SOURCE: Suchoff, David B. “‘A More Conscious Silence’: Friendship and Language in Thoreau's Week.” ELH 49, no. 3 (fall 1982): 673‐87.

[In the following essay, Suchoff contends that Thoreau sought to understand the mystery of nature through friendship rather than language.]

“It is difficult to begin without borrowing,” Thoreau tells us as he relates the borrowing of an ax to found his cabin at Walden, “but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow men to have an interest in your enterprise.”¹ The project of Walden, promising to take the writer to the “necessary of life” (7), and at the same time to make him matutine, capable of pure origin like the morning, begins already in debt. “All poets and heroes, like Memnon,” he tells us, “are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is perpetual sunrise” (62). The pure beginning Thoreau seeks at Walden is already undercut by the need for the axe, which like the pen, divides at the same time it discovers. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau will describe the poetic frenzy as the poet who scratches with his pen, but who does “not detect where the jewel lies, which, perhaps, we have in the mean time cast to a distance, or quite covered up again.”² The insufficiency of his beginning throws Thoreau back upon the human community; and though that beginning has been interrupted, Nature is nonetheless seen as a process of continuous origination to which the poet can lend his ear: “The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it” (58).

The rift between the abundant meaning inherent in Nature and the possibility of poetic access to it becomes the major theme of Thoreau's Week. Consisting of the account of a canoe trip Thoreau took with his brother, the Week returns again and again to the disproportion of poetic language to the natural truths it would evoke, yet does so at the same time it asserts at least the possibility of a union between the mind and Nature. Few are the critics, however, who sense the prevalence of this problem in the work at all. A sensitive reading such as Sherman Paul's centers on the supposed union achieved by Thoreau's language with the natural meaning it encounters in the course of the journey, the river providing the background for a transcendentalist drama of correspondence in which “everything radiated meaning.”³ Similarly, Lawrence Buell sees the work as a successful example of an optimistic transcendental program, with nature providing the material for a fusion by means of poetic language of disparate aspects of experience: “Like the river, like the trip itself, the speaker's imagination in A Week moves both upstream and down, forwards towards self‐realization but simultaneously back in time.”⁴ Buell goes on to claim that the journey takes Thoreau “as far back as the beginnings of civilization”; in fact, A Week will go much further than this by presenting and calling into question the transcendentalist notion of the correspondence between language and nature, which were supposed to have coalesced at some distant, originary moment.

On Sunday morning of A Week, Thoreau bodes a beginning “with more the auroral rosy and white than the yellow light in it, as if it dated from earlier than the fall of man” (43), a beginning of original innocence; and on the same day, the noise of wood and stream promises an original rather than originating poetry, capable of a mystic animation of nature: “But today I like best the echo amid these cliffs and woods. It is no feeble imitation, but rather its original, as if some rural Orpheus played over the strain again to show how it should sound” (50). The echo, in its distance and secondary status, is nonetheless permeated with a presence and primary significance for Thoreau. The journey will take him and his brother towards a hoped‐for merging of the secondary and primary, where the poet hopes to achieve an interpenetration of the literal and metaphorical streams. “And I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy but much abused Concord River with the most famous in history” (12), he tells us, that river being Parnassus.

The project of interfusing poetry, history, and Nature, which A Week undertakes, can be likened to Thoreau's favorite reverie, “watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same laws with the system, with time, with all that is made” (12). Although the river's own progress is predicated on its lapse in spite of its continuity, as an emblem it shares with Thoreau the project of his language in A Week, to obscure the tearing and divisiveness which he sees as characteristic of writing. Before embarking on the first day of the voyage, he looks with longing at the fields of men “greater … than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so.” Their fields are imagined as a kind of writing which hides the wounds it effects:

Look at their fields, and imagine what they might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and plowing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already written for want of parchment.

