The Dusty World

Wildness and Higher Laws in Thoreau’s Walden

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Jim Cheney

To the attentive reader, the high contrast between Thoreau’s depiction of a life in conformity to "Higher Laws" and his depiction of Wildness can seem to be yet another endorsement of nature/culture dualism. I argue that while such a dualism frames much of Thoreau’s "experiment" at Walden Pond, a deeper understanding of the relationship between Higher Laws and Wildness emerges which is decidedly nondualistic, an understanding for which I invoke the Buddhist image of the Dusty World. I conclude with some reflections on Val Plumwood’s recent work on the nature/culture dualisms at work in current discussions about wilderness.

WILDNESS

The innocence and beneficence of Nature, even its sweetness, is a pervasive theme in Walden. In "Solitude" we read:

The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,—such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun’s brightness fade...if any man should ever for a just cause grieve.

...I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object....There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Aeolian music to a healthy and innocent ear. (V, 4)

More than this, Nature is, in a strong sense, kindred: "I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me" (V, 4), and "We are conscious of an animal in us....It is reptile and sensual....Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature" (XI, 11). Further, this kinship has epistemological consequences: "Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?" (V, 17). Thoreau’s use of "intelligence with," rather than "intelligence of" (or "knowledge about") is particularly striking, indicating that nonhuman Nature itself joins in the conversation, participates in the construction of knowledge.

Beyond the innocence and beneficence of Nature, beyond kinship and "intelligence with" Nature, immersion in Nature has a spiritual dimension: Communion with Nature and the "tonic of wildness" are necessary in order to realize the highest aspirations of the human spirit. Early in Walden we read:

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself....I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. (II, 14)

The connection between immersion in Nature (in this case, the Wildness, or rather the compromised Wildness, of the human body) and "higher" aspirations is made explicit in the parable of John Farmer, which ends "Higher Laws":

Having bathed he sat down to recreate his intellectual man....He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood....But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him,-—Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.—But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect. (XI, 15)

A "higher law" requires redemption of the body—that is, as I will argue, a restoration to that body of its original Wildness.

Even in the Winter, Thoreau’s "morning work"—that search for "an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned" (II, 14)—was to "take an axe and pail and go in search of water" (XVI, 2). The return to daily life is a religious awakening.

By far the strongest statement on the importance of Wildness to the human enterprise is reserved for the end of Walden (excepting the "Conclusion"):

We need the tonic of wildness....At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable....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....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. Compassion is a very untenable ground. (XVII, 24)

This is an amazing passage, to which I will return. For now, I want simply to emphasize certain of Thoreau’s claims. We require that all things be not just mysterious, but positively unexplorable. We need to witness our own physical limits and Higher Laws transgressed—and we are cheered by this. That tender organizations are serenely squashed out of existence is seen as an instance of universal innocence. No wounds are fatal; and compassion is untenable. The lessons of Wildness are strong indeed; and would seem to fly in the face of the whole tenor and direction of the "Higher Laws" developed earlier in Walden. And we need this tonic of Wildness.

HIGHER LAWS

If there is kinship with, and an instinct toward, wild Nature, there is also, in seeming contrast, "an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life" (XI, 1). Although Thoreau says that he reverences the "primitive rank and savage" life as well as the spiritual life, and says "I love the wild not less than the good" (XI, 1), a few pages thereafter he says that

If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies....a life in conformity to higher principles. (XI, 7)

In seeming contradiction to statements referred to in the first section of this paper, Thoreau insists that "Nature is hard to overcome, but she must be overcome" (XI, 12).

"[T]here is something essentially unclean about this diet [of fish] and all flesh" (XI, 5). This objection is closely tied—identical, in fact—with another: Animal flesh—and, be it noted, "food of any kind," including coffee and tea—Thoreau says,

...seemed not to have fed me essentially....I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, &c.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination....I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. (XI, 5)

There is, Thoreau thinks, "an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual," and the

...animal in us...awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers....Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure. (XI, 11)

Yet the animal and spiritual instincts are perhaps not so antithetical for Thoreau as these passages suggest. "Not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man," Thoreau says, "but the devotion to sensual savors" (XI, 9). And he refers us to the antinomian Vedic pronouncement that "he who has true faith...may eat all that exists" (XI, 8).

