[In the following excerpt, Garber argues that Thoreau inserted the Saddleback Mountain climbing episode in order to show the insufficiency of textual and temporal closures.]

The logic of this study derives, in part, from the logic of Thoreau's thought on some very basic questions about being at home in the world. From language, to writing, to the field of inscribings of which writing is a part, to the functions of autography as a mode of self‐inscribing—each of these actions or consequences implies and implicates the others, all of them together creating a tight and rigorous complex. The complex is remarkable in part because, after some hesitant sputtering that sometimes slips into sentimentality (seen as late as in several sections of “Natural History of Massachusetts”), it quickly matures and stays surprisingly consistent through the rest of Thoreau's work. We saw that consistency as early as in A Week. Thoreau had drawn up the main lines of the complex by the time the book was completed, that is, during his stay at Walden. For the rest of this chapter, we shall look at A Week as a model of many issues, among them the possibility of irony and self‐parody, the flexing of a metacommentary.

There are all manner of oddities about A Week, and much of the commentary has been devoted to pointing them out. Some have to do with the grab‐bag quality of the book: Henry Seidel Canby said that it was “perilously like a library of the shorter works of Henry Thoreau,” though Canby went on to say that the poor reception of A Week has to be attributed as much to a failure in its audience as to anything in the text.¹ Many commentators since Canby have come to accept the structure of the text, arguing, for example, that its order is based on association and a careful interweaving and development of themes.² Still others think of the book as an especially dense version of Transcendental writing, what Lawrence Buell calls “an exploration of one's own higher latitudes,” whose purpose is to help one live better at home.³ Toward the end of his historical introduction to the Princeton text of A Week, Linck C. Johnson surveys the shift in twentieth‐century thinking about the book, from early readings of its “formlessness” to what he calls, in more recent critics, a “congratulatory view.”⁴ Writing since Johnson's essay, H. Daniel Peck points to the temporal firmness of A Week's ordering, especially when compared to Walden and The Maine Woods.⁵

Many of these recent views are plausible; some, like Buell's and Peck's, are quite convincing in their central efforts; yet most are based on readings of the modes of traditional discourse that appear in A Week—classic styles of history writing, various sorts of circling, trips to the natural source—and what they tend not to do is take into consideration Thoreau's questioning of such discourse. That he uses it richly, fruitfully, and often to compelling effect is a point that modern criticism has helped us clearly to see. But that he usually finds the discourse to be unnervingly insufficient—perhaps, finally, incompetent—is the next point to be taken, and that has not been done.

An unquestioning acceptance of the patently regular patterns that form the substance of A Week cannot control the bundles of anomalies—some simple, some bogglingly complex—that also inhabit the book. Take, for example, the relation of the title to the content. The trip from which the narrative is taken was, as we know, a two‐week excursion, condensed in the text to one for much the same reasons that the two years at Walden Pond came out to be one in the book. Yet the oddity has to do not with the condensation itself but with what was condensed out, or down to a minimal existence. In point of fact, they divided their time equally between land and water trips; and that is precisely what the title does not say.⁶ Perhaps the title is arguing that the essence of the text is watery, not earthy. Peck shows how the point of view is developed from a position out on the river, with all the implications deriving from such a position. Still, the land trip was not erased completely. Near the end of this good‐sized book, Thoreau sketches a two‐page record of their hike up Agiocochook, a trip to the source of “the river to which our native stream is a tributary” (314). He goes outside of the titular framework to bring into the textual framework a clearly crucial event, yet what he chooses to say could hardly be briefer. There are other, attendant difficulties, especially with the tone of the event. At least half of the record of the ascent is involved with the description of “a soldier lad in the woods” marching with nervous pomp to his muster, shivering “like a reed in his thin military pants” (313). Such an introduction would qualify any climax. Here it can lead only to a mocking understatement.⁷

Thoreau knew precisely what he was producing at this point: “we would,” he says, “be faithful to our experience” (313). The hike may not be part of the week they spent on the river, but Thoreau obviously takes it as part of the meaning of that week. It therefore had to appear somewhere within the framework, even if it had to be brought in from the earthy outside. His handling of his narrative is designed to get him closer to “a true account of the actual” (325). Such loyalty to exactitude characterizes all his works, even when they reshape the relationship of the events on which they are based. As he puts it in the “Friday” chapter: “I have no respect for facts even except when I would use them, and for the most part I am independent of those which I hear, and can afford to be inaccurate, or, in other words, to substitute more present and pressing facts in their place” (363). Those present, pressing facts are the stuff of sufficient fictions, fictions surely supreme.

Those who argue for the orderliness of A Week, for its carefully designed artifice, have come to be far more convincing than those who shrug at the text. Yet this is still not to say that every element in A Week clicks comfortably into place once we recognize commanding shapes. Take, for example, the “Tuesday” chapter. It begins at an earlier point in the day than some of the other chapters, with a noisy predawn excursion to hunt for firewood. By the time they clean out their boat and get themselves ready, it is 3:00 A.M. They push off into the fog that seems to envelop them every morning, trusting, as Thoreau says, “that there was a bright day behind it” (179). After quoting a historian on the prevalence of such fogs, Thoreau remarks on their extent and on the limits of the larger fogs that go beyond river valleys. He then says, “I once saw the day break from the top of Saddleback Mountain in Massachusetts, above the clouds. As we cannot distinguish objects through this dense fog, let me tell this story more at length” (180). And he does so, for ten of the most compelling pages in his writings. Yet the story he tells has peculiarities about it. A Week is the record of a river journey taken in the fall of 1839. The ascent up Saddleback Mountain (now known as Greylock) took place in 1844, though the text never mentions that point (any more than the title mentions the week they spent on land). Thus, Thoreau describes a hike up a mountain while the narrative still has them floating on the river, and he gets to tell of the hike by interrupting the record of a journey that took place five years earlier. Why does he do it precisely at that point—which is, as it turns out, almost exactly in the middle of his narrative? Why, indeed, is it in A Week at all?

I

To answer those questions properly we need to begin by examining the shape and process of Thoreau's narrative and how they come to be. “Concord River,” the introductory chapter, goes over the physical and historical context of the river and works out the mode in which the book asks to be read. Though the chapter is not part of the narrative of the trip, it has the same function as those introductory lines in meditative poems that tell us where the meditator is located, establishing a place from which the journey of the mind will begin. George Herbert, whom Thoreau quotes several times in the text, wrote a number of such poems.⁸ Wordsworth practiced a version of the technique in “Tintern Abbey” and the “Immortality” ode, and Coleridge did the same in his Conversation Poems.⁹ This chapter's link to meditative beginnings of the sort Thoreau knew well offers a considerable hint about the qualities that will follow. But Thoreau cannot resist lionizing and exalting at once. He turns “our muddy but much abused Concord River” into a counterpart of history's most famous rivers and then, irony gone underground, into an image of the stream of time. Thus, before we enter into the main body of the narrative, the text itself offers suggestions about how to read it. At the same time, it demonstrates how our minds can turn the facticity of our experience into images of radical truth. As the introductory chapter moves through a discussion of the river in all its literal contexts, it transmutes the river into “an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made” (12). The chapter, it turns out, is about ourselves as well as the river, about processes of mind as well as processes of nature.

It seems inevitable, then, that the text will lead us in two directions at once, down the river and into the mind. The travelers are hardly on their way, just passing the remaining abutments of the North Bridge, when the two directions come into play. “Our reflections,” he says, “had already acquired a historical remoteness from the scenes we had left” (17). Separating rapidly from his immediate surroundings, his thoughts go off to an encounter with the events of 1775, his mind engaging with the past while his body and the boat go forward with the flow of the present. His body takes part in the rhythms of nature while his mind finds other rhythms, unavailable to the body. Thoreau's statement about the historical remoteness of their reflections comes in at this initiating point to clarify an essential issue, what meditation means to the relations of mind and body. We will be seeing a bifurcation in which one fork goes inevitably seaward while the other goes where it wants. It can go to the season when the North Bridge was rumbling with intimations of war, or back to the earliest beginnings of “the Musketaquid or Grass‐ground River,” which is “probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates” (5). Bound inexorably to the present and its rigorous forward thrust, the body is caught in the rhythms of nature; but there are no inevitable directions in the mind, seaward or otherwise. We are beginning to uncover the contours of a map that contains several kinds of geography, and Thoreau is careful to point out what we can do in each of them.