(8)

The river, like Nature, is also like the poetry towards which the matutine poet strives—a perpetual morning, a renewal which hides the debt of its newness. “Concord River is remarkable for the gentleness of its current, which is scarcely perceptible” (9), as poetic origination hopes to be. The act of writing, however, is dramatically counterposed to the river's smooth and lapsing continuity: “The talent of composition is very dangerous—the striking out the heart of life at a blow, as the Indian takes off a scalp. I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it” (329). Like the axe which causes Thoreau to reflect that all human beginnings reflect a basic insufficiency, the act of composition is seen as a rending or wounding, severing the poet from his self‐sufficient dream. The image of language presented in A Week becomes a highly contradictory one; while the poet would echo the eternal origination of morning, he would confer on that echo a primacy over that which it repeats. Thoreau makes a similar claim in Walden, that the echo of church bells, when heard from a sufficient distance, became indistinguishable from the original sound: “The echo is, to some extent,” he concludes, “an original sound” (85).

A Week will carry out this contradictory idea, transforming it into a significant process. The narrative expresses a longing to attain a match between poetic and natural origination; at the same time, however, its metaphors are implicitly undermining such a claim. “Wednesday” and its discussion of Friendship then become the work's metacritical discourse, dealing self‐consciously with the contradictory notion of language embedded in the previous narrative. “Wednesday” will show that the impossibility of the union of language and nature, and the difference between mind and the meaning it would perceive, provide the opportunity for a profound and precarious hermeneutic, represented by Friendship. Though the “matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere” (61), Thoreau argues, the river itself, in regard to that intellect, was always “flowing long and full of meaning, but untranslatable” (84).

The peculiar tone and subtle organization of A Week derive from the work's paradoxical project: to assert simultaneously the identity and difference of language and Nature. The poet may hear, and long for, an original unity between himself, his words, and natural experience; but the words themselves can only lament the falling of the identity:

The loftiest strains of the muse are, for the most part, sublimely plaintive, and not a carol as free as Nature's. The content which the sun shines to celebrate from morning to evening, is unsung. The muse solaces herself, and is not ravished but consoled. There is a catastrophe implied, and a tragic element in all our verse, and less of the lark and morning dews than the nightingale and evening shades.

(368)

The tone of the work is at the same time prospective and retrospective, looking forward to a consummation which in fact can only plaintively be sought. The shifting levels of discourse, its various digressions into philosophy, literature, and history, serve to mollify the sharp edges of the stroke of composition.⁵ The shifting between description, poetry, history, and reflection enacts and disguises the process of continuous displacement which characterizes the mind's relation to Nature. The initial sundering, repeated in the act of writing, would be healed over in the linearity of prose; the “lapses” in style would aspire to the seamless continuity of the river. The narration of the journey, then, promises a self‐discovery and healing, “as if our birth had first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through Nature like a wedge, and not till the wound heals and the scar disappears, do we begin to discover where we are, and that Nature is one and continuous everywhere” (349).

At first Thoreau's determination seems to assert his desire that his experience of the week place him at Nature's center; but at the same time he will suggest that his language can only hint at such an experience. Though he can claim that man stands like the sun at the universe's center (“the universe is a sphere whose centre is wherever there is intelligence. The sun is not so central as man” [349]), repeated statements in A Week will contradictorily assert that its own language will be like the poetry and mythology it cites: only a fragmentary reflection of a creative center. The inheritance of literature becomes seen much as the debt incurred borrowing the axe at Walden, pointing towards the indebtedness of the act of expression, as opposed to the river's free, unowned flow. A Week's endeavor will be as “the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, so to speak, of the world's inheritance, wrecks of poems still reflecting some of their original splendor, like fragments of clouds tinted by the rays of the departed sun; reaching into the latest summer day, and allying this our time to the morning of creation” (157). Thoreau makes it clear to us on the final day of his trip that he wakes precisely on this “latest summer day” of literature's inheritance: “We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in Autumn; for summer passes into Autumn in some unimaginable point in time” (334). The splendor of the moment between summer's fullness and autumn's Fall can neither be imagined nor narrated in literature.