At any rate, for Thoreau, humans for the most part find themselves fallen from the innocence of the Wild condition of nonhuman Nature and with an instinct for "a life in conformity to higher principles." Redemption, though it involves letting one’s mind descend into one’s body, involves the practice of austerities, both mental and physical.

The Higher Laws that Thoreau discusses here concern themselves almost entirely with eating, with incidental references to other bodily functions. We may take it, however, that eating, and Thoreau’s concern with eating in relationship to the imagination and to his instincts toward both a "primitive rank and savage" life and a "spiritual" life is simply a paradigm example (as we shall see) of the grounding of human ethical thought in Wildness and its elevation by means of metaphor. His concern is more general; it is with the fallen nature of "the necessary [bodily] functions of human nature" (XI, 13) and their redemption.

Thoreau concludes Walden (excepting the "Conclusion") with a set of descriptions or images that illustrate the three central conceptions of the philosophy that informs Walden: Wildness, Higher Laws, and what I will call the Middle Path (leading back to the Dusty World). I have already quoted at length Thoreau’s account of Wildness. The image of Higher Laws precedes this account. "On the 29th of April," Thoreau says, "I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a nighthawk":

It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed....[I]t sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounted again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe,—sporting there alone,—and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it....The tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the crevice of a crag;—or was its native nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow’s trimmings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its eyry now some cliffy cloud. (XVII, 22)

What is so striking about this image is the hawk’s tenuous connection with earth and Wildness. What are we to make of this in light of Thoreau’s claims about the religious importance of Wildness?

THE MIDDLE PATH AND THE DUSTY WORLD

Somehow, Thoreau’s remarks concerning Higher Laws must be reconciled with what seems to be a central tenet of Thoreau’s philosophy:

In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. (II, 21)

Otherwise put, "Olympus is but the outside of the earth every where" (II, 8).

It is in light of this understanding of the relation between Nature and Eternity (the realms, as it were, of Wildness and Higher Laws, respectively) that we should understand the following early comment: "Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?" (I, 20). If we assume (as seems right) that Thoreau has chosen his words carefully, we can conclude that there is an internal relation of some sort between Wildness and Higher Laws. That is, "a life in conformity to higher principles" is not transcendent to Nature; rather, it is "the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us."

The sentence following this last phrase reads: "The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then." A few pages earlier we read:

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. (II, 15)

The choice of metaphors with which we "carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look" are moral and epistemological acts; they establish the epistemic and moral contours of our world.

In the Bhagavad Gita, the ur-text for the various Hindu systems and a key text for Thoreau in Walden, our epistemic/moral relationship to prakriti (nature) determines whether that relationship is maya (illusion, bondage to the wheel of birth and death), or moksha (enlightenment, release from the wheel of birth and death). In the Gita the epistemic/moral journey cannot be made outside the context of prakriti (material nature)—which includes thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc. (the empirical self). Purusha (the true self) is in itself without content. Each self (purusha) is what it is as a particular bondage to prakriti, which in this way defines the empirical self within prakriti, and purusha understands itself through a process of disentangling itself from prakriti (and therefore from the empirical self), the mirror in which it sees itself (and with which it at first falsely identifies itself). The process of liberation is a working through of this bondage, this fate, as it were. It is precisely because prakriti answers to our conceptions that both bondage and liberation are possible. Much of this is reflected in the passages we have just considered from Walden and in that passage most transparently adapted from the Bhagavad Gita:

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the drift-wood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity [the empirical self, part of prakriti in the Gita]; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections [which, again, are prakriti, not purusha, in the Gita]; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I [purusha] can stand as remote from myself [prakriti] as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not part of me, but spectator [purusha], sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. (V, 11)

This and the earlier passages I have cited constitute Thoreau’s adaptation of the Gita to his understanding of the relationship of the human self to Wildness and to Higher Laws.

There are metaphysical puzzles in my portrait of the metaphysics of the Gita that immediately come to mind. Purusha seems to be both one and many: it is (they are?) in bondage to prakriti in a multiplicity of ways that define various empirical selves; on the other hand, purusha, as distinct from the multiplicity of empirical selves, "is no more I than you," its apparent multiplicity being, it seems, a matter of maya (illusion, bondage to prakriti). What then is liberation? Is it the "merging" of multiplicity into the unity of Brahman? What is this now-contentless purusha after it (they?) is (are) released from the wheel of birth and death?

Mahayana Buddhism sidesteps this metaphysical tangle by making enlightenment internal to maya in its famous pronouncement that samsara (this world of suffering) and nirvana (the blowing out of the flame of desire) are one and the same—there is no metaphysical distance between samsara and nirvana; the distance is epistemological and moral.

