Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [168]
“To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws.”
In short, a scientist.
But Emerson’s grief also had an edge to it, a kind of anger at fate which spilled over into frustration even with Thoreau himself:
“I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party.”
Whoah. Pretty harsh, that. And Frank saw reason to believe that this was not the first time Emerson had used the phrase—and that the first time it had been said right to Thoreau’s face. They had argued a lot, and about things they both thought mattered, like how to live in a nation where slavery was legal. And in Thoreau’s journal, whenever he was grumbling about the terrible inadequacies of friendship, it was pretty clear that he was usually complaining about Emerson. This was particularly true whenever he wrote about The Friend. It made sense, given the way they were; Emerson had a huge range of acquaintances, and spread himself thin, while Thoreau had what Frank thought would now be called social anxieties, so that he relied heavily on a few people close to him. It would not have been easy for any friend to live up to his standards. Emerson said, “I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human society.”
In any case they clashed, two strong thinkers with their own ideas, and so they saw less of each other, and Emerson disapproved of Thoreau’s withdrawal, and his endless botanizing.
Only in the privacy of his journal did Thoreau make his rebuttal to Emerson’s waspish accusation; this was why Frank thought Emerson had made it directly—perhaps even shouted it: he imagined the two men out in Emerson’s yard, Thoreau having dropped by without warning, withdrawn and contrary, headed into the woods, and the lonely old gabster hurt by this, and frustrated to see the potential great voice of the age go missing in the swamps—“You could be engineering for all America, and yet off you go to be captain of a huckleberry-party!”
Thoreau wrote: “To such a pass our civilization and division of labor has come, that A, a professional huckleberry-picker, has hired B’s field; C, a professed cook, is superintending the cooking of a pudding made of the berries; while Professor D, for which the pudding is intended, sits in his library writing a book. That book, which should be the ultimate fruit of the huckleberry field, will be worthless. There will be none of the spirit of the huckleberry in it. The reading of it will be a weariness to the flesh. I believe in a different kind of division of labor, and that Professor D should divide himself between the library and the huckleberry-field.”
Four days later, still nursing this riposte, he wrote:
“We dwellers in the huckleberry pastures are slow to adopt the notions of large towns and cities and may perchance be nicknamed huckleberry people.”
In the end, despite these spats, the two men were friends. They both knew that a twist of fate had thrown them into the same time and place together, and they both treasured the contact. Thoreau wrote of his employer, teacher, mentor, friend:
“Emerson has special talents unequalled. The divine in man has had no more easy, methodically distinct expression. His personal influence upon young persons greater than any man’s. In his world every man would be a poet, Love would reign, Beauty would take place, Man and Nature would harmonize.”
Interesting how even here Thoreau alluded to that source of conflict between them, the question of how to make an impact on the time. Meanwhile, Emerson thought Thoreau had disappeared into the woods and failed to live up to his promise; he could not foresee how widely Thoreau would eventually be read. It took many decades before Thoreau’s journals were transcribed, and only then was his full accomplishment revealed, a very rare thing: the transcription of a mind onto the page, so that