Sizing-Up the Soul with a Beastly Stare

It is amazing to consider how much earth shattering literature was generated in America between a handful of writers who all knew each other extremely well, visited each other often, and for all extents and purposes were neighbors. Such a thing hasn't happened since and was considerably rare in any happenings before. You might have to go all the way back to the Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley relationships to find anything remotely similar.

Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott, & Hawthorne -- all knew each other. (Later on we add brothers William James, the psychologist and Henry James, the novelist into this mix.) With the exception of Whitman, they were all neighbors. Thoreau used to look after little Louise May Alcott from time to time; he house sat for Emerson when he traveled. This group went to weddings together, funerals together, and they advocated for each other's publications.

Whitman was the lone outsider and although his relationship with the Concord transcendentalists would smooth out over time, he earned the rebuke of Emerson early in their relationship by quoting from a private letter Emerson wrote him in the newspaper, and by using an actual quote from that letter on the spine of Leaves of Grass (2nd Edition) without Emerson's permission. A gutsy move and the critics hounded him for it and it nearly cost Whitman any sort of relationship with the Concord writers.

Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau met one time in November of 1856. Amos Bronson Alcott, who I blogged about below, took Thoreau to Whitman in hopes of introducing the two men. Oh to have been a fly on that wall as these two men locked eyes!

Listen to how Bronson Alcott describes the meeting between Whitman and Thoreau in his journal entry:

"I hoped to put him [Walt Whitman] in communication direct with Thoreau, and tried my hand a little after we came down stairs and sat in the parlor below; but each seemed planted fast in reserves, surveying the other curiously, — like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do, whether to snap or run; and it came to no more than cold compliments between them."

Wow, what a description. Alcott's journals don't usually contain much embellishment or over-description, but this particular passage stands out. The meeting must have had quite an impact on Alcott to have described it in such a way. He goes on in the journal entry to wonder if perhaps Walt had met his match, or his equal in the young Thoreau.

Two men in a locked stare, each sizing the other up, neither willing to divulge too much information and so it came to "no more than cold compliments between them." One wonders what each thought of the other. They exchanged not only looks, but books. Walt gave Henry a copy of his 2^nd edition Leaves of Grass.

Three short weeks later, Thoreau had read the entire thing and in this letter to a Unitarian pastor he says:

“That Walt Whitman, of whom I wrote to you, is the most interesting fact to me at the present. I have just read his 2nd edition (which he gave me) and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time… there are 2 or 3 pieces in the book which are disagreeable to say the least, simply sensual. He does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke….

I do not believe that all the sermons so called that have been preached in this land put together are equal to it for preaching… We ought to rejoice greatly in him. He occasionally suggests something a little more than human. Since I have seen him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egoism in his book. He may turn out the least braggart of all, having a better right to be confident.”

Seems as though the old gray poet had quite the effect on Thoreau… six years later Thoreau would die of tuberculosis at the age of 44. We can only speculate what more he would have said about Whitman.

So how exactly did Walt feel about Henry? It would take almost twenty years, but Whitman eventually visited Alcott and Emerson in Concord. In his Specimen Days journal, Whitman would recount visiting Thoreau’s grave and walking the shores of Walden Pond. Whitman, like so many other travelers over time, would place a small stone of remembrance at the cabin site where Thoreau lived during the writing of Walden.

Stones of Remembrance @ Thoreau's Cabin Site
Is one of these stones Whitman's?

 

I think the respect was mutual. And the locked stare between these two alpha male authors was quite real… each sizing up the other, both prepared to acknowledge the human propensity to live as animal and as eternal soul.

 

Of Cages and Cures

"Go build yourself a hut, and there begin

 the grand process of devouring yourself alive.

I see no other alternative, no other hope for you." 

 

~ Ellery Channing to Henry David Thoreau

 

Replica of Thoreau's Cabin

Original Cabin Site on Walden Pond

 

"Self-care" is a term tossed around today in a variety of different ways. As I said in a post below, I am sort inoculated to the term and have no real fondness for it. When you practice self-care, you are generally making an attempt to improve your physical and emotional health, but what that looks like remains up for debate because it varies vastly from person to person.

 

When Thoreau's friend Ellery Channing says "go devour yourself... I see no other hope for you," we are certainly left to wonder if peering through the lens of self-care if this wasn't perhaps some bad advice. Now, we can argue that it worked out alright for Thoreau, tuberculosis aside. But imagine with me that you've just heard a professional counselor give this bit of advice to an intelligent, melancholy man who arrived in his/her office with emotional and intellectual restlessness.

 

Hard to imagine, yes? Go devour yourself? Retreat from human spaces into the cages of your own mind? Isolate yourself to your books and your writing? None of that seems to much like "self-care." The potential to dig oneself deeper into the hole feels completely plausible.

 

One of the reasons I believe a general malaise has fallen across our culture is that we tend to see comfort as a cure rather than a cage. Medication is prescribed to "relieve" the discomfort that we feel, or sometimes that others feel, due to our mental or emotional conditions. The thought of devouring ourselves never really occurs to us and certainly isn't treated as a prescribed course of action.

 

This trip was not only an experience of a lifetime for me, created for me to absorb the thoughts of dead poets and writers in a state of appreciative bliss -- it was also designed to be self-care. Up to this point, I've been trying to blog about my visits (and I have at least two more to do - one on the Poe house and another on the Twain house), but with my trip now complete it seems only fair to address the second half of this blog's title: The Oddities of Self-Care.

 

How is swimming in Walden Pond or reading Leaves of Grass at the tomb of Walt Whitman self-care? In one aspect, I believe my trip has fed my cage just as much as it has fed a cure. Like Thoreau, I often feel as though I have no other choice but to devour myself in musing and writings of great men gone by... in that sense, I've just spent one week feeding my cage.

 

Watching the sun rise while floating on my back in Walden Pond, watching that last star get absorbed in a curtain of light, watching the surface of the lake transform into a canopy of mist heightened by the first rays of sun -- there is no substitute for an experience like that. I was so cold in there, as it was about 55 degrees outside and most of my body was miserable and aching; my wet head jutted upward into the cold mist only heightened the physical discomfort I was feeling. But I didn't want to leave... it certainly felt Divine and I started to wonder if perhaps "there was no other hope for me." I fed the cage and wanted to stay in the woods forever, to turn my back on man and live alone with Nature.

 

On the other hand though, I believe this trip helped to define the kind of pastor I will become. I did leave the pond and will continue leaving a thousand ponds hereafter. The temptation is to believe that I am somehow unique in this regard, but nothing could be further from the truth. All of us have that listless wandering grafted into our souls; all of us look for the tender retreats. We all want a Garden of Eden. Carving out spiritual spaces to swim freely, shameless, and naked before all of God and creation seems not so far fetched a calling. Taking our man-made things, our tendency to hide from both God and ourselves, burying ourselves away in the tombs of our technologies, all of it can often serve as a veil we wear over the deeper parts of who we are and what we were each born to do: to enjoy God and reveal His character, image, and likeness in our own brief lives.

 

I am tempted to list out in bullet form the kinds of things this trip has revealed about me, and I'd like to believe, about all of us as human beings... but I'm not going to. I will blog a bit more and to any who take the time, I think some of that list will appear wedged within the paragraphs. In the meantime though, it will suffice me enough to say that there are many cages and many cures both within our hearts and outside them in popular culture.

 

Sometimes the cures lie at the very bottom of who we are. Sometimes we have to eat our way there; and the sustenance of such a meal is not without cost. But then again, nothing worth having is without cost. And maybe that's the true meaning of self-care.