THE ART OF MEMORY

In Memory is the more reality.

Thoreau, December 30, 1841, Journal 1, 1981, p. 352

Memory is a prelude to history, and Thoreau exercised his memory both to write his autobiography and to stimulate and orient his communal history. Narrative thus becomes a vehicle of personal exposition; biography becomes autobiography (A Week, 1980a, p. 156). This personalized view was perhaps appropriated from Emerson's more general adage: “There is no history; only biography” (Emerson, Journal entry, May 28, 1839 [Emerson 1969, p. 202]).^[15] A particularly interesting example of this exercise of memory occurs in Thoreau's recollection of his first visit to Walden Pond, a memory that must have carried potent connotations and which undoubtedly exerted a profound

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influence on his choice to live there. As Thoreau attests, Walden offered him a “proper nursery,” a vision he first perceived as an impressionable young boy and which served to guide him as he sat as an adult at Walden's shore. He alludes to a reverie, where the music of the flute “awakes” what he calls “echoes” (by which he must mean the echoes of memory) of that childhood revelation.

We have two records to consider. The first is from his Journal entry written at Walden Pond shortly after he established his homestead; the second from the published version that appeared in Walden nine years later. There are both important differences and important correspondences between the two narratives, so each will be quoted in full:

Twenty three years since when I was 5 years old, I was brought from Boston to this pond, away in the country which was then but another name for the extended world for me—one of the most ancient scenes stamped on the tablets of my memory—the oriental asiatic valley of my world—whence so many races and inventions have gone forth in recent times. That woodland vision for a long time made the drapery of my dreams. That sweet solitude my spirit seemed so early to require that I might have room to entertain my thronging guests, and that speaking silence that my ears might distinguish the significant sounds. Some how or other it at once gave the preference to this recess among the pines where almost sunshine & shadow were the only inhabitants that varied the scene, over that tumultuous and varied city—as if it had found its proper nursery.

Well now tonight my flute awakes the echoes over this very water, but one generation of pines has fallen and with their stumps I have cooked my supper, And a lusty growth of oaks and pines is rising all around its brim and preparing its wilder aspect for new infant eyes.

Almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this pasture.–

Even I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my imagination– –and one result of my presence and influence is seen in the bean leaves and corn blades and potato vines.

Seek to preserve the tenderness of your nature as you would the bloom upon a peach. (Journal 2, 1984, pp. 173–74; after August 6, 1845)

When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought from Boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory. And now tonight my flute has waked the echoes over that very water. The pines still stand here older than I; or, if some have fallen, I have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same

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johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results of my presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato vines.

I planted about two acres and a half of upland … (Walden, 1971, pp. 155–56)^[16]

Thoreau was born in Concord in 1817. The next year the family moved to Chelmsford, and then in 1821 to Boston, returning to Concord permanently in 1823. Is Thoreau recalling that final return or an earlier visit to Walden? There is a minor but obvious discrepancy in the child's age between the Journal and Walden, but that is not of critical importance for our purposes, or his. Paramount is how the visit was “stamped” on Thoreau's earliest memory, and it remained highly evocative. The explicit vision of the wilderness for which the city was but a gate remained an orienting experience, and Thoreau was to meditate upon that pastoral world as the focus of his mature enterprise. So when he writes in the Journal that “that woodland vision for a long time made the drapery of my dreams,” we might well take heed of the importance of this memory, for it no less served as the backdrop for his later maturity.

The passage is structured on two critical phrases found in both versions: 1) “scenes stamped on my memory” and 2) “my flute has waked the echoes over that very water,” and another constant element: time has elapsed as evidenced by the new growth of trees and the John'swort, prepared to engage another infant. Thus we move with Thoreau through his own memory to its passage in time to the next generation. Thoreau evinces his own participation in that turn of time's cycle (now measured by the eyes of another as yet unidentified child—perhaps the reader of Walden), through clothing “that fabulous landscape of my imagination” (namely, the planting of crops). Is that all? Hardly. The basic theme of the passage is that this early memory has informed and directed Thoreau's life, and while we might read the planting of crops as emblematic of Thoreau's project, the image is understated.