Several critics have noticed the paradoxical character of Thoreau's general stance in A Week, and one focuses perceptively on the problem of writing. Walter Hesford notes that “in the course of the voyage, summer turns to fall. Throughout the book we are made to feel that we are enjoying a golden moment on the edge of a fall.”⁶ Eric Sundquist looks at the issue of writing but understands origins differently, sees Thoreau as destroying the authority he seeks for America by corrupting the very blankness of Nature which constitutes its meaning for him:

What is striking … is Thoreau's subtle alertness to the fact that the very figures with which he fills the blank of America, the figures of his own writing, perpetuate both the dream and the debt. … Once the blank is filled, it no longer functions as the lost innocence avidly pined after. … [H]is writing turns him into an entrepreneur who corrupts his edenic property at the same time he advertises its value.⁷

Both these critics recognize a profound doubleness inherent in Thoreau's project in A Week; and though Sundquist aptly suggests that Thoreau wishes to conceal the difference between his writing and Nature, this does not speak completely to the complex process the Week effects, for it is only by previously asserting and implicitly denying the identity of mind and Nature that the work's explicitly metacritical discourse, the discussion of Friendship in “Wednesday,” is able to bear the weight it does. By examining A Week in light of Emerson's theory of language, as expressed in Nature and the essay “Circles,” and by examining Thoreau's journals, one can see how he transforms Emerson's optimistic assertion of the identity of Nature and language into a complex hermeneutic process, arriving at a completely different conclusion. Rather than the Week being the account of one who succeeds in “domesticating the violence” of his literary return to Nature and who “fails to interpret the silence accurately,” Thoreau can be seen as looking beyond language altogether.⁸ Friendship will become the emblem of a shifting, contradictory relationship between mind and meaning which does no violence to the meaning it nonetheless hears.

II

In Nature, Emerson argues that words are derived from the natural world, and that the natural world itself symbolizes the facts of spiritual truth:

Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance … this is the origin of all words that convey a spiritual import—so conspicuous a fact in the history of our language—is our least debt to Nature. Nature, in this view, is already emblematic to man of the spiritual truths of his existence.⁹

The identity of language and Nature becomes the basis of a profound writing for Emerson. Savages who are closer to the “remote time” (32) when words and Nature were linked, speak predominantly in figures; good writing is seen as a repetition of this pure, unproblematic origin. The writer draws upon the natural world about him to express the spontaneous conceptions of his Reason:

Good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working of the original cause through its instrument. …

(36)

In his essay “Circles,” Emerson expands upon this suggestion that the forms of Nature become the forms of language. The circle is seen as the original trope, “and throughout Nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” The act of reading becomes emblematic of the mind's relationship to Nature, and reading, rather than leading to any abrupt fissures in the pattern of Nature's significance, finds every end in fact to be a beginning leading to a larger circular pattern of meaning:

We are all our lives reading the copious sense of this first of forms. … Our lives are an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in Nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid‐morn, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

(281)

Thoreau often seems to be espousing a similar poetic, as a guide to his own enterprise as well as the reader's reading of it. In Walden, he announces playfully his intention to cultivate beans “as some must work in the fields for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable maker one day” (12). Elsewhere in Walden, such an easy one‐to‐one correspondence between experience and language is denied. At the beginning of “Sounds,” Thoreau warns us that “while we are confined to books,” we must remember the language all things speak beyond trope or metaphor: “We are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard” (71). Yet in a journal passage Thoreau clearly affirms the Emersonian dictum of language expressing the spiritual truths emblematized in Nature: “The roots of letters are things. Natural object and phenomena are the original types which express our thoughts and feelings.”¹⁰ In spite of this assertion, Thoreau will claim in A Week that Nature's writing is incommensurable with and different from man's: “Nature, who is superior to all styles and ages, is now, with pensive face, composing her poem Autumn with which no work of man will bear to be compared” (377). In another journal entry Thoreau contradicts Emerson, locating endlessness not in any primary figure radiating between Nature and man, but in silence, the absence of speech and figure:

My life at this moment is like a summer morning when birds are singing; yet that is false, for Nature's is an idle pleasure by comparison: my hour has a more solid serenity; I have been breaking silence these 23 years, and have hardly made a dent in it: Silence has no end, speech is but the beginning of it. My friend thinks I keep silence, who am only choked with letting it out so fast. Does he forget that new mines of secrecy are constantly opening in me?