These pages show still more. After quoting some of his own poems and remarking on the sinking of the sun and the subsiding of the village murmur, Thoreau spends some time on a detailed description of the foliage on or near the water. This is Thoreau the naturalist, focusing on the immediate and contemporary, on what he can notice by opening his eyes. His mode here is observation, and it differs very clearly from the mode of meditation. Meditation can take us anywhere; observation stays right here. In meditation, the mind goes in one direction and the body in another. In observation, mind and body focus on the same place and time, the here and now, and any speculations that the mind makes are speculations on the world around it. It is the product of a meeting of mind and body in the immediate moment. But meditation can occur only when the mind moves within itself and away from immediacy.

This interplay that is offered so early in the text is as important to the life of A Week as any other elements within it. One of the essential oscillations in the book, it is repeated with varying cadences for the rest of A Week. This text is therefore not only about Thoreau as river traveler or even as mental traveler, either role offering ample precedent in the cultural history he knew. One of the major feats of A Week lies in its ability to be, at once, about both kinds of traveling—which means, in effect, to be also about a third that not only encompasses the other two but, refusing a binary choice, suggests a richer and better way. That third is, of course, the simultaneous performance of what seemed to be a set of alternate choices. Here, as elsewhere, A Week lays down the lines of some basic Thoreauvian practices. In the “Village” chapter of Walden, Thoreau remembers those times when he would walk back to the cabin late on dark nights, “dreaming and absent‐minded all the way, until,” as he says, “I was aroused by raising my hand to lift the latch” and was “not able to recall a single step of my walk” (170). Here he is doing that strange third thing, performing both kinds of traveling at once, the body following its instincts with a life that is seen as separate from and independent of the mind. It can function without the mind's attentiveness while moving easily, comfortably, through the spaces of the wood. The mind pursues its business through its own kind of spaces, returning to the spaces the body inhabits when it is ready to touch the world again. The same process occurs repeatedly in A Week: Thoreau will get his thought going at some point on his river trip, let his mind go about its business, and then return to the river, although farther downstream from the point where he started.¹⁰ Though the several kinds of traveling happen in different places, they happen at the same time and to the same person. Each is therefore part of the capacities of Henry David Thoreau, and their relationship in the book appears to be offered as an allegory of their relationship in him.

That sounds very fine and satisfying at this point in the narrative, establishing a grand surmise for the journeys in the rest of A Week. But we have seen enough of Thoreau to suspect that this parallelism of self and text will turn out to own ironies that make the surmise uneasy. A Week is so far from being the muddle that some have called it that we could (should) end by admiring the canniness of its practices, especially its practice of subversion.

For that surmise had been made uneasy during the process that was laying it out. At the beginning of the “Saturday” chapter, Thoreau describes the boat he and his brother had built the previous spring, the boat that was to take them down and up the two rivers. Here too the text plays with a variously dimensioned allegory, though this time with implications that turn the other one quite around. Built like a stable fisherman's dory, the boat was “painted green below, with a border of blue, with reference to the two elements in which it was to spend its existence” (15). That point prefigures exactly those passages in Walden where Thoreau speaks of the pond as a link between heaven and earth: “Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both” (W, 176). In so partaking, it offers a fusion of the green nature we live in and the blue heaven we aspire to. That is the fusion of the demigod, who finds within himself that marvelous illogic in which radical differences find a way of working together. Defined in other terms, both pond and boat offer an outline of total desire put into a total form, in the case of the boat, offering a shape that permits it to work fluently in several elements at once. If fashioned with proper attention, the boat should be a perfect blend; and even though theirs is not quite so (it was “hardly of better model than usual” [16], Thoreau and his brother came close enough at least to comprehend perfection:

If rightly made a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong‐winged and graceful bird. The fish shows where there should be the greatest breadth of beam and depth in the hold; its fins direct where to set the oars, and the tail gives some hint for the form and position of the rudder. The bird shows how to rig and trim the sails, and what form to give to the prow that they may balance the boat, and divide the air and water best. These hints we had but partially obeyed.

(16)

Partial obedience is enough to make a working version of the blend, a form of that ideal instrument which can take us through the elements that determine the ultimate shape of what we want to be.

One way of conceiving that shape has its profoundest roots in traditional discourse, that is, in the way we think of our ideal selves in terms of combinations like that green‐blue blend of swift fish and strong‐winged bird. Conceptions of that sort run all through Walden's descriptions of the pond and our relations to it: if the pond is “intermediate in its nature between land and sky … many men have been likened to it but few deserve that honor” (W, 188‐89; 192). However few they are, the pond remains an ideal image of ourselves, as does the boat. That Thoreau and his brother chose to paint the boat in those colors shows a more‐than‐subliminal awareness of the import of the blend. And in fact he had hinted openly at the ideal, the placement in a single framework of flesh and spirit, just a few lines before this, at the beginning of the text: “for Concord, too, lies under the sun, a port of entry and departure for the bodies as well as the souls of men” (15). By the time we get to the spelling out of the colors of the boat, the meaning of those colors is beyond any doubt. Bright and early in the text we are given still another surmise about ourselves and how we are constituted.

And it is precisely because these surmises come at the same crucial point in the text, little more than a page apart and at the beginning of the setting out, that the ironies have their way. That surmise which has to do with varieties of bifurcation, the traveling of the mind and the traveling of the body offering a parallel to the capacities of Henry David Thoreau, cannot sit comfortably with the other surmise, the one that finds its allegory in the workings of the boat. At the onset of its narrative, A Week puts forth two contradictory ideals, each of which has its basis in all manner of traditional discourse. The ideal of bifurcation, the splitting of soul and body that privileges the former both in its freedom and essential divinity, finds one of its strands of history in the business about the Brahmins that turns up at the beginning of Walden, just as a journeyman version turns up at the beginning of A Week. The opposing ideal of the blend puts Thoreau firmly within the traditional discourse we have noted. And if, in certain ways, he stands midway between Blake and Stevens, Thoreau's boat furthers Blake's notion that “man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses. The chief inlets of Soul in this age.”¹¹ To proffer this pairing of contrary readings at the beginning of the narrative is, finally, to insist that the making of a choice may be impossible to resolve. And yet it is surely the ultimate matter when we come to ponder our ways of being in the world, for if we, as forked animals, take biforking as our basic condition, we shall be in the world in a very different way than if our condition is a blue‐green blending. The only viable approach is to take Thoreau as, again, seeking to be faithful to our experience. Its only viable result is a position of ambivalence—not a refusal to make a choice between the pairing of surmises but a recognition that no choice can honestly be made without massive equivocation. If “Concord River” stands as a prologue to A Week, putting forth, as prologues do, suggestions for ways of reading, the first three pages of the narrative put forth some other options, less blatant but equally traditional, less easy to fix and hold.

And as though to confirm the dilemma these options force upon us, Thoreau has trouble making up his mind on several issues deriving from them. To take one representative pairing: in the “Wednesday” chapter, he repeats a story about a woman who discovered traces of an old hunting camp while looking for pennyroyal. The thought of that healing plant leads him to the healing arts, to the relations of priests and physicians (their roles interchangeable in even the most civilized countries), and then to the typically Thoreauvian paradox that, despite their likenesses, “the one's profession is a satire on the other's, and either's success would be the other's failure” (257). He ends the passage with the complaint that, though “men believe practically that matter is independent of spirit,” in fact “there is need of a physician who shall minister to both soul and body at once, that is to man.” The human comes to be defined according to its blend of blue and green, its pure unitary state. Subliminal echoes of the boat as “amphibious animal” call back to the text's beginnings for linkage and support, and beyond them to the sounds of one old discourse. But the text makes other calls toward the end of the same chapter. Sitting on the bank, eating their supper, the travelers come to think of universal laws, of Syria and India, Alexander and Hannibal, and they arrive at the conclusion that “this world is but canvass to our imaginations” (292). Men endeavor with infinite pains “to realize to their bodies” what ought to be realized to the imagination, “for certainly there is a life of the mind above the wants of the body and independent of it.” So much for that aptest medicine which would minister to the truly human by attending to body and soul together. So much for a colloquy of discourses: it seems that the choices the text proffers can end only in cacophony.