Thoreau is engaged here in an interesting subterfuge, subtle yet telling. The Journal is more revealing in several respects, and by reading it carefully, we glean important clues about the way that Thoreau himself regarded this formative memory. Each version contains this critical passage: “I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my [infant dreams {Walden}] [imagination {Journal}].” Note that the earlier “imagination” has been changed to “dreams” in the final published version. We are not accountable for our dreams: they appear and we may interpret them, but

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they appear in the night, disappear upon awakening, and correspond only loosely to our conscious life.Imagination is the Romantic faculty par excellence. It is to imagination that Thoreau turns again and again as the cognitive apparatus upon which he builds his history, his science, his poetry. In the Journal, the vision of Walden Pond, first appearing to him as a child, remains scored in Thoreau's imagination, actively working and directing him. The memory is no longer of the past, but resides firmly in his active present. His entire life is devoted to the emancipation of that imagination, the free expression of all that this muse might hold for him, whether expressed by him as a naturalist, a historian, a philosopher, or a poet. To emphasize this point, note how Thoreau ends the memory: “Seek to preserve the tenderness of your nature as you would the bloom upon a peach.” Interestingly omitted in Walden, this sentence not only implicitly reaffirms Wordsworth's insight that the child is father to the man, but perhaps more saliently that the purity and creative power of childhood experience and imagination must be preserved to guide and inspire the adult. Thoreau explicitly pronounced the validity of infant experience in what can only be read as a rapturous passage from the Journal:

Heaven lies about us as in our infancy [Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” line 66]. There is nothing so wild and extravagant that it does not make true. It makes a dream my only real experience, and prompts faith to such elasticity, that only the incredible can satisfy it. It tells me again to trust the remotest, and finest, as the divinest instinct. All that I have imagined of heroism, it reminds and reassures me of. It is a life unlived, a life beyond life, where at length my years will pass.I look under the lids of Time[.] (January 30, 1841,Journal 1, 1981, p. 242; emphasis added)

The “lids of time” (becoming the “eyelids of time” in October 23, 1843, ibid., p. 480) poetically pronounce Thoreau's stratagem, for as he would lift the cover from his eyes, Thoreau would “see”—understand—the deeper metaphysics of time as the everpresent present. Just as the period of infancy is brought into the presence of adulthood, so would the historical past be appropriated to the current era.

We must look for clues to further decode Thoreau's memory, just as one might explicate a dream. Note the paucity of insight Thoreau offers as to how the childhood memory directed him. The published memory is simply a scene, and thus the reader is left with no idea what gave this memory its potency. Again, the Journal entry helps decipher its power for Thoreau by testifying that the pond represented a gate to an exotic world. The first association is with the Orient, whose worldview would be so influential in molding

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his mature attitudes and offering a counterpoint to the mid-nineteenth-century America he so actively criticized. This oriental allusion is a rather free association, but taking it at face value it is intriguing to observe that Thoreau linked the New England woods in some fashion with an exotic world markedly removed from any prior experience. Of course, Thoreau had no knowledge of the Orient as a child, but the point is not whether there was a linkage then but rather how the memory is being constructed in 1845. The connection is blatantly subjective, drawing together some emotional resonance between Asian images and the American wilderness. In this sense we might consider how perhaps the woods were to a certain degree always foreign, an abode that one might enter but that, despite protestations, remained alien in a deep and mysterious way, as Thoreau testified about his climb to the top of Mount Ktaadn later that fall:

It was vast titanic & such as man never inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends–He is more lone than one—there is less of substance less of fair calculation & intellectual fullness than in the plains where men inhabit[.] Vast Titanic inhuman nature has got him at disadvantage caught him alone–& pilfers him[.] She does not smile on him as in the plains–She seems to say sternly why come Ye here before your time–This ground is not prepared for. Is it not enough that I smile in the vallies … Why seek me where I have not called you and then complain that I am not your genial mother….

For what canst thou pray here—but to be delivered from here.–And shouldst thou freeze or starve—or shudder thy life away—here is no shrine nor altar—nor access to my ear. (Fall 1846,Journal 2, 1984, pp. 339–40)

This episode, so unusual among Thoreau's earlier celebrations of nature, testifies to a sense that beneath the quiet pastoral of rural Concord, Thoreau recognized at that moment a fundamental chasm between the tranquillity of Walden Pond, wild in a tamed fashion, and nature untrimmed. Here, and more extensively in his later writings, Thoreau appreciates the terrifying otherness of nature, an insight that McGregor (1997) has argued was pivotal to Thoreau's existential and literary development.^[17] An anxiety, sometimes surfacing only briefly (e.g., admitting his own bestiality [Walden, 1971, p. 210]) and sometimes dominating an essay on nature as hostile and indifferent to human life (e.g.,Cape Cod [1988] thematically continues Ktaadn), seems to have accompanied Thoreau throughout his life. And I believe we detect the faint pull of that undercurrent even in his fond recollection. The earliest memory of Walden Pond portrays Thoreau's mixed feelings,

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where the mystic experience of Walden, the allure of nature, the mystery of the Asiatic, are all fused into an associated image where myriad passions, both affirmative and negative, are given free rein. So in our reading of his childhood impressions, we should attend to the complex image of the wondrous and the strange, and even the frightening, aspects of a new world.

