Thoreau, like Emerson, admired mythology as a more meaningful form than annalistic, fact-oriented history, and explored the subject at length in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Thoreau, too, respected archetypes over facts, and found that myth was demonstrated as powerfully in the life of the ordinary person in the present as in that of rulers in the past. Thoreau dismissed purely factual history (along with biography, literature, religion, medicine, and science) because it precluded comprehensive vision. Uninterpreted history, he suggested in A Week (in the chapter entitled "Friday"), "accumulates like rubbish before the portals of nature." It is not surprising that Thoreau found little value in history and other disciplines that focused on the particular but stopped short of broader perception. He celebrated universals, and emphasized the way in which particulate information provides evidence of the eternal. The mere accumulation of such evidence, however, does not constitute understanding. Alertness to its symbolism and a receptiveness to revelatory intuition are necessary.
Throughout A Week, Thoreau provided a number of examples of the expression of the universal through the particular. In the chapter "Saturday," for instance, he wrote of passing a fisherman on the shore of the Concord River, and reflected, "The characteristics and pursuits of various ages and races of men are always existing in epitome in every neighborhood." And in further commenting "The pleasures of my earliest youth have become the inheritance of other men," he connected recurrent human patterns with his own personal history.
If Thoreau rejected narrowly focused disciplines in A Week, he emphasized others myth, fable, ancient literature, Oriental scripture and poetry that are irreducible into factual particulars and that consequently allow a more direct perception of universals. Myth presents archetypes of human experience rather than the biographies of individual men. Thoreau wrote in the chapter "Monday" of bringing history closer to myth by subordinating fact and elevating evocative generalities: "We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create, than by its groundwork and composition." Thoreau explored the relationship between change and permanence in history and the preeminence of the present over the past: "In reality, history fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening. What is of moment is its hue and color. Time hides no treasures; we want not its then, but its now." The overall landscape remains the same, even though the details that compose it and the light in which it is seen are always changing.
The Subjectivity of Historical Perception
Thoreau, like Emerson, stressed that subjectivity is inseparable from our historical perception. We can only know what we know about the past through the window of the present. It is impossible truly to recapture what is no more. In the chapter "Monday" in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau stressed the individual in the here and now ("The researcher is more memorable than the researched"), and urged the historian to deal with the subjectivity inherent in historical perception by seeking what is common to all ages:
Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veil hangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.
He pointed out the endurance of the forces at work upon and within the individual: "The gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens ... " And he extolled mythology as an expressive medium for conveying the heart, rather than the details, of what transpired in the past:
If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, ... the world's inheritance, still reflecting some of their original splendor, like the fragments of clouds tinted by the rays of the departed sun ... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race ... We will not be confined by historical, even geological periods, which would allow us to doubt of a progress in human affairs.
Thoreau indicated that man would remain capable in the future of everything accomplished in the past: " ... in the lapse of the divine periods, other divine agents and godlike men will assist to elevate the race as much above its present condition."
The Classics on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Throughout A Week, Thoreau interwove past and present, myth and history. He opened "Monday" with allusions to the dawn of time and, in describing a ferryman on the river in the morning fog, to death. He referred to the Styx the ancient river of the underworld and to Charon the ferryman of the dead. He reflected on "the lapse of the river and of human life" and on the permanence of the eternal despite the transitory nature of the particular, the individual. For Thoreau, both myth and nature (always symbolic as well as concrete in Thoreau) evoke those universals that should form the subject matter of history. In the chapter "Thursday," he used the story of Hannah Dustan a white woman taken captive by the Indians to suggest the way in which history approached elementally transcends our measures of time. Hannah Dustan's story is both ancient and recent at the same time: "This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that ... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages." Universal history is thus understood not only through myth and ancient history, but is experienced more directly in events closer to our own time. The connecting thread of humanity unites past and present.
The age of the world is great enough for our imaginations ... without borrowing any years from the geologist. From Adam and Eve ... we ... continue our journey down ... to America. It is a wearisome while. And yet the lives of but sixty old women ... say of a century each, strung together, are sufficient to reach over the whole ground. Taking hold of hands they would span the interval from Eve to my own mother. A respectable tea-party merely, whose gossip would be universal history.
History as Self-Revelation
From this perspective, our understanding of events like the Concord Fight, then, comprise both ancient and modern history, and tell us as much about ourselves as they do about the heroes of April 19, 1775.
In holding up myth as an antidote to the shortcomings of factual history, in imbuing historical events with a larger-than-life meaning that transcends time and place, Emerson and Thoreau focused on permanence in the face of change and conferred a higher significance upon the life of each individual. No doubt they did so partly in response to what was happening in the world around them. They lived at a time of tremendous change territorial exploration and expansion; growing tension over the issue of slavery, exacerbated by the annexation of new territory; industrialization and technological development; anxiety over the increasing sense of dehumanization that accompanied mechanization; and major developments in transportation and communication.
But the roots of the Transcendentalists' Universal History went deeper than that. Change is inevitable not only from period to period in history, but in the cycle of each human life as well. Myth, like religion, provides constants to counterbalance this state of flux. We embellish history not because we are poor historians, but because we need something more elementally satisfying, more relevant to ourselves, more humanistic than history as we know it, which has proven an inadequate and disjointed record of the human spirit. We always need to reaffirm this spirit and its connection to something larger than ourselves.
Text: ©2001 Leslie Perrin Wilson
Art: Mythological images courtesy of ArtToday.
Backgrounds: Deborah Bier for Hometown Websmith and Asynjur's Fantasy Realm.
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Thoreau, like Emerson, admired mythology as a more meaningful form than annalistic, fact-oriented history, and explored the subject at length in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Thoreau, too, respected archetypes over facts, and found that myth was demonstrated as powerfully in the life of the ordinary person in the present as in that of rulers in the past. Thoreau dismissed purely factual history (along with biography, literature, religion, medicine, and science) because it precluded comprehensive vision. Uninterpreted history, he suggested in A Week (in the chapter entitled "Friday"), "accumulates like rubbish before the portals of nature." It is not surprising that Thoreau found little value in history and other disciplines that focused on the particular but stopped short of broader perception. He celebrated universals, and emphasized the way in which particulate information provides evidence of the eternal. The mere accumulation of such evidence, however, does not constitute understanding. Alertness to its symbolism and a receptiveness to revelatory intuition are necessary.