Of course it would be much easier if the text offered either/or, blue‐green or bifurcation; but it does not, and given Thoreau's antipathy to the binary, it would be surprising were the text to do so. One might consider such a choice as in fact a metadiscourse offering perfectly clear alternatives between two opposing readings of the relations of soul and body. As readers of the histories of such speculations (those histories are one of the sites where the metadiscourse works), we know what such choices would look like. But Thoreau flatly refuses to accept these blocked‐out alternatives, perhaps because such choices create a neatly unified structure, the wholeness that results when a pair of perfect opposites ends up in a self‐contained microcosm. Nowhere is Thoreau's uneasiness with such autonomous packages more patent than in his refusal to accept such a choice, and in what that refusal does to our reading of A Week. For in presenting the possibility that each alternative has a legitimate claim upon him, Thoreau undoes the wholeness that either/or makes and puts it all into suspension, the result, the discontinuity that comes from irresolution. Instead of a binary whole, there is radical incompletion. This too we shall have to attribute to his passionate wish to “be faithful to our experience.”

All of this puts A Week into some very difficult trouble—a warring of text and subtext, of subterranean mutterings and the bright chirpings of accepted discourse—that gives the text a deep and especially vigorous life. The trouble has to do with some of the major formulations that make up the text, the cycles in particular but also several tendencies stemming from the generic function of the text as travelogue. Consider, for example, the business of directions. When the travelers pushed their boat away from the banks of the Concord “and dropped silently down the stream” (15), they were setting out in a seaward direction, going down the river to the point where it joins the Merrimack. To continue the text's suggestions on how it ought to be read, their trip down the Concord concurs “with time, and all that is made,” a passive, acquiescent gesture that puts them into harmony with the most basic level of nature. At noon on Sunday, they entered the Merrimack through the Middlesex locks, making a turn in direction and mode that would take them upstream to New Hampshire. Once again we are led to accept the logic of the text's suggestion: if the trip downstream involves a concurrence with nature, the trip upstream would have to involve its opposite, a decision to go against the natural direction, a decision that could be acted on only through a considerable exercise of will. This imposition of will upon the tendencies of nature is characteristically Thoreauvian, a gesture that, in other contexts, he saw as eminently human. Every time a farmer turns a swamp into a meadow, every time a woodsman makes a clearing in the forest, someone has imposed his will upon nature and turned it into something useful for the human.¹² This we can call the humanizing imagination, the sort he saw so often with the loggers in The Maine Woods, the sort that finds it purest Transcendental expression in Emerson's Nature. Its requisite opposite would be the naturalizing imagination, that desire to shape one's life as part of the natural order, the impulse that drew Thoreau to think of devouring woodchucks and, when he was up in Maine, to admire Indians who could talk to muskrats. The naturalizing imagination seeks to lock us into nature, the humanizing looks at nature as our opponent in a struggle—which ought not to be taken to mean that we are antinatural but that we are seeking to impose ourselves upon the natural order, perhaps to do something that nature will not ordinarily permit. It will not, for example, permit us easily to go upstream in search of the place where the river begins. To do that we have to be contranatural. Thoreau's journey on the rivers can therefore be taken as an allegory of the workings of two kinds of imagination, two opposing modes of encountering nature.

Put so baldly, this is, of course, a reductive scheme at best, not least because of our uneasiness with terms like “naturalizing” and “humanizing.” We can assume that Thoreau establishes the scheme in its simplest form so he can complicate it sufficiently and bring it closer to the truths of our experience. His awareness of the play of directions and the import of that play turns up often in the text, for example, in this passage from “Tuesday,” where they are resting from the heat of the day: “When we made a fire to boil some rice for our dinner, the flames spreading amid the dry grass, and the smoke curling silently upward and casting grotesque shadows on the ground seemed phenomena of the noon, and we fancied that we progressed up the stream without effort, and as naturally as the wind and tide went down, not outraging the calm days by unworthy bustle or impatience (222‐23). Going upstream “naturally” can happen only in fancy, just as Thoreau can go back in time to the events of 1775 only in acts of the mind. The contranatural imagination involves not only acts like making clearings in the forest but also our capacities to counter the temporal flow and our capacities to counter the flow of the tide.¹³ Of course, those last two capacities have a long, archetypal linking, but their placement alongside acts like redeeming a meadow or placing bricks in a trackless forest is by no means an obvious one, and it complicates the issue considerably.

For example, countering the flow of the tide in a blue‐green boat that stands for the wholeness of flesh and spirit makes for a clear and pristine allegory, putting together as it does both the struggle we have to make against the contranatural flow and a perfect sort of instrument with which to make the struggle. Relating these two concepts seems almost inevitable, and Thoreau accepts the temptation. But the blue‐green idea is only one way of reading the relations of body and soul, as we saw in the binary choice between blending and bifurcation. So—to bring in the alternative that always shadows the blue‐green one—how does one go up toward the place where the stream begins its flow if body and soul cannot work in comfortable harmony? If their harmony is less than perfect, will that hamper the ascent? Thoreau, as we shall see, accepts that possibility too.

To add to these complications, we have to keep in mind that there are several mountain ascents referred to in A Week and that the climbing of a mountain necessarily involves precisely the same processes, the going up and down that describes an ascent and return, that appear in the other activities that crowd under the heading of the humanizing imagination. Indeed, it is only when we acknowledge the homology of these processes that much of the richness in A Week becomes apparent.

We are now ready to return to the problems we posed ourselves earlier—why the climb up Saddleback Mountain is where it is in A Week, why, in fact, it is in the text at all.

The Saddleback episode is actually a single element in a rich and complex sequence, one of a series of mountain ascents referred to in A Week. We shall have to consider several ascents in order to establish some answers to our questions about the point of Saddleback. Still—and this, we are coming to realize, is typical of Thoreau—the sequence stretches to include scenes outside of A Week, especially those in the early essay, “A Walk to Wachusett.” That stretching will surely have an effect on how we read the series, but it is also an object lesson in how we ought to read Thoreau; we need to establish the proper contextual focus. We gain our fullest understanding of the Saddleback ascent only when we see it in the context of Thoreau's earlier work.

“Wachusett,” which was published in Boston Miscellany of Literature in January 1843, records a four‐day walk begun on July 19, 1842, with Margaret Fuller's brother, Richard.¹⁴ As so often with Thoreau, the text begins with instructions for reading, though this time the reading will extend through Thoreau's first book (which is not, of course, to say that Thoreau planned it that way but that as he worked out A Week the continuity became apparent and then developed and thickened as the text progressed). Here is the first sentence of the essay:

Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains in our horizon, to which distance and indistinctness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all the allusions of poets and travellers; whether with Homer, on a spring morning, we sat down on the many‐peaked Olympus, or, with Virgil and his compeers, roamed the Etrurian and Thessalian hills, or with Humboldt measured the more modern Andes and Teneriffe.

(Excursions, 72)

A great deal of literary history works through the intertextual life of this sentence, not only eighteenth‐century saws about distance lending enchantment to the view, and the related context of saws in which dimness and the sublime reinforce each other, but also a broad sweep of literary mountains from the earliest classics to more recent traveling. Most important, however, is what the sentence says about the related ways in which we read landscapes and texts. To start off with distance and indistinctness means, in this context, to make space for sufficient fictions, adequate to illuminate a range of relevant truths. We have not only returned to Thoreau's point about being true to our experience but are looking ahead to the beginnings of many chapters in A Week where fogs are the first element we face in the “morning” of the piece. The most elaborate of those beginnings is the one in “Tuesday,” the chapter that takes Thoreau up Saddleback Mountain.