(7:210)

Nature's song appears disproportionate and even false to the meaning which moves within Thoreau, and that meaning is predicated upon the absence of speech rather than transference of trope from Nature to language. The passage begins with a simile equating the poet's life with the morning, and then denies the adequacy of simile to express the meaning he is choking with. Poetic speech, though it begins like the birds who sing at morning, dents and rends silence at the moment it speaks. In A Week, in a passage which we will shortly compare with the loon episode in Walden, Thoreau will suggest that the “untold” or unthought always looms larger than the ability of the divisive act of human speech to contain. Here, the poet is pictured as sitting upon a lake into which he dives in search of its secrets:

A man may run on confidently for a time, thinking he has her under his thumb, and shall one day exhaust her, but he too must at last be silent, and men remark only how brave a beginning he has made; for when he at last dives into her, so vast is the disproportion of the told to the untold, that the former will seem but the bubble on the surface where he disappeared.

(393)

The image of utterance diving into the surface of meaning, only to be lost, recalls Thoreau's allegorized attempt to anticipate the movements of the diving loon upon Walden pond: “While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine,” he tells us as he tries to approach the loon but is continually frustrated (161). The effort becomes a “pretty game” characterized by a sliding, shifting, and unconstant relation between Thoreau and the meaning in Nature he would anticipate. The loon's diving, he speculates, takes it to depths which no man is able to fathom, “for he had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond at its deepest part.” Thoreau's project at Walden, as discussed by Walter Michaels, has been the quest to find such a bottom for human knowledge; yet at the same time the symbolic necessity for the pond's bottomlessness is maintained.¹¹ If we take Thoreau's use of a similar metaphor in A Week into consideration, human speech, as a kind of diving similar to the loon's, seems destined to remain on the surface rather than reach bottom. Inasmuch as the loon becomes a figure for Thoreau, his inability to anticipate it represents the insufficiency of the figurative imagination. Just as Thoreau cannot get within a half dozen yards of the loon, so figure can never attain the “radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts” (34) which Emerson spoke of in Nature. The loon penetrates the surface of the pond over and over again without scarring it, breaking it only to reach bottom; and the pond itself, in Thoreau's description, is supposed to be at the same time “smooth” and “a tumultuous surface” (162). Description trying to totalize Nature wraps itself in contradiction. In man's attempt to get at this sliding meaning which shifts from surface to bottom and smoothness to tumult, to get it “under his thumb,” he is left but a bubble on the surface, like Thoreau sitting on Walden pond watching the loon depart.

III

As Thoreau listens to an owl on the Concord horizon, he harkens to “one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard,” and next claims that to the person with the proper ear, “there were in it the elements of a concord such as these plans never saw” (186). At the beginning of A Week, the river Concord becomes the locus of the hope for such a unity. Thoreau counterposes the Indian name for the river, Musketaquid, or Grass‐Ground, with “its other but kindred name of Concord” (5), and proceeds to question the status of both in regard to the river they would describe. “It will be the grass ground river as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks” (5), he speculates. The river bespeaks a concord between names and natural and social phenomena. In his journal Thoreau emphasizes the importance of names in acquiring the proper understanding of Nature: “With a knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition of the knowledge of the thing” (11:137). The journey upstream and down proposes to take Thoreau deeper into the experience of nature he would describe, for in another journal entry, he tells us “a more intimate knowledge, a deeper experience, will surely originate a word” (11:386). The origination of language the trip is to provoke, however, constantly hovers on the brink of silence. While Thoreau will weave into his journey the accounts of historians concerning the region, and the fable and the lore of local history, eager as he is to “quote so good an authority” (5), the authority of these descriptions will be called into question by the “deeper and more conscious silence” (40) which broke the silence of each night. The tombstones mentioned in their gazeteer have been washed away by the stream's spring freshets, and though there are separate inscriptions on the tombstones which do remain, of the Indians whom these settlers displaced and their original domain, “there is no journal to tell” (122).

