Annie Dillard, Henry David Thoreau, and William Gilpin: The Discovery of a Like-Minded Soul
Even at a physical distance, one mind can directly influence the activity—and development—of another through the transfer of energy and information. . . . Two differentiated individuals can become linked as a part of a resonating whole.
DAN SIEGEL
Two differentiated individuals can become linked as a part of a resonating whole.
Really? Has this happened to you?
It has happened to me, several times throughout my life, in fact, but never more powerfully than the very moment—now twenty years ago—when I first read the following sentence:
Few sights are so absurd as that of an inchworm leading its dimwit life.
So begins a paragraph in Annie Dillard’s classic 1989 collection of essays on writing entitled The Writing Life. I was instantly drawn in.
Every inchworm I have seen, Dillard continues in the next paragraph, was stuck in long grasses. The wretched inchworm hangs from the side of a grassblade and throws its head around from side to side, seeming to wail. What! No further? Its back pair of nubby feet clasps the grass stem; its front three pairs of nubs rear back and flail in the air, apparently in search of a footing. What! No further? What? It searches everywhere in the wide world for the rest of the grass, which is right under its nose.
What, indeed? I thought. Who gave this woman permission to write with this much swagger? This Annie Dillard does not hold back.
By dumb luck it touches the grass. . . . All it has to do now is slide its front legs up the grass stem. Instead it gets lost. It throws up its head and front legs, flings its upper body out into the void, and panics again. What! No further? End of world? . . . I have seen it many times. The blind and frantic numbskull makes it off one grassblade and onto another one, which it will climb in virtual hysteria for several hours. Every step brings it to the universe’s rim. And now—What! No further? End of world? Ah, here’s ground. What! No further? Yike!
“Why don’t you just jump?” I tell it, disgusted. “Put yourself out of your misery.”
2
Ralph Waldo Emerson taught Henry David Thoreau about writing: Every sentence should be its own evidence, he said. In other words: Do not write about anything. The writing—the words, the sentences—must be the thing itself! The words themselves must live.
And there it is, right there on Annie Dillard’s pages: vivid life. Her words are indeed “the thing itself.” They are not about the inchworm, really, are they? They live independently of the inchworm. They are the inchworm, but the inchworm-plus. Something entirely new. Dillard’s sentences are bolts of lightning. You could plug a high-wattage lamp into any page of the book, and the lamp would explode with light.
The reviewer for The Detroit News saw nothing less: “A spare volume,” the reviewer says of The Writing Life, “that has the power and force of a detonating bomb.”
3
The first meeting of any receptive reader with the mind of a great writer is often a thrill.
In 1862 Emily Dickinson wrote a brief letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson—American minister, literary figure, and abolitionist—enclosing four of her strange, brilliant poems. “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” Dickinson queried Higginson. “Should you think it breathed—and had you the leisure to tell me,” she continued, “I should feel quick gratitude.” Higginson dutifully read the four poems. His head exploded. Three decades later, even after he had fully realized the depth of Emily Dickinson’s genius, the thrill of that first contact still reverberated in his mind. “. . . the impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius was as distinct on my mind at the first reading of these four poems as it is now, after thirty years of further knowledge . . . ” he wrote.
For me, reading Annie Dillard for the first time was just such a revelation. Circuits popped in my brain.
“How does she do that?” I called right out loud to no one in particular. How did she pull off that sentence? Are you even allowed to do that?
For an entire year, I read only Dillard.
4
Have you had this experience? With a writer? A musician? A visual artist? A scientist? Absolutely anyone at all?
If you have, you’ll know this: The experience begins with fascination. Jaw-dropping fascination.
Some thing, or some one, or some place out there in the wide world fascinates you. It doesn’t have to be a genius like Dillard, mind you. Apparent mundanities can fascinate us just as thoroughly. My friend Tabitha is fascinated by a particular running back in the National Football League. She is riveted to the screen whenever he appears. She jumps up. She hushes the room. She reads the tabloid accounts. “Oh, if I could be a running back, I would be,” she insists. “I want to come back in my next life as him.”
What fascinates you in the world? And more importantly, who fascinates you? Right now? Someone at work? Someone whom you study across the conference table day after day? (Your co-worker, noticing, says later, “Steve, don’t stare.”) Some strange character in a television show who has a sinister side with which you secretly identify? The British royal family? My friend Peter is fascinated by—obsessed with, actually—Warren Buffett.