Other hints of a flexibility that undoes the day‐to‐day appear as the text gets underway, the first a clumsy phrasing from the doggerel poem (rejected by Margaret Fuller for the Dial) that stands near the head of the text:

I fancy even
Through your defiles windeth the way to heaven;
And yonder still, in spite of history's page,
Linger the golden and the silver age;
Upon the laboring gale
The news of future centuries is brought,
And the new dynasties of thought,
From your remotest vale.

(75)

Westering leads to heaven, but it is a very curious heaven that holds within itself not only the golden and silver ages but future centuries and other discourses (“new dynasties of thought”), a place where origin and end fuse without confusion, so that going toward the one comes also to mean successfully going toward the other. That establishes a surmise whose echoes we shall be hearing elsewhere in the sequence on mountains.

The second suggestion of flexibility makes plain Thoreau's insistence on the efficacy of certain fictions. Their walk took them through the town of Sterling and past the banks of the Stillwater, “where a small village collected” (82). Thoreau's habit of associating westering with wildness, and the wild with that which either has not yet been named or is named by those who are wilder than these travelers (cf. 78), takes over here as well, not only in the names of the river but of “this village [which] had, as yet, no post‐office, nor any settled name” (83). He goes on to describe how “in the small villages which we entered, the villagers gazed after us, with a complacent, almost compassionate look, as if we were just making our debut in the world at a late hour. ‘Nevertheless,’ did they seem to say, ‘come and study us, and learn men and manners.’ So is each one's world but a clearing in the forest, so much open and inclosed ground” (83). Though this is especially effective in the context of the trip to Wachusett, it actually comes from a journal entry about a trip made four years earlier in a very different place:

Portland to Bath‐via Brunswick‐Bath to Brunswick‐May 5th—

Each one's world is but a clearing in the forest‐so much open and inclosed ground.—When the mail coach rumbles into one of these‐the villagers gaze after you with a compassionate look, as much as to say “Where have you been all this time, that you make your début [sic] in the world at this late hour? nevertheless, here we are, come and study us, that you may learn men and manners.

(∗J 1:45)

When and where things happen are less important than what happens, for the latter may be a fiction in terms of this place and time but can become a sufficient synecdoche for an abiding and prevalent condition. In this light, an earlier remark in “A Walk to Wachusett” seems to offer a justification for what is actually an adequate lie: “So soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man's life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new” (78). Once we accept this idea, such synecdoches make sense, for they tell the same radical story and may well be more efficacious than what was actually there. We shall see the same efficacy in the “Tuesday” chapter of A Week.

There is, however, no question of substituting something else for the ascent of Wachusett Mountain, for Thoreau can make what he needs out of the materials at hand. He prepares our reading of the ascent with some fairly fancy writing about getting to be at home up there:

As we gathered the raspberries, which grew abundantly by the roadside, we fancied that that action was consistent with a lofty prudence, as if the traveller who ascends into a mountainous region should fortify himself by eating of such light ambrosial fruits as grow there; and, drinking of the springs which gush out from the mountain sides, as he gradually inhales the subtler and purer atmosphere of those elevated places, thus propitiating the mountain gods, by a sacrifice of their own fruits. The gross products of the plains and valleys are for such as dwell therein; but it seemed to us that the juices of this berry had relation to the thin air of the mountain‐tops.

(84)

They seek a sacramental libation to put them in tune with the mountaintops, acknowledging that they come out of the plains and may well carry part of the plains within them as they go up. Literary, somewhat stuffy, approaching affectation, these and similar lines seek carefully to control a distinction of locales that has within it the potential for considerable unease. Yet the comfort is not quite complete, for some subtextual mutterings still manage to make it to the surface, partly through comments on how the summit is “removed from all contagion with the plain” (87), partly through others on their passage over the heights where “the follies of the plain are refined and purified” (92). Their upward mobility has a redemptive dimension. We can gauge the degree of its potency by the degree of fanciness in the language, going on the assumption that such elevated language is there to contain the threat of contagion, to distance them from its touch in precisely the same way that the ascent distances them from the pollution of the plain. The homology of the ascent and of the language that makes it happen (“elevated” works for both) is evident and precise. Still, however successfully “Wachusett” keeps down the subtextual muttering, it cannot do so completely. The travelers' need for a libation grows clearer to the reader as the text grows more familiar.

This puts into perspective Thoreau's comments on the place of mountains in the general scheme of things (91‐92). On the summits, one arrives at a pervasive sense of unity, for we can see how the hand “which moulded their opposite slopes [made] one to balance the other.” From this we go on to learn how the least part of nature refers to all space, how the rivers answer to “the general direction of the coast, the bank of the great ocean stream itself.” And all that elaborate ordering works around “a deep centre” that holds the whole together. (That center appears, with different suppositions, in Poe's Eureka.) One can see all this only when one climbs to the summits, and even then not right away. No wonder that we seek to leave the place of contagion behind, purifying ourselves as we ascend: only with such purity can we attain such a vision. A long tradition claims this to be the only possible condition in which such seeing can take place. Further, we need that condition to perceive how we ourselves relate to that radical shape, how not only “the least part of nature” but we too, in our bearings, refer to all space. To be able to see is to be able to partake, that is, to achieve that sort of at‐homeness where we are in absolute relation—no hesitation or rebuff, no incompleteness, no place or sight blocked off—with all that there is to be seen.

Of course when they descend, there has to be a kind of letdown, a condition connected with the travelers' return “to the abodes of men,” as they turn their faces to the east, finding themselves “almost at home again” (93). Those circular travels put them into a most ironic oneness with the conditions of the plain, and they find themselves going mindless: “At length, as we plodded along the dusty roads, our thoughts became as dusty as they; all thought indeed stopped, thinking broke down, or proceeded only passively in a sort of rhythmical cadence of the confused material of thought, and we found ourselves mechanically repeating some familiar measure which timed with our tread” (94). The ascent had called from them the fullest stretch of being, but the descent and return home ask only a homologous descent on the Great Chain of Being, approaching the condition of mindless dust. Oddly, they say nothing in their walk over the plains about the contagion of the plains, the need to purify themselves. They realize the need for cleansing (of all that the dust is, surely) only when they travel in the other direction. They know nothing of the threat of staining while they are in the place of staining. Thoreau speaks of how their climbing and descending are “perfectly symbolical of human life” (95), of how the desultory life of the plain needs some “mountain grandeur” in it (96). But a bit of allegory making and a comforting moral conclusion cannot subdue the subterranean grumbling that mandates not only the putting aside of impurity but even the defensive language in which that putting aside is described—the kind that echoes at the end in the allegory of human life and the insufficient moral. The framework of the experience rendered in “A Walk to Wachusett” is not especially stable, whatever its claims to the contrary. It is precisely that instability that A Week was to pick up.

And in fact it was ready to do so when it took into the “Monday” chapter (162‐66) a condensation of “A Walk to Wachusett.” Thoreau includes the introductory lines of “Wachusett,” which are on distance and indistinctness and how they serve to interpret “all the allusions of poets and travellers.” He is equally careful to include the comments about scaling the blue wall at the horizon, “though not without misgivings that thereafter no visible fairy land would exist for us” (165). Except for a version of the poem, nothing of the rest remains, the result of which is to leave the surviving prose excerpts speaking largely of readings and fictions, and hinting (without resolution) that there might be disappointment ahead. Subtle and somewhat ominous, the shift carefully defines what “Wachusett” had come to signify for Thoreau since its publication in 1843. Though the new version says nothing about the contagion of the plain, it suggests that something could stand in the way of their glimpse of a “visible fairy land.” The subtext lives on in these unresolved speculations, putting into A Week's pondering on mountains a potential for uneasiness, based on a potential for incompletion, that was never to leave the text.

