A quick note: as I am still busy with teaching and a writing project unrelated to this blog, I am dredging up another one of my old essays from my former blog, Musement, now defunct. I wrote it in 2017, during my time in the Peace Corps. I had a lot of free time in those days, so this post is a little longer than my usual fare. I hope you enjoy it.
Hound, Bay Horse, Turtledove
This month marks Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday. There’s a lot of writing floating around about Thoreau right now, much of it variations on the same few themes: civil disobedience, living in the woods, wildness, the neckbeard. Usually unsaid is Thoreau’s extensive scientific work as a naturalist, his journalism for some of the most prominent papers of the day, his tireless (and effective) abolitionism, and his career as one of the best pencilmakers in American history. He could play the flute, conduct a land survey, and build a house. He read Homer in the original Greek, and was fond of quoting Confucius and the Bhagavad Gita. He was a polymath.
Maybe it takes one to know one, because one of the best things written about Thoreau came from a painter, writer, translator, and designer equally at home talking about Pre-Socratic Greece, city planning, Soviet Constructivism, the history of sexuality, atonal music, prehistoric cave art, utopianism, furniture design, Denmark, pastoral Latin poetry, landscape painting, and anthropology, among other things. He was Guy Davenport, and he wrote “The Concord Sonata,” a collage that turns a minor moment in Walden into a portrait of Thoreau. It begins like this:
At his small sanded white pine table in his cabin at Walden Pond on which he kept an arrowhead, an oak leaf, and an Iliad in Greek, Henry David Thoreau worked on two books at once. In one, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, he wrote: Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. In the other, Walden, or Life in the Woods, he wrote three such sentences: “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers whom I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.”
Davenport is being modest. At least one intelligence has made sense of Walden’s least sensible passage. His “Concord Sonata” is all about Thoreau’s hound, bay horse, and turtledove: where they come from, what they mean, and if he found them. I had to work hard to understand this prickly, allusive text, a solution to a mystery that creates more mysteries in its wake. Davenport is never an easy read. But it was worth it. This essay tracks his movements.
Let’s start with that first section, all of which is true: the white pine table, the Iliad, the sentences. Thoreau wrote much of A Week on the Concord and Walden at the same time, but he published A Week quickly and labored on Walden for years. Like most people, before I read Walden I assumed that it was just sappy self-help: Walden: I Lived in the Woods Practicing Mindfulness and Self Reliance, and You Can, Too! This is the Walden people have in mind when they bring up little Henry taking his laundry from the pond to his mother’s house as though Thoreau lied to us about his manly forest survivalism. Walden isn’t self-help, of course; strictly speaking, it’s not entirely non-fiction. Thoreau really did live in a cabin by the pond, but he takes liberties for the sake of literature, compressing two years into one in order to track the order of ideas and personal growth with the seasons of a single year, ending in spring on a note of enlightenment, literal and otherwise.
The dog, the horse, and the bird aren’t real, but they obviously mean something. Davenport quotes Stanley Cavell: “I have no new proposal to offer about the literary or biographical source of these symbols in perhaps his most famously cryptic passage, but the very fact that they are symbols, and function within a little myth, seems to me to tell me we need to know.” Thoreau’s passage is its own paragraph, with no clear connection to the parts before or after. If it’s making a point, it does so in a roundabout way. It feels like something an ancient Chinese sage would write.
Et Voilà Tout
It is something a Chinese sage wrote. “The immediate instigation” for “The Concord Sonata,” Davenport said in an interview, “was a search for the source of the mysterious passage in Walden (about losing a dog, a horse, and a dove). I found it in Mencius.” (Reading Thoreau as a Chinese philosopher is a typical Davenportism.) And sure enough, Davenport found Thoreau quoting Mencius in A Week on the Concord:
Mencius says: If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of the heart, he does not know how to seek them again. The duties of all practical philosophy consist only in seeking after the sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all.”
No English translation of Mencius existed when Thoreau wrote that. He didn’t read it in Chinese, obviously, but he could’ve read it in French. And sure enough, open Chapter V of the second book of Mecius in Confucius et Mencius: les quatre livres de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine, translated by M.G. Pauthier and published in 1846, you will find:
Meng-Tseu dit: Si l'on perd une poule ou un chien, on sait bien les rechercher; si on perd les sentiments de son cœur, on ne sait pas les rechercher! Les devoirs de la philosophie pratique ne consistent qu'à rechercher ces sentiments du cœur que nous avons perdus; et voilà tout.