This fascination, however apparently mundane its object, is a gift. Indeed, this fascination is the beginning of a trail you must follow. Go ahead. Open the door. Learn all you can about the running back. Write fan letters to Warren Buffett. Go to lunch with the guy across the conference table.
Why? Because this fascination holds within it some essential information about you. You think it’s about him, don’t you? You think it’s about the running back. You think it’s about Annie Dillard. Warren Buffett. No. It’s about you.
5
Freud was interested in the visceral experience of fascination. He noticed, as I have said, that very often what most fascinates us is what has been forbidden us—forbidden us by others, or, more powerfully, forbidden us by our very selves. There’s the fascination of the Puritan with sex, for example; the fascination of the fundamentalist preacher with the prostitute; the fascination of the cop with the criminal; the fascination of the cool Englishman with the hot Italian.
Have you noticed? We are fascinated by any object that calls up a part of our self that remains hidden, unknown, split off, or exiled. In nineteenth-century Vienna, Freud noted that these fascinations were often organized around sex and aggression, exiled as those qualities were in that culture. But today, the bandwidth of our fascinations is much extended. Indeed, today many of us are fascinated by the increasingly rare qualities of tenderness, exhilaration, spiritual joy, mastery, heroism, self-sacrifice, aspiration, and transcendence. We’re fascinated by realms that we have not yet quite touched. Realms that we have only intuited. We feel them as possibilities. We yearn for them.
What part of your self remains unknown—intuited, perhaps, but just out of reach? What animal do you have locked away in the attic of your psyche—without food and water?
Whenever you see this exiled part of yourself in full bloom—in full bloom, that is, in someone else’s life—you will be fascinated. Guaranteed.
And have you noticed that indulging your fascination with these exiled parts of yourself—these objects of intense interest—makes you feel more alive? Have you noticed that it’s a thrilling energy experience watching that running back? Why? Because it is a part of you being lit up. It is your own unused circuitry waiting for electricity to move through it.
6
So: you are fascinated by someone.
Now what?
Follow your object of fascination. Seek her out.
Ludwig van Beethoven was fascinated with Johann Sebastian Bach. Obsessed, really. Why? In his early life Beethoven had looked everywhere in the European world for some confirmation of his inner genius—an intuited inner possibility that he had not yet fully claimed as his own. In order to make this inner possibility real, Beethoven searched everywhere for the man who might have already dared to bring the same kind of secret genius into full bloom in his own life. Beethoven studied with Haydn, the greatest musician of his day. But he did not find in Haydn the secret key to his own mind. Finally. Finally! When he encountered the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, he recognized it. There! he thought. There. That is what can be done. That is who I can be. No, that, indeed, is who I already am. That is a flesh-and-blood whiff of the part of me that I have been longing for.
This crazy wizard Bach, thought Beethoven. He has the secret key. He has the key to my own mind.
“The key to your heart lies in the heart of another,” wrote one Indian swami. So too, the key to your own mind lies in the mind of another. When you see it out there, when you intuit it in someone else, go toward it—just as Beethoven went toward Bach.
Do you have an Annie Dillard sitting on the bedside table? An author whom you cannot put down? Do you have a picture of that running back on your wall? Buffett’s books on investment—and life—stacked next to your desk?
We will have many of these fascinations throughout life. Think of them as little romances. Have fun with them. They are fingers pointing back to your self.
But occasionally over the course of a life, one or more of these fascinations will mature into something altogether new. This fascination will turn out to be more than a brief romance; it will become a full-blown marriage—a Soul Friendship—a resonance that vibrates to the core. (Colonel Higginson was never the same after he met Dickinson. He was caught up with her mind for the rest of his long life.) These friendships may be of long or short duration. My Soul Friendship with Annie Dillard has lasted already for twenty years. Beethoven was obsessed with Bach throughout his entire life. Henry David Thoreau was fascinated by the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe from his very first reading and throughout his short life. Tabitha’s affair with the running back has been shorter lived.
If you pay close attention, you’ll see that these fascinations follow a predictable psychological trajectory. They begin with the spark of fascination. Then they mature. They become inspiration, then identification, then imitation, then integration.
Fascination leads to inspiration: “I feel drawn to that!” Then identification: “I am that in some small way.” Then to imitation: “I’m going to try that on fully.” And finally to integration: “This suit fits me. This feels like me. Hey! This is me.”
And there you are. As this Soul Friendship deepens, there is simply more of you.
The dictionary contains many names for these Soul Friends—names like hero, role model, mentor, beacon, muse, mystic friend, guide. I like the term “mystic friend.” It hints at the deep mystery here—the mystery of encountering another soul, another soul somewhere out there in the wide world of space and time who astonishingly enough appears to be digging quietly and intently along the very same vein of ore that you feel compelled to mine, another soul who is wrestling with the same angels and devils. What are the chances?
