Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Similarly, there are aspects of Thoreau’s relation to nature that arenot those we feel to be prevalent elsewhere among us. The gods of gladeand brook and pond are not the gods of plain, seacoast, forest, desert, andmountain. The former are almost in reach; one can imagine oneself in dialoguewith them; they can enter into an almost personal relationship withthose who have turned from the company of men. But the gods of greatspace are enigmatic; we are never sure that we have read aright the messageof their beauty and terror; we do not hastily put words into their mouths.Yet the more we feel an “otherness” in nature, the more we recognize thatwe ourselves are natural. “It appears to be a law,” wrote Thoreau, in April1852, “that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. …I loved nature because she is not man, but a retreat from him.” There is nosuch law, nor have any other American voices expressed any sentiment likeit, unless we take note of a moment in Emily Dickinson’s life when she wrote:I thought that nature was enoughTill human nature came.Nature failed Thoreau, as it will ultimately fail anyone who wishesto divide it up, to pick and choose only limited congenial aspects of it, forecstasy or for retreat, or who wishes to employ one aspect of it to confoundanother. And the question: “Life! who knows what it is, what it does?” Itwould seem that Thoreau had considerably compromised his inquiry bydivesting himself of the testimony and the companionship of others andby repeating his question to a wooded vale.Yet millions have testified and are testifying to the powerful clarificationsthat he brought back from Walden Pond. And all his triumphs camefrom his embattled individualism, from pushing it to the limits that borderon absurdity and from facing—”face to face”—the loneliness consequentupon it. He came back with the answer that life, thought, culture, religion,government—everything—arises from subjectivity, from inwardness. Oursole self is the first and last judge of values, including the values of communallife.Here I traced briefly the long, gradual millenniary convergence ofemphasis on the individual—religion’s, government’s, art’s; andshowed how through an historical accident the settling of America,by that “selection of a selection” of European individualists, constitutedan acceleration, perhaps a “leap,” in the forward movementof this centering of emphasis.215