In A Week, we see memory assuming its psychic function, falling between the wild associations of dreams and the finished product of history, a distilled and so less authentic rendition of free imagination. The narrative itself swings periodically between these poles of consciousness: As a naturalist Thoreau is keenly aware of his surroundings, and the text is replete with critical commentary about the scenery, the natural history, the social history of the river's banks. This critique is contrasted with a dreamlike state, which Thoreau refers to only in a poetic guise. Indistinct as an entity, possessing no character of an object of thought that might be grasped and concretized in description, the Concord River presents him the opportunity of being “embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts” (A Week, 1980a, pp. 19–20). The river itself affords Thoreau a unique perspective, one quite different in character from his normal life on land,^[18] but there is more: In a sense, the river is dream, perceived as a mystical entity. In an unpublished poem in the Berg manuscript of A Week, Thoreau declares,

	I was born upon thy banks,
	River, My blood flows in thy stream,
	And thou meanderest forever
	As the bottom of my dream.[19]

For him the river was his poetic, if not existential, source of being. No wonder it sustained his imagination so effectively.

A Week would become a poetic work, a Thoreauvian mythology, carried to future readers, just as he was carried “on its bosom and float whither it would bear me” (1980a, p. 13).^[20] Floating in a dory, Thoreau also beckoned to other means of travel, a history carried by memory, poetry, myth, and dream. These socalled “flitting perspectives and demiexperiences” are faculties outside time. Thoreau can only allude to the importance of this dimension attended to by a suspended intelligence, of which dreams are in most accounts the most ephemeral. When he describes dreams (waking or sleeping) as both integral to his experience and a foundation for the reality he so earnestly attempts to capture as a naturalist and historian, he does so with a firm assertion of their authenticity: “In dreams we never deceive

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ourselves, nor are deceived…. Dreams are the touchstones of our characters…. In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake” (ibid., pp. 296–97). Indeed, “our truest life is when we are in dreams awake” (ibid., p. 297), a position he was to hold unwaveringly into his full maturity (e.g., October 29, 1857, Journal, [1906] 1962, 10:141). Thus dreams, encoding echoes of ancient myth and personal experience lost to consciousness, possess a truth function that Thoreau acknowledges as a wellspring for his literary efforts.

Myth also served Thoreau's personalized vision of history. In a sustained discussion of fable and myth in the “Sunday” chapter of A Week, Thoreau makes three points relevant to this discussion. First, myth is “naturally and truly composed” (1980a, p. 58) and either transmitted to us as “music of a thought”—that is, unintelligible to scientific or historical analysis—or as the work of a current poet who might write “without the aid of posterity” (ibid., p. 60). In either case, myths have their own aesthetic and cognitive functions, which—and this is the second point—express a variety of truths more significant than our current understanding of history. The materials of biography and history, the more mundane labors that pass as efforts of history writing, are but materials to serve mythology, the higher function distilling the truth content of these lesser enterprises (ibid.). Finally, myth transmits a divine message, which the poet perceives and serves:

In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn. In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun's rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere. (Ibid., p. 61)

Again, the past is brought to the immediacy of the now, available for each of us to partake in its light.

This idea of myth, the intermediary between conventional history and imagination, resonates deeply throughout Thoreau's writings—perhaps most vividly in Walden. The ethical imperative suggested by this passage from A Week, namely those efforts evoked by the sun's (Apollo's) appearance in the morning, is built from two temporal elements better developed in Walden. The first is the morning of our respective days. As Peck (1990) has so carefully shown, the morning is the cardinal image of Thoreau's endeavor, where he would attempt to live life “deliberately” by calling for selfconscious wakefulness. “To be awake is to be alive” (Walden, 1971, p. 90), and to achieve a meaningful life Thoreau saw the morning as the crucible of his labor, where,

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indeed, “moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep” (ibid.). In a Nietzschean mode, Thoreau knew “of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor…. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour” (ibid.).Walden is a treatise on how Thoreau suggests we might respond to this challenge, and he draws a correlation between the morning and myth, a crucial guiding source for Thoreau's own heroic quest for a meaningful existence. Thus Thoreau introduces the second temporal element, the past as present. He baldly asserts, “Morning brings back the heroic ages” (ibid., p. 88) that inspire him. For in the heroic past described by myth are to be found eternal truths that can only be learned by acknowledging the presence of those fables.^[21] Thoreau is a poet, but he is in the good company of heroes. Poets and heroes are workers of the morning; each is roused and vitalized by Aurora. Here we see myth operating in the now, as the poet dredges the depths of time and the unconscious which leads him to the past.