Saturday consists largely of an account of the names of the fish inhabiting the river, and as the names correspond to the river's life in an edenic manner, Thoreau at day's end is moved to a praise of the “never failing beauty and accuracy of language, the most perfect art in the world” (42). Like the sounds of the river, language is said to be able to give testimony to Nature's sound state, the denotation and connotation of the word combining to express language's ability to achieve harmony with the river. The sense of adamic lyricism continues on Sunday, which begins with a light “as if dated from earlier than the fall of man” (43). As Thoreau and his brother pass various islands in the stream, like Adam, they “gave names to them” (44). The day continues with “an ideal remoteness and perfection” (46); the sense of harmony gradually deepens until it includes elements which begin to subvert it. While noticing “the mirror—like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected” (48), Thoreau's perception of harmony becomes divided. The shallowest water becomes “unfathomable”:

We noticed that it required separate intention of the eye, a more free and abstract vision, to see the reflected trees and the sky than to see the river bottom merely; and so there are manifold visions in the direction of every object, and even the most opaque reflect the heavens from their surface. Some men have their eyes naturally intended to the one, and some to the other object.

(48)

That which gives the opaque surface its ability to reflect the heavens, in fact, is its very opacity; and when the human eye focuses on this blankness to gain a “more free and abstract vision,” it loses the solid certainty of the bottom. Description, like the name, which elsewhere was claimed to possess the plenitude of meaning inherent in nature, is here belied by the phenomenal complexity of perception. Half of the river's complexity simply “drops out” in any description Thoreau can try. The attempt to describe nature in language thus seems to involve a loss, rather than appropriation of meaning; though naming betokens an original sympathy between language and natural truth, this phenomenal appearance of the river itself resists any such facile correspondence with the human senses. Thus the bottom gives Thoreau knowledge of the heavens and a wide‐ranging imagination only at the price of effacing the certainty it represents. To know the bottom is to lose the capacity for “reflection.”

From this discussion of the river's doubleness, Thoreau moves on to a discussion of myth, scripture and poetry. The fables he ponders, he admits, “are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be made to express a variety of truth” (61). Like Nature, they resist any simple correspondence to a particular truth which the mind would see in them. Having said this, Thoreau cautions against making such an attempt with Nature; in fact the world does not speak clearly and univocally to us in symbols, he suggests in regard to literature. An attempt to see a particular truth embodied in a fable is “like striving to make the sun, or the wind, or the sea, symbols to signify exclusively the particular thoughts of our day” (61). Going on to examine the relations of the various scriptural traditions to truth, as would befit Sunday, Thoreau warns against a “scheme of the universe all cut and dried” (69), and turns back to the river, which was “the only key which could unlock its [Nature's] maze, presenting its hills and valleys, its lakes and streams, in their natural order and position” (83). Having turned back to Nature, the rest of the chapter goes on to discuss the peculiar scripture of poetry, suggesting that it too can be a “natural fruit” (91), and unlock Nature's secrets.

The dream of such an original, adamic language, continues through Monday, which dawns with the “first light which dawned on earth” (117), and Tuesday, as do the counter‐trends, bringing the tension to a culmination in Wednesday's discussion of Friendship. The issue becomes to resolve the meaning of opacity or seeming non‐meaning in the mind's relationship to Nature. For in an intercourse with the world (“the universe is so aptly fitted to our organization” [159]), the sentence which bears back most of the world's living essence is that one which cannot be understood: “Give me a sentence which no man can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it; under its words a kind of blood must circulate forever” (151). That which animates this sentence seems to be precisely its lack of precision, its refusal to slice to the heart of meaning. By going beyond language, Thoreau will suggest that a seeming lack of fit between the mind and the world in fact represents the highest truth the mind can know.