The chicken and dog from Mencius have “become under Concord skies a biblical dove, a Rover, and a bay horse,” Davenport writes. “The one is a pet, one is a friend, one is a fellow worker.” These are the sentiments of the heart. These are values.
So Davenport has solved the what, but not the why. Having found Mencius in Thoreau, he also finds Thoreau in Mencius. The longest section in “The Concord Sonata” is the dialog between Mencius and Duke Hsuan about sparing an ox out of mercy and killing a sheep in its place. I found it in Mencius 1A7. My translation reads:
The king was pleased, and said, 'It is said in the Book of Poetry, "The minds of others, I am able by reflection to measure;" - this is verified, my Master, in your discovery of my motive. I indeed did the thing, but when I turned my thoughts inward, and examined into it, I could not discover my own mind.
Davenport’s paraphrase is better, but still: here is a bit of American Transcendentalism in the Three Kingdoms: self-reflection as a means of knowing the world. Not that Thoreau and Mencius are really identical: at the point where Davenport introduces a Confucian ode, the Mencius dialog turns toward the very un-Thoreauvian topic of benevolent, powerful rulers. Davenport isn’t making an argument—just spotting an assonance.
About that ode: it’s not in Mencius and I can’t find it. Davenport is either relying on an interpretation different than what I can find online, or it’s a fabrication. Both are possible. But it’s still worth a close read. “The world’s order is in the stars,” it begins, “We are its children, its orphans.” To a Confucian or Thoreau, this is not a metaphor but a fact: nature is orderly, and humanity is embedded in this order. Thoreau writes in A Week on the Concord of “the stars, by whose dissipated rays this lower world is illumined.” Again, here is a Confucian reading of Walden, and a Thoreauvian reading of the Shi Ching. The third through sixth stanzas read:
The autumn moon is round and red.
I have not troubled the order,
Yet I am no longer in it.
In the first waywardness we could
Have gone back. In the second we
Began to confuse lost and found.
Had we been angry to be lost,
Would we have taken disorder
For order, if any had cared?
Cicadas shrill in the willows.
There was a time we had neighbors.
The autumn moon is round and red.
Every stanza here raises an issue you can find in Walden. Waywardness, an absence of order, no clarity of purpose—they are as lost to the Confucian as they are to the American. “There was a time we had neighbors,” Confucius sings; Thoreau says, “We cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men.” However different the two sages are in their outlooks—one wrote “Civil Disobedience,” and the other gave us filial piety—they both understand well enough that we are a stupid and inept species, cut off from a world and a heritage that might sustain us on better terms, if we were not so lost.
This is the center (literally) of “The Concord Sonata.” Losing and finding, are the operative terms here, the key to Thoreau’s hound, horse, and dove, to Walden, to his entire corpus, and to “The Concord Sonata.” They are everywhere. Look at the Confucian ode again: we are lost, and cannot find our way back. Look at the Mencius again: losing chickens and dogs and the sentiments of the heart, and seeking after them. Look at Thoreau’s parable again. “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail.” Thoreau’s work is a search for something lost. But what has he lost?
Harmony and Effluences
Section 2 is a quote from the American naturalist John Burroughs. He says that Thoreau had a “fine effluence he was always reaching after, and often grasping or inhaling [and] in every spring note and call that he listens to so patiently, he hopes to get some clew to his lost treasures, the effluence that so provokingly eludes him.” This “search of his for the transcendental,” as Burroughs calls it, as well as its fine effluence, come from Thoreau’s journals. March 7, 1859: “The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence which only the most ingenious worshipper perceives at a reverent distance from its surface even. Only that intellect makes any progress toward conceiving of the essence which at the same time perceives the effluence.” This comes from a longer argument against a scientific paper that, for him, fails to grasp its subject’s grand, mystical glories and enigmas. The paper is on potato vines.
The natural world—not an idealized, feckless nature of roses and waterfalls, but the filthy, real one composed of potato vines and warring ants—is where Thoreau’s search it always taking him. Nature is where Thoreau looks for effluences, essences, and the sentiments of the heart. Section 16, “Meadows,” finds him searching in that wilderness, lovingly describing the sedges, andromedas, hardhacks, marsh-hawks, and berries: chokeberry, blueberries, and hollyberries all together, “in singular contrast yet harmony, and you hardly knew why you selected those only to eat, leaving the others to the birds.” It’s a moment of joy and union for Thoreau. This is what he’s looking for in the woods. He calls it harmony.