Thus this poetic venture requires conscious effort balanced by an openness to “dream”—to access the unconscious. “Morning” is consciousness, and it is counterpoised to dream, to the night, which holds its own importance for this poetic faculty. “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations” (Walden, 1971, p. 171). The interpretative character of Thoreau's journey in time—night and day; past and present—demands access to qualitative experience. Thoreau in fact built upon these impressions. For instance, from Walden, he relates how his dreams oriented his “morning work”:

After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what—how—when—where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight. (Ibid., p. 282)

Inspired by his nocturnal questions, the morning provides him a response, and he situates himself in a confounding cosmos by performing worldly chores: carrying water, fishing, making his fire, observing the surroundings, and so on. And again, in the evening, he is left to other devices, visiting with a divine chronicler who in turn feeds his imagination:

I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and original

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proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new eternity[.] (Ibid., p. 137)

Thoreau thus swung between night dreams and day work, each fulfilling their respective functions. Note that Thoreau also dreamt while awake, and not thus necessarily at night. He also translated immediate perceptions into the domain of dream, whereby such experience might achieve its full significance. In other words, the immediacy of experience is sometimes transformed by a poetic transposition from consciousness to a dreamlike state, so that, for instance, a landscape might be experienced as dream. For example, at the top of Saddleback Mountain, remembered as an earlier excursion narrated in the “Tuesday” chapter of A Week, Thoreau recounts the climb through an “ocean of mist” after which he arrives in “cloudland,” a dream world:

As the light in the east steadily increased, it revealed to me more clearly the new world into which I had risen in the night, the new terrafirma perchance of my future life…. All around beneath me was spread for a hundred miles on every side, as far as the eye could reach, an undulating country of clouds, answering in the varied swell of its surface the terrestrial world it veiled.It was such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise…. It was a favor for which to be forever silent to be shown this vision. The earth beneath had become such a flitting thing of lights and shadows as the clouds had been before.It was not merely veiled to me, but it had passed away like the phantom of a shadow … and this new platform was gained. As I had climbed above storm and cloud, so by successive days' journey I might reach the region of eternal day beyond the tapering shadow of earth[.] (A Week, 1980a, pp. 188–89; emphasis added)

Thoreau has gone to the mountain and had a dreamlike vision—a view of eternity that he would hold firmly in his memory, informing and inspiring his spirituality.

Of course, Thoreau did not need to climb mountains to find a catalyst by which he might peer at eternity (e.g.,Walden, 1971, p. 98) or recover time (e.g.,A Week, 1980a, p. 351). In whatever context contemplation was exercised, he dipped into that experience through the faculty of memory. After all, dreams are only accessible through recall, through construction by memory. Their very disorder and illogic bespeak another cognitive grammar, and memory provides the bridge between that unconscious encounter and the strictures of conscious thought. So not only does memory of the mountaintop—within the memory of the river trip—make “journeying itself archetypal and therefore the property of inward life” (Peck 1990, p. 29), but memory

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itself becomes the fundamental faculty of consciousness of that inner life serving to conjure the past and create a more complete present. We have adequate testimony to the veracity of such experience for Thoreau.

A final comment regarding the relation of dreams, memory, and history: In A Week, Thoreau observes, dreams possess “a more liberal and juster apprehension of things, unconstrained by habit, which is then in some measure put off, and divested of memory, which we call history” (1980a, p. 58). History's cognitive standing is different from that of dreams or memory. Perhaps inspired by a primordial consciousness, history remains an objective and thus depersonalized account, or at least so it claims. Memory is the province of ancient fables and personal history that hover in the indistinct past and that can be recovered only in our dreams and in the faint outline of our own recall, to be reconstructed in the full light of consciousness, as history. There is, to be sure, a continuum of dream, memory, and history; for Thoreau—as a Romantic—must believe in unmediated apprehension whereby even history might be directly experienced. But the continuum itself attests to the different forms of experience that must be integrated to produce this final public, shared experience, and it is this effort that requires a synthesis of these three forms of imagination. Memory, as meditation, is situated between dream and history, partaking of the former to inform the latter. Thus for Thoreau, memory serves as the bridge which links some inarticulate infancy of experience into mature articulation.