“Wednesday” prepares for the discussion of Friendship carefully, much in the same way that one must situate oneself gradually in relation to the Friend to perceive him accurately.¹² The Friend will not boldly present his secrets to be simply started upon or penetrated. The countryside itself, with its “antiquities ancient and durable, and as useful as any” (250), asks to be interpreted. Time may have penetrated to these secrets, but nonetheless, the soil which remains “is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature.” The poet with the proper “clue” “may still detect the brazen nails which fastened Time's inscriptions, and if he has the gift, decipher them by his clue.” The natural and historical past beckon and depart; though each town passed claims to have been the residence of some great man (254), “The graves of Passaconaway and Wannalancet are marked by no monument on the bank of their native river” (254). Meaning approaches and recedes: “We were always passing some low inviting shore or some overhanging bank, on which, however, we never landed” (238), culminating at a point where Friendship is able to incorporate all the valences of the natural and historical scene: “Friendship is evanescent in every man's experience” (261), Thoreau will finally pronounce. He begins to explain the nature of the evanescence with a remark which applies to Thoreau's understanding of the mind's entire relation to the world of meaning outside of it: “We are inclined to lay chief stress on likeness, and not on difference” (264).

With the discussion of Friendship on Wednesday, A Week both centers and decenters itself. The discussion occurs both at the center of the week, and at the periphery of the week's journey. Thursday morning will begin with “a faint deliberate and ominous sound” (298), and Thoreau will tell us “this was the limit of our voyage” (298). The bond between the two brothers enlarges to encompass the whole question of meaning and its perception by the mind. Friendship will stand as an alternative to a language that would penetrate to the heart of Nature's secrets; instead, it will symbolize the quest for meaning as a complex relationship to a fundamental absence. The center of meaning will turn out to be no center at all, but a significant lack, and comprehending it will involve situating oneself properly to perceive properly a truth which only evanescently discloses itself. Quoting from eastern scriptures, Thoreau says of Nature that “once aware of having been seen, she does not again expose herself to the gaze of the soul” (382‐3). Situating oneself properly in relation to meaning has elsewhere been identified with an avoidance of the violence associated with penetration and writing: “All the world reposes in beauty to him who preserves equipoise in his life, and moves serenely on his path without secret violence” (317). Perceiving the pattern of meaning is dependent on this equipoise, rather than the intentional road which seeks its goal, or the act of writing which seeks “the striking out the heart of life at a blow.” Both the road and writing penetrate towards a secret to be appropriated; the river, by contrast, placidly bearing Thoreau and his brother, imbues their relationship with a complexity of meaning not accessible to such an approach: “Other roads do some violence to Nature, and bring the traveller to stare at her, but the river steals into the scenery and traverses it without intrusion, silently creating and adoring it” (235).

The Friend turns out to be both identical to our wishes and frustrating of them. Thoreau will first explain the bond as a complete union of meaning and purpose predicated upon a maximum of articulation: “Friendship is, at any rate, a relation of perfect equality. The one's love is exactly balanced and represented by the other's” (271). In a tone reminiscent of his remarks on the plaintive quality of poetry, Thoreau laments the fact that the best meaning of the Friend often goes unregarded, when his “thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed” (259). Yet it is precisely that which remains unrepresented and undisclosed in the relation which bears the most meaning. Not the identity of meaning or correspondence of thought and thing provides the self with most self‐understanding, but a positive discontinuity or difference. The finest relations, in fact, are those which are never consummated, like Time's inscriptions which leave behind them a virgin mould. The understanding of meaning will follow as a consequence of the proper degree of receptive reticence, and tragedy is seen to ensue from an Ahabian identification of the self's words with the world:

Our finest relations are not simply kept silent about, but buried under a positive depth of silence, never to be revealed. It may be that we are not even yet acquainted. In human intercourse the tragedy begins not when there is a misunderstanding about words, but when silence is misunderstood.