I understand Thoreau to be making a similar move, though the issue is complicated by the fact that he sometimes appears to lean toward Hindu metaphysics, sometimes toward Mahayana Buddhist epistemology; sometimes he seems to assert a metaphysical distance between Wildness and a life in conformity to Higher Laws whereas at other times he seems clearly to hold the view that Wildness is epistemically transformed (the body is redeemed) in a life in conformity to Higher Laws, that the realms of Nature and Eternity are (epistemically) internally related. The tension between the two positions can be resolved as it is in Mahayana Buddhism: The view that there is a metaphysical gap between samsara and nirvana is understood to be the view from the path; the identity between the two is the enlightened view; epistemology is fundamental. Similarly, we can say that, for Thoreau, the metaphysical distance between Wildness and a life in accordance with Higher Laws is the view from the path whereas the redemption of the body (the epistemic transformation of Wildness and Higher Laws) signals a life truly in conformity to Higher Laws.

The view that "man [has] rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise...into the heavens" is quite in accord with the message of the Gita, seemingly asserting that transcendence of Nature is the goal of human striving. But when the excised phrase—"in the same proportion"—is returned to the quotation, we have shifted to what can at least not unreasonably be understood as Mahayana Buddhist epistemological territory: the depth of one’s life in conformity to Higher Laws is in proportion to the depth of one’s sympathy and resonance with Wildness; one’s epistemic relationship to Wildness and to Higher Laws are transformed in relationship to one another.

Thoreau says in "Higher Laws" that "our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice" (XI, 10), and a bit later, "Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome" (XI, 12). This is the view from the path. But Thoreau also "reverences" both the "spiritual life" and the "primitive rank and savage one": "I love the wild not less than the good" (XI, 1). Life in conformity to Higher Laws is not better than life immersed in Wildness. Wildness is not on the scale of good and bad at all; it is characterized as innocent. In "Spring" Thoreau says that "the impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground" (XVII, 24). This is the view from life in conformity to Higher Laws, a life which delivers one over to the innocence of Wildness.

Thoreau’s uncertainty in "Higher Laws" concerning his own ability to achieve a life in conformity to Higher Laws, and his curious ruminations in the dialogue between Hermit and Poet that immediately follows "Higher Laws," mark that chapter as a view from the path, hardly Thoreau’s last word on the subject. The last five paragraphs of the book (excepting the "Conclusion") contain Thoreau’s final thoughts on the matter, concluding with a full return to what Zen Buddhists call the "dusty world," the epistemic merging of Wildness and life in conformity to Higher Laws.

It is time to leave the rarified air of metaphysics and epistemology. This discussion is best concluded with an image that recurs again and again in Walden: the image of the close relationship between the loon, emblem of purest Wildness, and Walden, emblem of the Hindu Brahman, that into which all things are resolved, the metaphysical image of life in conformity to Higher Laws.

Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work [cutting ice]...and in thirty days more, probably, I shall look from the same window on the pure sea-green Walden water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself.... (XVI, 20)

Looning is "perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here [on Walden pond]," "but what besides safety [loons] got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do" (XII, 16 and 17). Walden and the loon: "The perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us."

Now we are in a position to understand the parable of John Farmer at the end of "Higher Laws": "All that he could think of was to practice some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect" (XI, 15). Life in conformity to Higher Laws is life in accord with the universal innocence of Wildness. The Middle Path leads us back to the Dusty World. For humans, the return to such accord necessitates a journey during which Wildness and life in conformity to Higher Laws are experienced as metaphysically distant from one another.

DEPARTURE AND RETURN: METAPHOR ON THE MIDDLE PATH

"Brute Neighbors," which immediately follows "Higher Laws," begins as follows:

Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? Why has a man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts. (XII, 8)

And in "The Pond in Winter," after determining the greatest depth of Walden to be one hundred and seven feet, Thoreau says:

This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. (XVI, 6)

It hardly needs stating that Walden is a metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical investigation that proceeds primarily by use of metaphor. Indeed, one of the salient lessons of Walden is that metaphor is only incidentally an ornament of thought; its primary function is as vehicle and instrument of thought. At a time when any number of studies have shown convincingly the power of metaphor in scientific theory construction and in thinking generally, Thoreau’s method hardly needs defense here.