Other elements in these pages suggest further subversions. “A Walk to Wachusett” took some notes out of the Journal for 1838 and wove them, without acknowledgment, into the report of a trip he made in 1842. A Week reverses direction, taking sections of the essay and weaving them, without acknowledgment, into the report of a trip he made in 1839. Further, A Week sets the impression that the poem was contemporary with the trip on the two rivers, quoting directly from the essay but in a way that clearly refers to the travels A Week is describing: “Standing on the Concord Cliffs we thus spoke our mind to them” (163). Taking out of the essay what now seems to him most significant, Thoreau grants a dark hint to contagion and blatantly plays with fictions that subvert “regular” temporality, especially its insistence on rigorous, determinate order. That is a very odd thing to do in a book built so openly on self‐contained cycles, and it necessarily affects the way we read the sequence on mountains and maybe even the book as a whole. The reader who comes to A Week with a reasonably good memory of Thoreau's previous work (and considering the paucity of sales, many of its readers must have been such) hears a voice emergent in this passage which speaks in countertones to the overall voice of the text. In effect, this is to say that “A Walk to Wachusett” is, to certain elements in A Week, a pre‐text for what is to follow, and it remains in the background as a shadow text that has a great deal to say about crucial aspects of the book.

Of the seven chapters in A Week that have to do directly with their trip, five refer to the fog or mist with which the day's atmosphere begins, one speaks of how “a warm drizzling rain had obscured the morning” (15), and only one (“Wednesday”) says nothing about such impediments to vision. Readers of Thoreau know that morning means to him a diurnal re‐originating where all opportunities begin again (see, e.g., W, 88‐89). Since each chapter of A Week begins with the condition of the morning, textual and diurnal origins take an interlocking relationship, each mirroring the other and ultimately becoming indistinguishable from it. And since fog or mist turns up at all but one of these points of beginning, it seems reasonable to conclude that Thoreau connects these varied scenes of origin with difficulty of vision.¹⁵ That those beginnings also suggest—somewhat more than subliminally—the origin of the world appears not only in many of the passages about mornings as fresh starts but in this passage from the Journal written a decade after the writing of A Week: “It is one of the mornings of creation, and the trees, shrubs, etc., etc., are covered with a fine leaf frost, as if they had their morning robes on, seen against the sun. There has been a mist in the night. Now, at 8:30 A.M., I see, collected over the low grounds behind Mr. Cheney's, a dense fog (over a foot of snow), which looks dusty like smoke by contrast with the snow” (J 8:74). This pure illustration of that conflation of themes is by no means the only one in the canon.¹⁶ The chapters and days of A Week begin with a set of significations that can end only at origin, at the first lines of Genesis, which show precisely the same complex questions of origin occurring at the beginning of a text, with darkness spread over all.

That reference has more to speak of than the intertextual life of Thoreau's various beginnings. Something of the fullest meaning of their traveling in A Week comes through in the “Thursday” chapter, in remarks directed not only to traveling in general (these comments prefigure those in the late essay “Walking”) but to their actions in the two weeks that A Week disparately covers. “True and sincere travelling,” he states, “is no pastime, but it is as serious as the grave, or any other part of the human journey, and it requires a longer probation to be broken into it” (306). It is so solemn and serious a matter because “the traveller must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements, the principal powers that be for him.” The play with originatings that starts each chapter of A Week is linked with—prefigures and supports and ultimately defers to—the one form of rebirth that is the most important of all, the one that has to (“must be”) take place within ourselves. The multiple beginnings in A Week and the act of traveling that informs it need to be taken together in order to gather the fullness of each and the profoundest meaning of the whole.

That meaning comes out more openly in the story of the ascent of Saddleback than at any other place in the text, a point which goes far toward explaining both the emphasis on originating and the unusually dense fog that appear at the beginning of “Tuesday” (179‐80). At the same time, that introductory passage suggests broadly what is to follow. It quotes from two poems, one by Tennyson and one by Thoreau, the former (from “The Lady of Shalott”) heading the chapter with a reference to traveling “thro' the fields the road runs by / To many‐towered Camelot.” (That there are hints of the Romance in all of Thoreau's excursions is a point we can begin to explore in this passage.) Thoreau's poem, however, speaks not of ends but of origins and dwells especially on a contranatural traveling that pits them against temporality and puts them always at the point of beginning:

Rivers from the sunrise flow.
          Springing with the dewy morn;
Voyageurs 'gainst time do row,
Idle noon nor sunset know,
          Ever even with the dawn.

(179)

An odd, uneasy illogic pervades the meeting of these pieces of poetry: if the travelers are always even with the dawn, knowing nothing of the stages of the diurnal narrative, how can they get to a Camelot, the goal of every Romance? In fact, they will always be on the way, the journey always incomplete, Camelot never quite in sight.¹⁷ We have already seen how the subversion of “regular” temporality that occurs in the excerpt from “Wachusett” calls into deep question the cycles that inform A Week. Here is more of the same questioning, a subversion of temporal sequence that has to cast into doubt not only the efficacy of cyclical journeys but, especially, the desirability of completion. Yet it seems as though a desire for arriving somewhere is also at work in this passage, in part in the Camelot business, in part in the passage's interplay of obscurity and clarity, one that combines hope and surmise: “Though we were enveloped in mist as usual, we trusted that there was a bright day behind it” (179).

Perhaps there would be, but the Tuesday‐morning fog was to be the densest of their journey, so dense that Thoreau adjourns the narrative of their river excursion for another that tells of a trip up a mountain. Part of the reason he tells the story is to compare the extent of fog on the two journeys. The one on the river is less confining than it appears: “That which seemed to us to invest the world, was only a narrow and shallow wreath of vapor stretched over the channel of the Merrimack from the sea‐board to the mountains.” But other conditions seem less bound to the contours of the earth: “More extensive fogs, however, have their own limits” (180). No other chapter in A Week is prepared as cannily, elaborately, as this. That is because what follows controls so much of the meaning of the book.

Thoreau places part of that meaning squarely before us at the beginning of the narrative, drawing on some of his habitual play with language. He “had come over the hills on foot and alone” and “began in the afternoon to ascend the mountain” (180), noting the few scattered farms along the way. “It seemed,” he says, “a road for the pilgrim to enter upon who would climb to the gates of heaven” (181), the hints of allegory not so blunt as at the end of “Wachusett” but sufficient to produce the point. Yet Thoreau seems to think otherwise and goes on to put together the comments about solitude and askesis into one punning sentence: “It seemed as if he must be the most singular and heavenly‐minded man whose dwelling stood highest up the valley” (182). We are eased into our reading of the ascent with some familiar themes and practices, Thoreau's solitude and wordplay already known from the early essays, his theme of askesis known from the densest cultural history. Further echoes of the Romance combine with his own preoccupations: “gradually ascending all the while,” he is taken by “a sort of awe, and filled with indefinite expectations as to what kind of inhabitants and what kind of nature I should come to at last” (181). And thereupon come some surprises, the first a figure unparalleled in Thoreau's work and, given the nature of that work and his views on sexuality, frankly astonishing. Having reached the last house but one, he considers returning to it after the ascent and staying for as much as a week, “if I could have entertainment” (182). That last word rings very oddly through the sentence which immediately follows, describing the inhabitant of the house:

Its mistress was a frank and hospitable young woman, who stood before me in a dishabille, busily and unconcernedly combing her long black hair while she talked, giving her head the necessary toss with each sweep of the comb, with lively, sparkling eyes, and full of interest in that lower world from which I had come, talking all the while as familiarly as if she had known me for years, and reminding me of a cousin of mine.

(182)

Considering what we have seen of patent echoes of the Romance, this figure makes all sorts of sense and has a long, rich set of counterparts from the beginning of the mode. In medieval forms of Romance and their immediate successors, she would be one of the impediments to the success of the quest, what Homer began with Circe.¹⁸ Indeed, her query about “that lower world from which I had come” gives her precisely the right aura to fit her into that Romance pattern. Of course, nothing like those diversions could happen in this context, yet her quite unexpected appearance not only offers further echoes of the ancient mode he was practicing but also prepares Thoreau for other unexpected answers to his query about people and places higher up the mountain.