Harmony is musical. “The Concord Sonata” is also the name of a piano sonata in four parts by the American Charles Ives, an insurance agent, college baseball star, Constitutional reformer manqué, and avant-garde composer. (Another polymath.) Each movement of the sonata is dedicated to a famous Concordian; the fourth movement is Thoreau’s, a collage focusing on the relationship between language, music, and nature. In the essay Ives published alongside the symphony, he writes:
Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear "the Symphony." The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer. He was divinely conscious of the enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony of her solitude. In this consciousness he sang of the submission to Nature, the religion of contemplation, and the freedom of simplicity.
The connection between nature, music, and sentences is rhythm. Thoreau’s careful searching examined these rhythms and how they worked. They worked the same way, Ives says, and Davenport agrees: together, in harmony.
The last section of the story is a single sentence: “Fear not, thou drummer of the night, we shall be there.” In A Week on the Concord, Thoreau’s party hears a drummer as they sleep on the riverbank:
We could have assured him that his beat would be answered, and the forces be mustered. Fear not, thou drummer of the night, we too will be there. And still he drummed on in the silence and the dark. This stray sound from a far-off sphere came to our ears from time to time, far, sweet, and significant, and we listened with such an unprejudiced sense as if for the first time we heard at all. No doubt he was an insignificant drummer enough, but his music afforded us a prime and leisure hour, and we felt that we were in season wholly. These simple sounds related us to the stars.
Self and stars are together in harmony. What do you do with that?
Lions, Designers, and Why
There are three lions in the “Concord Sonata.” Two of them are attributions. W.E.B. DuBois: “Lions have no historians.” The second is from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” Wittgenstein’s lion is certainly Thoreau in Davenport’s scheme: Section 12 is a cranky note from Davenport about how, in early American English, “One ship speaks another when they pass on the high seas,” which when it appears in A Week on the Concord is always misprinted as spoken to in “modern ignorance.” We literally don’t understand Thoreau’s language when he speaks.
One more lion: Section 15 says “Mr. Thoreau discovered that the dove is fiercer than a lion when he sat in the Concord jail, like Diogenes.” The jail is where he sat for refusing to pay taxes to support the Mexican War. Diogenes was the itinerant philosopher who lived in the wilderness, defaced currency, and rejected material comfort. (For his rough mode of living, the Greeks called him a dog, kynikoí, and today we still call people who distrust convention cynics.)
You can see the similarity between the two. “Thoreau was most himself when he was Diogenes,” Davenport writes, which is to say that both are, in his words, experimental moralists. Diogenes lived in a bathtub to prove that life could be simpler. Thoreau’s moral experiment was to see if freedom of conscience was worth more than freedom of movement (it was). In Walden, Thoreau writes: “I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.” Diogenes said that when a man owns a lion, a lion owns a man.
So a lion is a creature we know nothing about, can’t understand, and, with our conscience, wrestle to submission. The lion points towards an integration of knowledge, awareness, and commitment: it finally points to where Thoreau’s search, which has taken him from berry patches in a swamp to sitting in jail, at his most serenely confident, embedded in an ancient tradition. We lose “our nature itself,” Davenport says in section 10, “atom by atom, helplessly, unless we are kept in possession of it by the spirit of a culture passed down the generations as a tradition, the great hearsay of the past.”
Where does tradition come into it? There’s only one lion in Walden—“A live dog is better than a dead lion,” which helps nothing. But then I opened A Week on the Concord and found:
It is remarkable that Homer and a few Hebrews are the most Oriental names which modern Europe, whose literature has taken its rise since the decline of the Persian, has admitted into her list of Worthies, and perhaps the worthiest of mankind, and the fathers of modern thinking,—for the contemplations of those Indian sages…have influenced, and still influence, the intellectual development of mankind,—whose works even yet survive in wonderful completeness, are, for the most part, not recognized as ever having existed. If the lions had been the painters it would have been otherwise.
Pencils and Practical Philosophy
One last thought on integration. Davenport is impressed, and wants to impress upon us, the many talents of Thoreau.. Section 17 reads: “This text has been written first with a lead pencil (graphite encased in an hexagonal cedar cylinder) invented by Henry David Thoreau. He also invented a way of sounding ponds, a philosophy for being oneself, and raisin bread.” Davenport shows us Thoreau designing things. Designing things is a way of searching: for a better pencil, a better map, a better life, a better bread. “If we act by design, by principle,” Davenport says, “we need designers.” To design houses, experiments, gardens, sentences, like Thoreau did, is to live deliberately. Davenport makes no distinction between them because for Thoreau, for Mencius, for Diogenes, and for Davenport himself, all work, whether it is done with a chisel, a flute, or a pencil, is all part of the same search: hound, horse, turtledove. That is all.