We have already looked at Thoreau’s thought that the moral act of elevating one’s life by a "conscious endeavor" is accomplished by "carv[ing] and paint[ing] the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do" (II, 15). And I have noted that this carving and painting does not simply result in a human fabrication of reality, for "the universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions" (II, 21; my emphasis), and, in this response, lays down the tracks we follow. Different conceptions engender worlds that are equally real but have differing moral and epistemic characteristics, they engender different worlds and generate different fates. "Carv[ing] and paint[ing] the very atmosphere and medium through which we look" is a moral and epistemological act.

Thoreau couches his discussion of reality solidly within his view concerning the metaphorical construction of reality—a co-construction, really: we conceive, and the universe answers. ‘Reality’ has a moral/epistemic dimension:

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvium which covers the globe...till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality.... (II, 22)

(Thoreau’s use of "we can call" (emphasis added) here must be underscored. He does not say "is.") Soon after, Thoreau says:

If you stand right fronting and face to face with a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. (II, 22)

Robert Pogue Harrison’s reading of this passage seems exactly right: "Unlike a fact of science, [a fact of life, in Thoreau’s sense] is nontransferable and nonreiterative....In this sense a fact of life amounts to a personal fatality." Such facts make their appearance during journeys that have a particular moral and epistemological texture, journeys that take place within particular moral and epistemic worlds.

[Perhaps another example of a conception of truth with a moral dimension would be helpful. Louise Profeit-LeBlanc (Northern Tutchone), Native Heritage Advisor, Yukon Heritage Branch, in conversation, used a Northern Tutchone term, tli an oh, that she translated as "correctly true," "responsibly true" (a "responsible truth"), "true to what you believe in," "what is good for you and the community," and "rings true for everybody’s well-being." This is clearly a conception of truth that is ethically nuanced, a conception of truth closely tied to notions of responsibility, well-being, and community, a conception that is both mindful and gracious, that insists that matters of truth are at the same time matters of comportment.]

In the block quote above, Thoreau speaks of facts as having two surfaces, and he does this before he introduces the cimeter metaphor. The two surfaces are referred to outside the cimeter metaphor: facts have two surfaces, as though they were cimeters. What are these two surfaces? I suggest that they are Wildness and life in conformity to Higher Laws—that is, to use Thoreau’s metaphors, the loon and Walden are the two surfaces of ‘facts’. And in the Dusty World these two surfaces are one.

REPRISE: WILDNESS

But while we are confined to books...we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor.... (IV, 1)

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 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. The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward! Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution. (XVI, 1)

No question on Nature’s lips, and therefore no need for metaphor. Or is it the other way around? Nature speaks without metaphor, and therefore "puts no question...which we mortals ask." At any rate, the characteristic human endeavor by which we aspire to a life in conformity to Higher Laws is not a possibility for that which speaks without metaphor. This is surely part of what is intended by proclaiming the "universal innocence" of Wildness. Yet wild nature is abundant, full, prodigal, exuberant.

REPRISE: HIGHER LAWS

When we turn to Thoreau’s metaphors for life in conformity to Higher Laws—Walden and the hawk described at the end of "Spring"—a very different picture emerges. The "slight and graceful hawk" is the very antithesis of the prodigal Wildness spoken of two paragraphs later. Its flight is ethereal, "as if it had never set foot on terra firma....It appeared to have no companion in the universe...and to need none but the morning and the ether" (XVII, 22). And Walden, as we have seen, is the very image of Brahman, into which all existence is resolved: "no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there"—though "perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh" (XVI, 20).

In many ways there is very little of substance that can be said about Walden; its purity is, close to Brahman’s, such that it is virtually without content.

The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet....and you think that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there....It is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in it; and of noticeable plants,...a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or white, but only a few small heart-leaves and potamogetons, and perhaps a water-target or two; all which however a bather might not perceive; and these plants are clean and bright like the element they grow in. The stones extend a rod or two into the water, and then the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest parts, where there is usually a little sediment...and a bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter. (IX, 6 and 7)

The conversation between the hermit (Thoreau) and the poet that begins "Brute Neighbors" I read as a commentary on "Higher Laws," which immediately precedes "Brute Neighbors." That conversation constitutes a commentary on "Higher Laws," and thereby provides the reader with a transition from the trackless world of Higher Laws into a world of tracks—sign of all kinds—the world of brute neighbors, the Dusty World. Thoreau says to the poet that he is "just concluding a serious meditation" and that he should be left alone for a while.