Still, even this bit of the unforeseen (given Thoreau, of the unforeseeable) is not, it seems, enough to make him uneasy. At that house he had determined to take the less frequented way, in part, he says, because it was shorter and more adventurous, in part also because it would be his “own route,” the way of the different drummer. And as though to confirm the extent of his confidence, he ends this long paragraph with one of his purest examples of Transcendental self‐centering. After scoffing at what to others would seem an arduous way up, he goes on, it seems irrelevantly, to scoff at the idea of getting lost:

If a person lost would conclude that after all he is not lost, he is not beside himself, but standing in his own old shoes on the very spot where he is, and that for the time being he will live there; but the places that have known him, they are lost,—how much anxiety and danger would vanish. I am not alone if I stand by myself. Who knows where in space this globe is rolling? Yet we will not give ourselves up for lost, let it go where it will.

(184)

Considering all that mountain ascents mean to Thoreau, the point is not irrelevant at all. Such ascents have a great deal to do with being at home in the world, as we have already seen suggested and will see further on in substantial, confirming detail. The question of being‐in‐place has, of course, much to do with being at home in the world. This aside finally argues that we are at home wherever we stand because we are our own homes. Though much of what we have seen from the Tennyson passage on cannot quite support such confidence, the full ironies of this statement were not yet ready to emerge.¹⁹

Others were, however: up at the top, Thoreau digs out a well with his hands and some sharp stones, eats his rice with a wooden spoon he had whittled on the spot, then meditates on the “naturalness” of advertisements he found in the scraps of newspaper other travelers had used to wrap their prefashioned lunches. But his own nature gives him some minor trouble up there, for the pile of wood he collects to keep himself warm (“not having any blanket to cover me” [186]) is not, finally, sufficient. He packs the boards around him in such a way that, in a single gesture, he manages to warm himself up and also tune into the deeper reaches of the askesis, the leaving‐the‐world, which has been the form of his pilgrimage: “I at length encased myself completely in boards, managing even to put a board on top of me, with a large stone on it, to keep it down, and so slept comfortably” (186). Ever alert to the themes of traditional discourse, Thoreau acts out a dying to the world, playing on the ancient likening of bed and coffin, sleep and death. In so doing, he shifts into a register that prepares both him and us for the experience that is to follow.

In that experience, the quasi‐coffin becomes the saving plank in a way that looks strikingly forward to the conclusion of Moby Dick: “But now I come to the pitch of this long digression.—As the light increased I discovered around me an ocean of mist, which by chance reached up exactly to the base of the tower, and shut out every vestige of the earth, while I was left floating on this fragment of the wreck of a world, on my carved plank in cloudland; a situation which required no aid from the imagination to render it impressive” (188). The morning fog that began the chapter prefigured this massive fog which—the light in the east steadily increasing—“revealed to me more clearly the new world into which I had risen in the night, the new terra‐firma perchance of my future life.” The trip to the top of the mountain had taken him to a new beginning, a re‐originating more potent than any of its prefigurations because it happened on a height to which he had climbed and happened after a night spent wrapped in boards. (It is hardly extravagant to hear echoes of this scene in the last scene of Walden, where the “strong and beautiful bug” emerges from under “many concentric layers of woodenness” into a new morning life [W, 333].) Old places are put away—“there was not a crevice left through which the trivial places we name Massachusetts, or Vermont, or New York, could be seen”—and so, perhaps, is old time: “I still inhaled the clear atmosphere of a July morning,—if it were July there.” And as these are put away so also is the uncleanness of the old world below: “As there was wanting the symbol, so there was not the substance of impurity, no spot nor stain” (188).²⁰ No wonder he sees himself as if on a platform, staring out at a prelapsarian world (189), and that here at this midway point he envisions an ascent to the goal of all spirit, his origin, and, he hopes, his end. All of the re‐originating has led, finally, to this, all of it offering impetus to a climb toward the place of absolute beginning that is also the absolute goal. A few pages before, at the end of the “Monday” chapter, he had prepared for this experience by describing how the sound of a distant drum had led him out of his habitual thinking into an awareness of the health of the universe: “Suddenly old Time winked at me,—Ah, you know me, you rogue,—and news had come that IT was well” (173). But Time does not stay (“idle Time ran gadding by / And left me with Eternity alone”), and he moves directly into an experience of the Timeless, “that everlasting Something to which we are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very Selves” (193). Those last words speak of the Ultimate as, at once, origin and goal. The next step would have to be an attempt at a more permanent union, a reaching to end at the place of beginning. The Saddleback episode offers a vision of such an attempt.²¹

That vision culminates in an epiphany, the shining forth of the sun of “this pure world,” a sight unknown to “the inhabitants of earth” below who “behold commonly but the dark and shadowy under‐side of heaven's pavement” (189). In a move of extraordinary subtlety, Thoreau exults in his good fortune, praises what he sees, and—by recalling the spatiality, the sense of up here and down there that the passage had nearly forgotten—surreptitiously prepares for what is to happen next.

What happens should be no surprise, given the efficacy of the subtext, in “A Walk to Wachusett” and the excerpts from that essay that had been imported into A Week. Inherent in the climb up Wachusett had been the fear of the plain's contagion. The excerpt continued that deeply ingrained threat. Up here on Saddleback, where his vision is most extended, most fully played out in all its exultation, the subtext demands and gets its own piece of the action, its chance to play itself out. In fact, what the subtext does is compel the journey to take a cyclical shape rather than the unswervingly linear one that had been the form of his utmost desire:

But alas, owing as I think to some unworthiness in myself, my private sun did stain himself, and

“Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly wrack on his celestial face,”—

for before the god had reached the zenith the heavenly pavement rose and embraced my wavering virtue, or rather I sank down again into that “forlorn world,” from which the celestial Sun had hid his visage.

(189‐90)

The evening before, he had “seen the summits of new and yet higher mountains, the Catskills, by which I might hope to climb to heaven again”; but for now he had to descend, and he soon found himself “in the region of cloud and drizzling rain, and the inhabitants affirmed that it had been a cloudy and drizzling day wholly” (190). A whole history of visionary returns echoes through this passage, especially those that touch on the loneliness of the visionary who had seen but could not be believed, who had drunk the Milk of Paradise alone.

Thoreau has his own ironies to add to that history. He needed to return to the place of contagion, as he was still too much a creature of darkness, rain, and stain to complete the askesis; yet the touch of that very place made the askesis, for the moment, impossible. It was not the epiphany that failed: he had seen the light (“its own sun”) in its own place, and “never here did ‘Heaven's sun’ stain himself.” It was the askesis that failed, its frustration the fault of his private sun and its own stain of contagion. Up on Wachusett, they had sought a pure libation, and now we can see its point. Only thus could they remove the effects of the plain from themselves.

Other ironies take into their purview some of the deeper structures of A Week. The questioning of cyclical forms appears once again, this time with an undertone of melancholy that will reach out to affect the text's inner shape and, necessarily, its tonality. The act of ascending and descending describes a perfectly cyclical pattern, one that echoes all those cycles—day, week, season, and more—that give A Week its dominant form; yet he makes it clear at this point that he can dispense with such chiming in. From the point of view established in the world of rain and stain, he has sketched an ideal shape, an image of completion; but in terms of the way of seeing he knew of from above the clouds, there is only incompletion, the breaking off of a pattern that required only ascent. Cycles are wonderfully efficacious by one set of standards and sadly inadequate by another. One of the results of this impasse is to leave him in a state of suspension between differing ways of moving and their opposing valorizations. Another, the most potent, is to subvert the very concept by which this text claims to function. Halfway through A Week—just about half in pages, precisely half within the week that the text shaped out to be—stands a scene and an experience of extraordinary prominence. The import of that scene had been carefully prepared, and its effect on the book whose center it commands is to profoundly, permanently unsettle all of the claims of certain old discourses about the need to round things out. Nothing about A Week is more important than this undoing. The events on Saddleback Mountain embody a major statement about being in the world, and they have the gravest effect upon Thoreau's understanding of what such being means. For the remainder of this study, we shall be pondering other scenes that deepen that understanding.

