Revista de Letras - Utad

160 Isabel Maria Fernandes AlvesThoreau epitomizes the combination of scientific interest with a fierceimagination. Moreover, his attention to the physical details would turn scienceinto art, summarizing the nineteenth century cultural atmosphere in America:from reading the landscape extensively, the American writer and artist hasimbued it with metaphysical value. In a time of great concern towards economyand industry, Thoreau made use of cosmic interrelatedness: that day, the seasonswere seen as part of a great circle, always changing, and always coming back tothe beginning. As Lawrence Buell states, Thoreau’s pursuit of nature became apurposeful self-education in reading landscape and pondering what he foundthere: a process of continuously mapping the world and locating the self thereby(1996: 116). The understanding of the elemental landscapes enables Thoreau towork on his own interior landscape, his writings responding to the way the mindis affected by the land, showing, consequently, the transition from seeing natureas kin to nature as self. The self is shaped by all it is connected to, and inThoreau’s case, his self is connected to the waterways surrounding his physicalenvironment which came to populate his own imagination as well. Water,because of its inherent proprieties – transparency, fluidity, formlessness –emblematizes, namely, the possibility of change and movement 2 , and Thoreauknew the Merrimack and Concord Rivers, and the lakes around Walden well:“This is my lake country. These, with Concord River, are my water privileges;and night and day, year in year out, they grind me such grist as I carry to them”(Thoreau 1950: 252). However, he is most known for his attachment to WaldenPond. Though the pond has fixed boundaries, and a tamer form than a river, itstands for Thoreau’s self and imagination. The reader perceives the pond theway Thoreau perceives it; at times, he cannot distinguish himself from it: “I amits stony shore/ and its deepest resort/ lies high in my thought (1950: 249). Beingthe earth’s eye, the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. Anemblematic moment occurs in “Spring”, the season connected with the breakingup of the rivers and ponds, when he describes the lively flux of the pond and thesandbank minutely and sensitively: “the material is sand of every degree offineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When thefrost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in winter, the sandbegins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through thesnow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before” (1950: 329). Thispassage describes not only Thoreau’s merging with the watery landscape butreflects also his search for form, structure and harmony, his own way ofunderstanding the world.2 According to Buell, Thoreau was the first naturalist to study a body of water systematically(1996: 475).