Hermit alone. Let me see; where was I? Methinks I was in this frame of mind; the world lay about at this angle. Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? If I should soon bring this meditation to an end, would another so sweet occasion be likely to offer? I was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life. I fear my thoughts will not come back to me....My thoughts have left no track....I know not whether it was the dumps or a budding ecstasy. (XII, 5)

In contrast to the abundance, prodigality, and exuberance of Wildness—its fullness—and its copious voice, the realm of Higher Laws is thin indeed. Eventually one’s thoughts leave no track, and it is even uncertain whether one is on the track of a "budding ecstasy." We need the tonic of Wildness that we "may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above" (I, 20).

REPRISE: THE DUSTY WORLD

There is no scale, no common measure, in terms of which we can speak of life in conformity to Higher Laws as better than Wildness. As I noted earlier, Thoreau says in "Higher Laws" that "our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice" (XI, 10). Yet, in "Spring" we read that "the impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground" (XVII, 24). The realms of Wildness and life in conformity to Higher Laws are identical. A Buddhist term captures the idea best: sunyata, emptiness. The realm of Higher Laws is one with Wildness, since each is empty of svabhava, own-being; each has existence only in relation to the other. They have epistemic and moral existence, which "we can call reality," not metaphysical existence.

Thoreau’s actual distance from absolute Wildness, understood as metaphysically antithetical to life in conformity to Higher Laws, can be measured by his use of metaphor throughout Walden. His distance from a life in conformity to Higher Laws, understood as metaphysically antithetical to Wildness, can be seen in a different way. Not only does "Higher Laws" begin with powerful images of his own instinct for Wildness and his declared reverence for them, but it is rife with disclaimers about Thoreau’s (and our) ability to stay long in the rarified air of Higher Laws.

In the metaphysical realm of the infinitely Wild all things are "mysterious and unexplorable...unfathomed by us because unfathomable." In the metaphysical realm of Higher Laws our tracks fade and we are resolved into unity with Brahman. The latter is an ascetic world and the former is without metaphor. In the realm of Higher Laws metaphors lose content: the good which that realm promises is without content and nuance; the universal innocence of Wildness is without reflection, without metaphor. Our metaphorical tracks are, and must be, on some nonmetaphysical Middle Path between metaphysical asceticism and a metaphysical Wildness that speaks without metaphor. This Middle Path exists only because of the tension between, interweaving of, or, ultimately, identity between, a life lived in conformity to Higher Laws and a life that is true to its own Wildness. The fullness of the void (sunyata): the Wildness of a life lived in conformity to Higher Laws.

Walden ends (excepting the "Conclusion") with the image of the "slight and graceful hawk" and a closely related transitional paragraph (XVII, 23); followed by the powerful discussion of Wildness; followed, finally, by a leisurely saunter on the Middle Path, where Wildness and Higher Laws interweave as one in the Dusty World:

Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly on the hill-sides here and there. On the third or fourth of May I saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month I heard the whippoorwill, the brown-thrasher, the veery, the wood-pewee, the chewink, and other birds. I had heard the wood-thrush long before. The phoebe had already come once more and looked in at my door and window, to see if my house was cavern-like enough for her, sustaining herself on humming wings with clinched talons, as if she held by the air, while she surveyed the premises. The sulphur-like pollen of the pitch-pine soon covered the pond and the stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collected a barrel-ful. This is the "sulphur showers" we hear of. Even in Chalidas’ drama of Sacontala, we read of "rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lotus." And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.

Thus was my first year’s life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847. (XVII, 25-6)

SAUNTERING IN THE PLUMWOOD FOREST

(Concluding Philosophical Postscript)

One danger in reading Walden is in reading it as positing a hierarchical dualism between Wildness and life in conformity to Higher Laws—a version of the dualism between nature and culture. Robert Pogue Harrison, for example, seems to succumb to such a reading:

...Thoreau presumes to discover his irreducible relation to nature. What he discovers is that this relation remains opaque. We are in relation to nature because we are not within nature. We do not intrinsically belong to the natural order...but find in our relation the terms of our destiny as excursioners on the earth. Thoreau’s allusion to a "next excursion" implies that the experiment at Walden, as well as life in its very essence, are also excursions—excursions into a world where we are at once estranged and alive, or better, alive in our estrangement.