One of these is the ascent of Agiocochook, the point and purpose of which are now a good deal clearer. That ascent is a climb to the natural source, the place where the stream begins, one end of that natural cycle which carries the waters to the sea and then up to the clouds and then back again to the source on top of the mountain.²² A cycle is the inevitable frame for such a sequence. The ascent of Saddleback Mountain has a different source in mind, the primal beginning that is also the absolute end, and if that goal is reached, the narrative needs nothing more to be essentially complete. Each of these ascents is all that the other is not, and Thoreau felt compelled to bring both into the text in order to bring out the fullest meaning of each. Agiocochook by itself is only a partial truth, and the same can be said for Saddleback. Only with both together can the potential totality of experience (a totality envisioned rather than achieved, always about to be but so far incomplete) be properly understood.

To shift the focus to the individual climbs, Agiocochook and Saddleback must have each other in order for each to be fully itself, in order for both to satisfy the need for the fullest fidelity to Thoreau's worldly experience. Saddleback supplements Agiocochook, adding a dimension to the text that Agiocochook alone cannot possibly offer. Making that point, though, we also need to acknowledge that the parity between the ascents is now beginning to slip: whatever the homologous shapes of these mirror image journeys, there is no question of giving them equivalent valorizations. We have noted how much of the passage on Agiocochook involves the silly figure of the strutting soldier boy, but consider also what follows in the passage:

Thus, in fair days as well as foul, we had traced up the river to which our native stream is a tributary, until from Merrimack it became the Pemigewasset that leaped by our side, and when we had passed its fountain‐head, the Wild Amonoosuck, whose puny channel was crossed at a stride, guiding us toward its distant source among the mountains, and at length, without its guidance, we were enabled to reach the summit of agiocochook.

(314)

The stream that becomes their river is shown to be only a trickle that can be easily stepped over. To compare this to the massive breadth of the “seascape” above the clouds is to put the experience on top of Saddleback, whatever its frustrations, within an even more exalted aura, its sublimity that much more awesome.²³

Which brings us back to the first half of our original question, why Saddleback is where it is in the text of A Week. Another way of putting that question is to wonder why Saddleback is precisely when it is, which means to question not only why it occurs when it does in the text of A Week but also why it turns up in the record of a trip that took place at another time. Agiocochook had to be where it is in the text because that is when it happened in their journey up the river. Saddleback appears at the beginning of the “Tuesday” chapter, in the center of the recorded journey, for other good reasons: it insists on its centrality to the experience the journey records, much of the coding that goes into the concept of “center” coming into play in the episode. If we think of the text as a landscape (Romantic epics like The Prelude encourage us to do so), we can envision Saddleback as an eminence placed at its center, and Agiocochook as a smaller and less exalted eminence placed near the end.²⁴ To shift discourses slightly, the “actual” ascent comes halfway through the actual journey, the “symbolic” ascent halfway through the journey as finally described; which is another way of saying that the placement of Saddleback is really an instruction for reading.

But what then of the when, Saddleback out of its time? Much of the use to which Thoreau puts facts has finally to do with his compulsion to play havoc with those dominating cycles that claim to command A Week. By setting this prominent action precisely when it is, five years away from the sequence in which he gives it so significant a part, Thoreau skews the regular temporality on which those cycles depend and therefore undermines the ultimate source of authority through which they seek to substantiate their claims. We saw something similar happening with the excerpts from “Wachusett,” which are more devious than Saddleback because Thoreau so works the text that the excerpts seem contemporaneous with the journey in which they are placed. Saddleback is more open and therefore more arrogant in what it does and says about all those (equally) arrogant cycles. There is a very important sense in which A Week never recovers from the effects of the Saddleback episode. From that point on, it becomes difficult to speak of closure with the confidence it demands. What A Week has come to show is not the impossibility of closure—it happens on a regular basis—but, what is a good deal worse, its relative insufficiency, its ultimate, insulting impotence. At a subsequent juncture, we shall see how this refusal of total obeisance to the closures in the text carries into the way Thoreau chooses to conclude the text.²⁵

Two final points: one a connection, the other a question. What we have seen and shall see in A Week about the uneasiness of closure, the subversion of the cyclical, the skewing of temporality, tells us a great deal about the fable that runs through Thoreau's corpus. What we have seen is, in fact, a major contribution to the fable. We know that the word of words and the great, serene sentence cannot finally be found here, whatever their precursors in moments like the magnificent paragraph that gets Walden going. (It is not, we saw, impossible to make words work, only very, very difficult.) What A Week shows of the inability of closure to say all that needs to be said has a great deal to do with the fact that the ultimate ordering of language is not yet to be found but always about to be. We can read the Saddleback episode as an allegory of that inefficacy, and of all sorts of others as well. If Thoreau had had the spiritual wherewithal, he could have transcended Saddleback, even in this life: that, it would seem, is the claim the episode makes, such wherewithal having to do with purity, of course, but also with the tools one needs to make such a trip. Among those tools is the capacity for self‐transcendence that will take him beyond stain; but it is clear that such capacity needs at least one prior tool in order to realize itself fully, the supreme language that will serve to get him to where he is going—a place that, to no surprise, is the one where that language resides. That bitter paradox is hard to live with, yet he cannot live without it. A Week gives us not only more of Thoreau's fable but more of what it feels like to live within its terms.

That is the connection; what follows is the question, which has finally to do—as does everything else in this study—with how, in Thoreau's experience, one gets to be at home in the world. What kind of at‐homeness (what degree of at‐homeness) can one achieve in the world below the clouds, this place of contagion and stain? Given the tentativeness of things, it would be a difficult kind, surely, incomplete at best whatever the glorious moments that turn up in Thoreau's experience. One thing we have certainly seen in the conditions of the fable, one thing any careful observer of the tonality of the corpus cannot help but notice, is a persistent dissatisfaction that sounds all through the corpus, despite those glorious moments. Put in terms of the fable, the inaccessibility of the ultimate word and its sentence means that whatever Thoreau does here can never be more than tentative. Whatever the moments of gold, the at‐homeness that is possible in the world below the clouds is ultimately ephemeral, which means that we are always on the way to somewhere else. That perpetual going‐on goes far toward explaining some of the radical gestures in this corpus based on excursions. How can we put together the passion for the excursions that one chooses to make (“A Walk to Wachusett,” A Week, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, “Walking”) as well as the other excursions within which one is carried (all those cycles that inhabit the corpus, especially those in A Week and Walden) with the passion for at‐homeness that is equally Thoreauvian and always under strain? Some answers to these questions will come from the closer look at the acting out of at‐homeness that we shall take in the next chapter.

Notes

1. Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), p. 272. For comments on the audience, see p. 273.

2. See especially Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973); Sherman Paul, The Shores of America: Thoreau's Inward Exploration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958); William Bysshe Stein, “Thoreau's First Book: A Spoor of Yoga,” Emerson Society Quarterly 41 (1965): 4‐25.

3. Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, p. 197.

4. AW, 499. Johnson's essay is the best available survey of readings of A Week: see “Historical Introduction,” AW, 433‐500.

5. See H. Daniel Peck, “‘Further Down the Stream of Time’: Memory and Perspective in Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” Thoreau Quarterly 16 (1984): 93‐118.

6. For a quick overview of the itinerary, see Richard J. Schneider, Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), pp. 26‐27. There is a slightly longer sketch in Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, pp. 88‐93.

7. Several commentators have read this trip as archetypal. See Paul, Shores of America; and Joyce Holland, “Pattern and Meaning in Thoreau's A Week,” Emerson Society Quarterly 50, suppl. 1 (1968): 48‐55.

8. Poems by George Herbert are on pp. 48 and 314. On the theory of meditative poetry, see Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954).

9. Meyer Abrams discusses the establishment of place in such poems in “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” pp. 527‐60.