(278)

The relation between friends stands as a solution to the work's quest for an original language, by suggesting a meaning which transcends language, and by a certain license, “free and irresponsible in its nature” (276), approximates the originary language the poet seeks as “a fragmentary and godlike intercourse of ancient date” (276). Meaning's reticence requires an attitude of gentle patience, instilling a hermeneutic which dwells with the significance it seeks: “The language of Friendship is not in words but meanings. One imagines endless conversations with his Friend, in which his tongue shall be loosed” (273). The proper ear is required to comprehend the meaning‐laden silence: “It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak, and another to hear” (267); yet the speaking is actually no speaking at all: “There are some things which a man never speaks of, which are much finer kept silent about. To the highest communications we only lend a silent ear” (278). Nonetheless, regardless of the presence of these meanings, “We are not competent to hear them at all times” (269).

Communication of the kind described in the discussion of Friendship recalls Thoreau's mention of the empty parlor talk, or parlaver, of which he speaks in Walden (167); such prattle recalls Heidegger's sense of “idle talk” as “the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one's own.”¹³ Thoreau's view of silence is well elucidated by Heidegger's notion of silence manifesting an authentic disclosedness of self; in fact the similarities between the kind of questions both Thoreau and Heidegger ask are striking:

He who never says anything cannot keep silent at any given moment. Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing. To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say—that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case one's reticence makes something manifest, and does away with idle talk. As a mode of discoursing, reticence articulates the intelligibility of Dasein in so primordial a manner, that it gives rise to a potentiality for hearing which is genuine, and to a being with one another which is transparent.

(208)

To be sure, the notion of a significant blankness or unintelligibility appears in Emerson as well, in the chapter “Spirit” of Nature. There Emerson claims that “Of the ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most will say least” (1:66). It is Thoreau, however, who ponders seriously the limits as well as the possibilities of speech; it is these limits which give A Week's endings both a sense of closure and an openness.

On Friday, Thoreau and his brother awake to the commencement of Fall, “in suspense whether the wind blew up or down the stream, … favorable or unfavorable to our voyage” (334). Summing up the greatness of Chaucer, Ossian and other great poets, Thoreau must question the act of summing up itself, for “Nature strews her nuts and flowers broadcast” (374) in a dissemination of meaning, “and never collects them into heaps.” As for the philosopher attempting a similar summing up, “It appears as if the theorizer would always be in arrears, and were doomed forever to arrive at imperfect conclusions” (364).

It is precisely this problem of concluding, which causes Carl Hovde to judge “Friday's” conclusion to the Week as imperfect: “In ‘Friday,’ we are left with little voyage material, and even the meditations follow one another with a lack of coherence often confusing and even careless.”¹⁴ This formulation, however, takes into account neither Thoreau's problematic of endings, nor his ability to embody that problematic in literary form. Agreeing that “Friday” is informed by a peculiar tone absent in the previous chapters, we might more accurately say that it is no accident that the writer who claims the project of theorizing to be imperfect, would himself write an “incoherent” ending more true to the chaos of Nature's broadcast without end. Thus it is also no accident that the Week concludes on Friday, the weekend having come at the beginning of the Week, and that this same week finishes only ready to begin another end.

That this difficulty with endings was profoundly and consciously considered by Thoreau, is suggested by the fact that he asked “Friday” to be read aloud to him on his deathbed¹⁵; and if we take endings as seriously as he seemed to, we could also read the following line from “Friday” as a metaphorical statement about the inability of poetic language to express the ending he sought: “In the hues of October Sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those we occupy” (377). In Walden, however, Thoreau's next book, even this metaphor about the limits of metaphor will be questioned; for Thoreau will suggest that even these “other mansions” of meaning lie beyond the gesture of the metaphor which would indicate its distance from them, recalling “the language all things speak without metaphor.”¹⁶ Remembering that Thoreau wrote the Week while living at Walden, we might conclude that these same difficulties arising from metaphor's encounter with the “other mansions” of the river led him from those portals to the equally complex, yet difficult, task of building a “literal” cabin at Walden pond.

