Thoreau and Abbey Pair Work

THOREAU AND ABBEY: Kindred Thinkers

1. HENRY THOREAU WALDEN (1854): Organic Transcendence

When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad of others. You here see perchance how blood-vessels are formed.If you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the most inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel.

Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body.

Edward Abbey Desert Solitaire (1968): Paradox and Bedrock (5-6).

What are the similarities and differences in the two paradoxes on the natural as human and the human as natural?

2. Natural time: "The thin current of time slides away but eternity remans." - Henry Thoreau

Edward Abbey Desert Solitaire (1968): (10-11, 13).

the continuous present: nature is always working toward sustaining itself

panoptic perspective see order of nature: geological chaos has an order for perseverence when seen ecocentrically

(13) no nature: there is no such thing as nature; the world is nature: trailer to night sky

Thoreau: no loneliness: solitude Let me suggest a few comparisons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself...

I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.

(14): no loneliness: solitude

What are the similarities and differences between Thoreau's and Abbey's sense of natural time, solitude?

3. Ralph Emerson "Nature" (1836): deified transcendence

"Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without

having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect

exhilaration, I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as

the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is

perpetual youth...Standing on the bare ground,-my head bathed in the blithe air, and uplifted

into infinite space,-all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing;

I see all.."

(Emerson 24).

Edward Abbey Desert Solitaire (1968): shock of the real (xiii), of surfaces (27 and 37)

What are the similarities and differences in the two transcendental experiences?

3. Henry Thoreau Walden 1854: inviolable order in nature

Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther…Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow….There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within.

ED ABBEY DESERT SOLITAIRE 1968: (10) inviolable order in nature

What are the similarities and differences in the recognition of an order in all the workings of nature? How does this lead to a desire for preservation of all the parts that make it whole?

4. Henry Thoreau Walden 1854: ecological interconnectivity

When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists.

The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semicylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you call trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple- marks on the bottom.

The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank- for the sun acts on one side first- and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me- had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it.

ED ABBEY DESERT SOLITAIRE 1968: (21) ecological interconnectivity

What are the similarities and differences in Thoreau's and Abbey's recognition of a ecological link between all flora and fauna and humans and all flora and fauna?

How does this “kindredness” lead to an environmental ethic?

5. Henry Thoreau Walden 1854: ecocentricm

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this.

I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp-tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must

see how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal.

ED ABBEY DESERT SOLITAIRE 1968: (125-7) ecocentricm

What are the similarities and differences in the Thoreau’s ecocentric views of wilderness, vultures, rains, dead horses, herons gulping tadpoles and Abbey’s ecocentric view of spadefoot toads and the amount of water in the desert?

6. Henry Thoreau Walden 1854: THEORY OF ACTION: limits of human perception and understanding lead to preservation of wilderness

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows

which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness- to wade sometimes in marshes

where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to

smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her

nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we

are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and

unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us

because unfathomable...

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor,

vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the

wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain

which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits

transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered

when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens

us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the

hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way,

especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the

strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this."

-Henry Thoreau Walden (1854)

ED ABBEY DESERT SOLITAIRE 1968: (135-6) THEORY OF ACTION: limits of human perception and understanding lead to preservation

What are the similarities and differences in the Thoreau’s conclusion that wilderness is beyond human comprehension and Abbey’s conclusion that the sun, tree, bedrock, cloud resist human comprehension?

How does this lead both authors to a theory of action about wilderness preservation?