renewed
this 2nd day of November in the 6000th year of the world” (JMN,
4:95), he was being facetious. Few educated people still subscribed to
the traditional biblical chronology first calculated by St. Jerome in
the fifth century and later refined, to a famously precise degree, in
the seventeenth century by Archbishop James Ussher.1 By the end of
the eighteenth century, the idea that the earth had existed for only
1. Working with biblical dates provided originally by Eusebius, Jerome assumed
that roughly two thousand years had elapsed between Adam’s birth and Abraham’s, to
which he added all the years accounted for in the Old Testament. In 1658 Archbishop
Ussher adopted Jerome’s system and proposed, in The Annals of the world deduced
from the Origins of Time and continued to the beginning of the Emperor Vespasian’s
Reign, and the total Destruction and Abolition of the Temple and Commonwealth of
the Jews (or Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti), that the earth had been created
precisely 4003 years, seventy days, and six hours before the birth of Christ. For a
succinct summary of how the Mosaic chronology was calculated, see Glyn Daniel, A
Short History of Archaeology.
6
A History of Time
7
six millennia had been roundly refuted by pioneering paleontologists
and geologists such as Cuvier in France and Hutton in Britain. Their
discoveries were beginning to open up entire new vistas and territories
of time, ultimately blazing a path that would lead to Darwin’s and
Wallace’s subsequent discoveries about species change, close to the
middle of the nineteenth century. This is not to say, however, that
the dust raised over the issue of the earth’s antiquity had yet settled
by the time Emerson penned his journal entry. In that very year the
third and final volume of Sir Charles Lyell’s magisterial Principles
of Geology was being published in London, and other prominent
naturalists, notably the great Swiss zoologist Louis Agassiz, were still
stoutly resisting Lyell’s new uniformitarian geology, which held that
geologic changes worked continuously at uniform rates over vast
epochs. Yet all observers were agreed that seemingly within the span
of a single generation no one knew anymore how old the earth was,
and this uncertainty provoked larger questions among scientists and
laymen alike about the nature of time itself.
At the heart of the entire controversy lay a new view of time
that was becoming progressively more secular and ahistorical. The
immense quantity of time geologists were now predicating to have
elapsed upon earth before the appearance of Homo sapiens effected
an estrangement of man from time analogous to the way astronomers
had already separated man from space. After Herschel discovered
Uranus in 1781, and especially after Le Verrier determined the position
of Neptune in 1846, it became plain that the known volume of space
was going to expand, perhaps infinitely. Similarly, the calculable age
of the earth was rapidly receding backwards into the mists of time and
showed no signs of stopping. Scientists, philosophers, and theologians
were being driven to reassess humankind’s centrality in the grand
scheme of creation, and in their debates they began focusing not upon
the abstract theories and elegant equations of astronomy, but upon the
comparatively young science of geology. Accordingly, this chapter
will trace some of the major geologic theories and controversies that
surfaced while Emerson was rising to prominence as an essayist, poet,
and thinker.
Emerson’s own scientific background was impressive, for a layman.
He kept abreast of all the significant new developments among the
sciences, and he was personally acquainted with some of the leading
scientific authorities of the day, including Agassiz and Lyell. In his
8
Above Time
essays, Emerson wrestled particularly with the problem of reconciling
time, as it was beginning to be redefined by the geologists and other
naturalists, with history. Up until the early nineteenth century, time,
history, man, and the planet had all been considered roughly contemporary with each other. The earth itself, according to Genesis, had been
created only six days before Adam, so that heretofore, humankind’s
existence had provided not only an index to virtually all time, but,
because God had fabricated man and woman after he had already
completed the rest of Creation, a telos for time, as well. Man was therefore instrumental not only to time’s origin, but also to its ends. Thus
the new problem of determining the extent of time became inextricably entwined with the problem of determining time’s true “shape”—its
orientation, rhythms, purpose. Western cultures have tended to view
time as being either linear or cyclical, a symbolic dichotomy whose
history Stephen Jay Gould traces in his book Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. Because Emerson’s treatment of temporality in his essays may be
understood as a by-product of the concurrent cultural dispute about
time, this chapter will draw frequently upon Gould’s scientific and
historical rationales. Chiefly, however, I will be examining the extent
to which Emerson’s knowledge of geology informs (or fails to inform)
two texts that may be considered representative of the early and intermediate phases of his career, Nature and “Fate.”
Emerson displayed a lively interest in the sciences as a young
man. He botanized energetically and romantically, emulating his idol
Goethe in criticizing scientists for concentrating too exclusively upon
classification rather than upon seeking to establish bonds of sympathy between specimen and observer. In his late twenties Emerson
also began reading avidly in astronomy, particularly John Herschel’s
Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, in which
the British astronomer extols the virtues not only of his own field,
but of all the rest of the natural sciences as well. Emerson subsequently admitted Copernicus and Galileo to his pantheon of intellectual heroes, and at least one biographer has tied his resignation of
his Unitarian pulpit directly to a growing awareness of the theological
significance of the Copernican revolution.2 At about the time he wrote
Nature, Emerson was gravitating toward genetics and geology, with
2. Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 124.
A History of Time
9
even more consequences for his theology and teleology. The cumulative effect upon Emerson of his scientific reading was nothing less
than life-altering, as was the case for many of his contemporaries. In
his retrospective essay “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” in which he traces the origins of the American transcendental
movement, Emerson describes science’s impact upon his entire generation; nevertheless, the language in which he couches this observation
remains peculiarly self-referential:
. . . I think the paramount source of the religious revolution was
Modern Science; beginning with Copernicus, who destroyed the pagan
fictions of the Church, by showing mankind that the earth on which
we live was not the centre of the Universe, around which the sun
and stars revolved every day . . . but a little scrap of a planet, rushing
round the sun in our system, which in turn was too minute to be seen
at the distance of many stars which we behold. Astronomy taught us
our insignificance in Nature; showed that our sacred as our profane
history had been written in gross ignorance of the laws, which were far
grander than we knew; and compelled a certain extension and uplifting
of our views of the Deity and his Providence. This correction of our
superstitions was confirmed by the new science of Geology, and the
whole train of discoveries in every department. But we presently saw
also that the religious nature in man was not affected by these errors in
his understanding. The religious sentiment made nothing of bulk or size,
or far or near; triumphed over time as well as space; and every lesson of
humility, or justice, or charity, which the old ignorant saints had taught
him, was still forever true. (CE, 10:335–36)
Emerson’s deployment of the collective pronouns “we” and “us” represents an only partially successful attempt to generalize his own
determination to reconcile science and religion. With the possible
exception of Thoreau, no other American transcendentalist’s philosophic method was so syncretic as Emerson’s. In addition, the particular philosophical-cum-rhetorical tool Emerson wields to effect
such a synthesis was one for which he had a special fondness—
Compensation. Thus his acknowledgment that astronomy had “taught
us our insignificance in Nature” is mitigated by a concluding observation that none of the discoveries made by physical scientists finally
invalidated man’s importance as a religious and moral creature, for his
spiritual identity transcended material questions of “bulk or size . . .
far or near,” time or space. While the old saints may have been “igno-