Whatever you call her, you will almost certainly notice that one or more of these mystic friends is on your list of Soul Friends. (You have written out your list of Soul Friends, haven’t you? If not, go ahead and start it in the margins of this book. Really!) My own list could not possibly be complete without Dillard, without Beethoven, without Emily Dickinson—or, for that matter, without the anonymous fourteenth-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Who’s on your list?
7
Remember Ronald Fairbairn’s discovery, described in Chapter 1: Human beings are quintessentially object-seeking beings. (Not pleasure seeking, remember. Object seeking.)
We’ve already seen what a miraculous process object seeking is. As we grow, we seek out and find precisely the love object we need to see us through the next chapter of our development.
Now comes a wonderful corollary to Fairbairn’s discovery: As we mature, we are capable of finding and using increasingly subtle objects. That is to say, at a certain point in our growth, we no longer need to be held exclusively by actual flesh-and-blood arms. Our objects can now become increasingly symbolic. We can be in vital contact with new love objects through the written and spoken word, through images, stories, music, drama, scientific discoveries. Bach was long dead when Beethoven discovered him. I, indeed, have never met Annie Dillard.
What has happened? Our capacity to know has matured. We are capable now of a new kind of knowing—through symbols and across centuries. We can have a vital connection to minds—minds attuned to same mystic channel.
Says our friend Dr. Dan Siegel, “Even at a physical distance, one mind can directly influence the activity—and development—of another through the transfer of energy and information. This joining process occurs via both verbal and nonverbal behaviors, which function as signals sent from one mind to another. Words and the prosodic, nonverbal components of speech contain information that creates representational processes within the mind of the receiver . . . Two differentiated individuals can become linked as a part of a resonating whole.”
I stumbled onto Annie Dillard’s work innocently enough. My friend Diane had absentmindedly left a copy of Dillard’s The Writing Life at my apartment. I’m sure she didn’t mean for me to be struck dumb by it.
I picked it up nonchalantly one evening and read the first couple of paragraphs.
When you write, you lay out a line of words, writes Dillard. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood-carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins. . . .
That was it exactly! That was how writing was for me, too.
Who was this Annie Dillard, anyway? I looked into the matter.
“Annie Dillard is an American author, born in Pittsburgh on April 30, 1945.” So might begin a typical sketch of Dillard. Then would come these inevitable sentences: “She is best known for her stunning narrative prose—in both fiction and nonfiction. Her 1974 memoir, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, won her the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.”
The picture on the flyleaf of The Writing Life show a slim, innocent-looking woman with a stunningly beautiful, girlish face—holding a pencil in one hand. She is clearly in a reflective mood. I study the picture carefully, looking for signs. She is impish. A little bit of a rascal, maybe. I learn more from a biography online: She is from a wealthy WASP Pittsburgh family. Her mother was a beautiful and charming practical joker; her father was the handsome, wealthy scion of a great American oil family. He was also, like Dillard’s mother, a bit mischievous. At midlife he bailed from corporate life to drive his boat down the Mississippi River—to New Orleans, where he longed to immerse himself in the life of jazz. (Partway downriver he got wildly lonely for his family. He turned around.)
Dillard writes about her family in a galloping autobiography titled An American Childhood. It turns out that her family were joke tellers—and so, by definition, storytellers, since the joke is the shortest form of a story. Dillard learned her craft of storytelling at their knees. They were relentless masters.
Our parents would sooner have left us out of Christmas than leave us out of a joke, Dillard writes in An American Childhood. They explained a joke to us while they were still laughing at it; they tore a still-kicking joke apart, so we could see how it worked . . . Our father kept in his breast pocket a little black notebook. There he noted jokes he wanted to remember. Remembering jokes was a moral obligation. People who said, “I can never remember jokes,” were like people who said, obliviously, “I can never remember names,” or, “I don’t bathe.”
Over the course of her life, Dillard has produced a small but scintillating body of work. She is often known for her nature writing. (She won her Pulitzer Prize at the mere age of twenty-nine, and has been a nature-writing icon ever since.) She is frequently compared to Thoreau, to Dickinson, and to Emerson, and is most often referred to as a “naturalist writer.” But she balks: “I am no scientist,” she declares. “I am a wanderer with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts.”