In Val Plumwood’s ecofeminist analysis of the nature/culture dualism, undertaken specifically in the context of a critique of wilderness dualism, this dualism is understood as involving a polarizing assumption of a radical discontinuity between nature and culture which valorizes one at the expense of the other. In the West this dualism, whether it valorizes nature at the expense of culture or culture at the expense of nature, has been, she says, profoundly anthropocentric and androcentric. This arises from

...a polarity which is part of a wider hegemonic centrism. In hegemonic centrism, the dualised Other is defined in various ways in relation to a self conceived as centre, usually as a lack or absence of the self or its supposed qualities. The coloniser defines the Other as background to his foreground, and as inessential in contrast to himself as essential.

It is tempting to read Walden as endorsing a radical discontinuity, a dualism, between Wildness and a life in conformity to Higher Laws; I have cited ample evidence for such a reading above. This dualism (if such it is) fails to fit Val Plumwood’s account at one point, however: Thoreau valorizes both Wildness and a life in conformity to Higher Laws. Since, however, Thoreau centers himself in the realm of Higher Laws with Wildness as other in which we "witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander" (XVII, 24), we can see Thoreau’s dualism (if such it be) as a special case: Though Wildness is valorized, it is subordinated to a life in conformity to Higher Laws—"Nature is hard to overcome, but she must be overcome" (XI, 12); Wildness serves the purposes of a life in conformity to Higher Laws—"We need the tonic of wildness" (XVII, 24). Thus, Thoreau’s excursions into Wildness can be seen as background against which Thoreau’s quest for a life in conformity to Higher Laws is foregrounded. To the extent that this background is prized, the value of the foregrounded activity is heightened—"Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?" (I, 20).

Such cases of hierarchical dualism coupled with hegemonic centrism are all the more troublesome because their devaluation of one pole of the dualism at the expense of the other is masked by valorization of the implicitly devalued pole, as women are implicitly devalued even as they are raised up on a pedestal. Similarly, anthropocentric ‘environmentalists’ claim Thoreau as their own; even an anthropocentrist can see the value of wildness as a tonic.

I have done my best to provide a nondualistic reading of the relationship between Wildness and a life in conformity to Higher Laws in Walden. As Robert Pogue Harrison says, Walden is the tale of an excursion; and much of this excursion is told in the framework of a metaphysical chasm between Wildness and a life in conformity to Higher Laws. This is as it should be, however: For Thoreau, the metaphysical distance between Wildness and a life in conformity to Higher Laws is the view from the path—and that path needs mapping—whereas the redemption of the body (the epistemic transformation of Wildness and Higher Laws) signals a life truly in conformity to Higher Laws, a condition glimpsed only here and there in Walden, a tale told from the path.

But the path through and beyond wilderness dualisms changes some as it winds out of the Woods of Walden and into the Plumwood Forest, as it does for most of us in the late Twentieth Century:

Although wild places are not dispensable, certain oppressive and problematic ways of conceptualizing them are dispensable, and may hinder rather than help our attempts to protect them. The problems wilderness critics point to are created by the infection of our dominant concepts of wilderness by the western dualism of nature and culture, which is deeply eurocentric, androcentric and anthrocentric. But...if some understandings of the wilderness concept have practiced certain kinds of erasures, some of the new wilderness sceptics are in danger of practising counter-erasures....We are in danger of being trapped in a set of pendulum swings between the poles of nature and culture, unless we can break the dualism and develop more thoroughgoing and effective forms of environmentalism which replace feminised by feminist concepts of the Other.

But we are not far from Walden as we join Val Plumwood as she contemplates Surprise Bay, on Tasmania’s south coast track, and is reminded

...of the limit and boundary of the mysterious wild other, of what will not be penetrated and controlled. It also reminds me of an intimate and physical bond of knowledge with the earth, through a form of conversation with its great, laboriously-inscribed body which can only be entered into through the answering effort of our human bodies as we walk among it. In these places we wilderness travellers have sought the wisdom of the land, carried our survival on our backs, and measured ourselves as limited and only half-hardy animals. Here I have spent some of the most intensely alive but most humbling days of my life.

For both Henry David Thoreau and Val Plumwood,

...wilderness in the full sense of the wild other cannot properly be specified as an absence of the human; rather it is the presence of the other, the presence of the long-evolving biotic communities and animal species which reside there, the presence of ancient biospheric forces and of the unique combination of them which has shaped that particular, unique place.