Notes

1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, Riverside Edition, ed. with an introduction by Sherman Paul (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957), p. 27. In the case of works cited more than once, page references to the edition first noted will be thereafter given parenthetically in the text.

2. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. by Carl. F. Hovde (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 342.

3. Sherman Paul, The Shores of America: Thoreau's Inward Exploration (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1958), p. 195.

4. Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1958), p. 210.

   Other recent interpretations helpful to this reading of A Week are Paul David Johnson, “Thoreau's Redemptive Week,” American Literature, 49 (1977), 22‐33; Walter Hesford, “‘Incessant Tragedies’: A Reading of Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” ELH, 44 (1977), 515‐525; Stephen L. Tanner, “Current Motions in Thoreau's A Week,” Studies in Romanticism, 12 (1973), 763‐776.

5. For a useful summary of these “digressions,” and a history of their critical appraisal, see Walter Harding, A Thoreau Handbook (New York: New York University Press, 1970), p. 53.

6. Hesford, p. 517.

7. Eric J. Sundquist, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth‐Century American Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 45. I am indebted to this work for pointing the connection between writing and penetration in A Week: “Thoreau's cultivation of Nature yokes literal seeding with insemination by the letter in a precise way, for his whole project involves implanting himself in the midst of nature while at the same time concealing the injury generated by that act” (p. 66).

8. Sundquist, p. 68.

9. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Sully and Kleinteich, 1883), 1:31.

10. Henry David Thoreau, Journal, in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1906), 11: 386.

11. Walter Benn Michaels, “Walden's False Bottoms,” Glyph, 1(1977), pp. 132‐149.

12. The textual history of A Week strongly suggests that Thoreau took special care with “Wednesday,” both in placing it in the work as a whole, and in situating the “Friendship” essay within it. Walter Harding dates Thoreau's beginning of A Week by a journal entry dated June 11, 1840; Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Thoreau's contemporary, claims that Thoreau added the “Friendship” section to the “Wednesday” chapter in January, 1848. See Walter Harding, A Thoreau Handbook (New York: New York University Press, 1970), pp. 11, 52; and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Henry D. Thoreau (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1882), p. 304.

13. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1962), p. 213.

14. Carl F. Hovde, “Nature into Art: Thoreau's Use of His Journals in A Week,” American Literature, 30 (1958), 171.

15. Carl Hovde provides us with this account of Thoreau's own end: “Thoreau knew by that time [April, 1862] that he would not live to see a new edition of A Week, but even after Fields came to Concord on April 12 to purchase the unsold copies, he asked Ellery Channing to correct an error in the text. Shortly before he died, Thoreau called Edmund Hosmer to his bedside and gave him a copy of A Week. Inscribed ‘Henry D. Thoreau / Concord,’ it contained a lock of hair attached below the verse ‘Where'er thou sail'st who sailed with me,’ and identified as ‘From a lock of John Thoreau's hair.’ On the morning of May 6, Thoreau asked Sophia to read aloud from the chapter of A Week. When she read the sentence, ‘We glided past the mouth of the Nashua, and not long after, of Salmon Brook, without more pause than the wind’ (351.27‐29), he reportedly said: ‘Now comes good sailing.’ He died a few moments later” (“Historical Introduction” to the Princeton Edition of A Week).

16. Walden, p. 77.

I would like to thank my teacher Richard Hutson, whose insights and example made this essay possible. I am also grateful to David A. Miller for his astute and perceptive help in matters of revision; to Mitchell Breitweisser, whose recent essay “Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod” (Studies in Romanticism, 20 [1981], 3‐20), helped me rethink and improve my conclusion; to Michael Rogin, and to Thomas Albert, who was a Friend to this essay at its beginning.