10. See, e.g., AW, 377: “here on the stream of the Concord, where we have all the while been bodily.”

11. See Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 34.

12. For examples of these gestures, see my Thoreau's Redemptive Imagination, chap. 1.

13. Much of what Thoreau was getting at turns up in Robert Frost's “West‐Running Brook,” which reads like a late pondering on a number of the anomalies in A Week; and yet there are differences so significant that they come to show more clearly what Thoreau is trying to do and what it is possible for him to do. In Frost's poem, the brook that runs west “when all the other country brooks flow east / To reach the ocean” images the flow that is opposed to the expected sweep of natural things (in The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969], pp. 257‐60). But—and here Frost gets at complications similar to Thoreau's, especially Thoreau's uneasiness with binary descriptions—the brook carried its own contrarieties within itself. One of the observers in the poem notices how “the black stream, catching on a sunken rock [is] flung backward on itself in one white wave,” the brook, “in that white wave,” running “counter to itself.” Further, Frost taps into the same archetypal gestures that Thoreau did, seeing in the flowing water “the stream of everything that runs away”; and yet in his reading of that emblem, he takes in possibilities unavailable to even the extremest elements of Thoreauvian discourse. Frost's brook runs away “to fill the abyss's void with emptiness,” imaging “the universal cataract of death / That spends to nothingness.” It is what Frost can say that Thoreau could never utter that ought to give us caution when we watch Frost doing what Thoreau so often does, seeing in the retrograde motion a figure for all that seems most ourselves:

    It is this backward motion toward the source,
    Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
    The tribute of the current to the source.
    It is from this in nature we are from.
    It is most us.

    Calling that retrograde motion a “humanizing” one when it moves through Frost's Pascalian spaces would put all sorts of ironies into the term, ironies that Thoreau almost certainly suspected.

14. For details of the trip and the fate of the essay see Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, pp. 132‐33.

15. “A Walk to Wachusett” had also begun with indistinctness but says nothing about morning and therefore lacks the tripartite conflation that appears repeatedly in A Week. For a comparable passage, see AW, 192, which speaks, as “Wachusett” does, of mountains and indistinctness, and connects the sort of seeing that becomes possible in such conditions with the presence of the sublime. But the passage is not at the beginning of a section of the text, and it says nothing about the morning. It is only when all factors are present, as they are in A Week and elsewhere, that the full signification comes through. Still, “Wachusett” and this passage ought to alert us to the likelihood that the sublime will be a condition of these scenes of origin. Longinus had seen precisely the same relationship, a point Thoreau surely knew.

16. I deal with further instances in chap. 8, which goes into the question of origins and ends from another, but related, point of view.

17. Compare W, 89, which clarifies the poem in “Tuesday”: “To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.”

18. Though there is no figure anything like her elsewhere in Thoreau, we ought to remember that The Scarlet Letter was getting underway at about the same time as A Week, and there is more than a hint of Hester's sexuality in this young woman of the mountain.

19. It is, I think, possible to argue that the figure of the mountain woman put a nervousness into the passage, and that this bit of bravado was put in to counter it.

20. In an important related passage from the Journal of February 12, 1860 (J 13:140‐42), the reflection of the sky in the ice on the ground persuades Thoreau to think of himself as walking over “a smooth green sea,” the heavens happening here on earth (though with earth envisioned as, alternately, either sea or sky): “Here the clouds are these patches of snow or frozen vapor, and the ice is the greenish sky between them.” Curiously, though—and quite in line with ambiguities we have seen elsewhere—Thoreau cannot make up his mind about the color that is reflected: “The ice reflects the blue of the sky”; and later, “the shadows are blue, as the sky is forever blue,” though the reflections had been green at several points earlier in the passage. Still, whatever the ambiguities of color, there is no question here of stain: “In winter we are purified and translated. The earth does not absorb our thoughts.” What he longs for in Saddleback seems to be realized at least this once, though a seasonal purification can hardly be a lasting one.

21. The obvious similarities between the Saddleback ascent and Wordsworth's ascent of Mount Snowdon, recorded in the last book of The Prelude, ought not to blot out the patent distinctions. Thoreau's climb has finally to do with a seeking after transcendence and not (one of the major emphases of the Snowdon passage) the way the mind works over the materials of the world. That Wordsworth may have come to accept the Snowdon experience as a kind of second best, since moving beyond Nature seems not, for now, possible, does not cancel out the distinction, though it leagues Thoreau and Wordsworth in all sorts of significant ways. Of equal importance to what we have been developing about Saddleback is the fact that the Snowdon episode took place in 1791, before Wordsworth's distress over the French Revolution, though its placement in The Prelude does not make that point clear. See Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 78 and 493, fn. 16. Several images by Caspar David Friedrich relate to the theme of the “sea of clouds,” which was a prevalent one at the time. See, for example, Friedrich's “Traveller Looking Down Over a Sea of Fog.”

22. There are actually two mountain ascents in the “Tuesday” chapter, Saddleback at the beginning and, later, that ascent which leads Thoreau to meet a character named Rice. I shall deal extensively with Rice later. Suffice it to say here that Rice comes through as a kind of natural man, a type of the uncivil, and therefore points back to the ruder days of origin. In that sense, this second ascent speaks of natural origin, much as Agiocochook was to do, and it therefore balances Saddleback within the “Tuesday” chapter. Still, though coherent within its chapter, the second ascent does not tell much of the fuller meaning of Saddleback within A Week as a whole. Only the pairing of Saddleback and Agiocochook can bring that fullness out.

23. If I parse this difficult sentence correctly, they did not, in fact, reach the originating point of the Merrimack, for they never went on to the “distant source among the mountains” from which their river begins. Should this be an accurate reading, the trip to the natural source is itself not quite complete, an irony of the sort that Thoreau always relished.

24. Here too A Week sounds very much like The Prelude. Consider, for example, the following from the “Monday” chapter: “The abrupt epochs and chasms are smoothed down in history as the inequalities of the plain are concealed by distance” (125).

25. What Saddleback does to closure affects everything else it does to A Week as a whole, including its reading of visionary events. In “The Experience of the Sacred in Thoreau's Week” (ELH 33 [1966]: 66‐91), Jonathan Bishop gives particular attention to the Saddleback ascent and the events at the top of the mountain, figuring the whole, quite correctly, as a type of the experience of the sacred in Thoreau's text. Bishop's awareness of what he calls “some half‐recognition of a sacred presence inhabiting the sacred realm” (78) and of a “presence half‐discovered in Nature” (83) implies the incompleteness of Thoreau's experience on Saddleback. So too does his comment on the climactic paragraph of the experience, which brings Thoreau “to the verge of an encounter” (74). Yet he tends to take the event as a full‐fledged experience of God (“the rising sun [is] an obvious analogue for God” [75]), though Thoreau specifically says that he needs “successive days' journeys” to reach the ultimate place, that however great this point above the clouds, it is only a “platform” (189). But this matter of incompleteness goes further, for Bishop does not give nearly enough emphasis to the aspect of failure, the paradoxical status of Thoreau's return below (an incomplete completion), or the degree of compulsion involved (he says that Thoreau “inhibits himself” on Saddleback [82], though the matter of activity and passivity, the degree of self‐reflexiveness of any of the verbs involved, cannot be so easily mastered). Finally, he speaks of “the independence of the story in its context” (73), another phrasing that misses all of that intricate webbing which involves the Saddleback episode in the texture of A Week. Saddleback offers far more than Bishop allows: its melancholy sense of inadequacy and its centrality to the text as a whole are inescapable. Still, with all these demurrals granted, Bishop's essay remains one of the key readings of A Week.

    One ought to complement his essay with Walter Hesford's “‘Incessant Tragedies’: A Reading of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” ELH 44 (1977): 515‐25. The title points the way to Hesford's comments on how, for Thoreau, “history has a fixed tragic motif” and “American progress” is, in the main, “tragic” (520); how there is “a tragic strain that constitutes a constant undercurrent in the book” (523). Hesford properly balances this strain with reference to Thoreau's comments on the traveler's rebirth on the road (518‐19) and on the relation of this rebirth to writing (521).

Abbreviations

AW: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ed. Carl F. Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Excursions: Excursions (New York: Corinth Books, 1962).

J: The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, 14 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1962).

∗J: Journal, Volume 1: 1837‐1844, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell, William L. Howarth, Robert Sattelmeyer, and Thomas Blanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Journal, Volume 2: 1842‐1848, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

W: Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).