Though clearly influenced by Thoreau and Emerson, Annie Dillard has taken several giant steps beyond them. She is not a romantic—or even a transcendentalist. She is perhaps more like Henry David Thoreau during his final years—the Wild Man Thoreau who became enchanted with the moodiness and danger of Maine’s Mount Katahdin, the mature man who encountered nature’s rabid side. Like the mature Thoreau, Annie Dillard is fascinated by “the Wild.” She says, “In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy.”
Dillard has written in many genres. She has written poetry (Tickets for a Prayer Wheel), narrative essays (Teaching a Stone to Talk), novels (The Living, The Maytrees), and literary criticism (Living by Fiction). But her favorite genre is the narrative essay.
I learned as much as I could about Dillard during the year, now twenty years ago, when my bedside table was stacked only with her. When we are in love with an author—a scientist, an explorer, a stamp collector, whomever—we want to know everything about her. Have you had this experience? We wonder, naturally, about her personal life. We are tempted to idealize her.
I have seen Dillard in the flesh in later life—in recent years, in fact. It turns out that we both live in the same Florida town in the winter—about three blocks from one another. I sat behind her in church once. And once I shared an aisle with her at a health-food store. I was buying muesli and rice milk. I can’t remember, now, what she was buying. I was too starstruck to notice or retain that fact. She is now an older, handsome woman. Still the intelligent face from the photo. Still the sensitive lips, the wandering and penetrating eyes. Perhaps less fragile than I had imagined her.
I will tell you, honestly, that I was very tempted to stalk Ms. Dillard in Florida. We had mutual friends. A close friend of mine went to school with her. But no. Dillard herself warns against this. If you want to know me, she says, go to my writing.
The time for actually meeting Dillard is probably over. She herself writes: “I can no longer travel, can’t meet with strangers, can’t sign books but will sign labels with SASE, can’t write by request, and can’t answer letters. I’ve got to read and concentrate. Why? Beats me.”
So, what to do? I followed her advice. I went to her texts, to her own words. I ate them whole. (When reciting his poems, Robert Frost used to say them three times. “I’ll say it again,” he would blurt out crankily to surprised listeners after a first or second recitation of a poem. “Now listen this time.” I have read everything Annie Dillard has written at least three times.)
10
Two minds have resonance. This is a wonderful thing. If we’re lucky, we’ve learned resonance early—in mama’s arms. Once our capacity to resonate with another flesh-and-blood human being is established in infancy, through eye gazing, holding, and proximity, and then later through twinship, reciprocity, adversity, mirroring, and all the rest of it, our capacity for resonance expands vastly. These early, visceral experiences of resonance develop the very circuitry in our brains, the neural networks, that support resonance. But gradually, we no longer need to look directly into the eyes of a Soul Friend. We can simply look into his mind—through his words, or art, or science—and begin to vibrate.
Western psychological thinking has not yet begun to investigate the wider capacities of the mind to “know”—to resonate with objects at a distance. For a true understanding of this resonance, we have to go to the East, where they’ve been studying the mind’s higher powers for several thousand years. The contemplative traditions—the classical yoga tradition, say, or the Buddhist tradition—all recognize that as we mature we become more and more attuned to the subtler realms of the mind. These realms are sometimes called “sheaths.” In one classical Eastern system, there are five sheaths: first, of course, the sheath of the body; then the sheath of the energy body; then two increasingly subtle, expansive, and powerful sheaths of mental energy; and finally the sheath of spiritual energy and consciousness itself. In these traditions, the subtlest sheaths of consciousness are considered to be every bit as real as the physical body. And these subtle sheaths of mind and consciousness can touch and resonate with one another, just as physical bodies can.
“Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains,” wrote the fifteenth-century mystic poet Kabir, “and the maker of canyons and pine mountains! All seven oceans are inside,” he continues, “and hundreds of millions of stars.” In other words: Inside this body—this clay jug—lives the whole world. We are the world!
In the West, too, it is primarily the poets who teach of these subtle sheaths of experience. Emily Dickinson writes of them, naturally, since they are the very realm in which she lived.
The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You – beside –
Whitman, too, the great American poet of transcendent consciousness, resided in this realm. “I depart as air . . .” he wrote in his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass:
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
Have you had the experience of resonating deeply with another mind—even across vast distances of time and space? Was it a surprise for you the first time this happened? Had anyone ever told you to anticipate it?
My first experience of this was in graduate school. I was caught up by the mind of the fourteenth-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing. I read the dog-eared paperback version of this mystic’s masterpiece daily on Boston’s subway system, known as “the T.” Every day I traveled the Red Line and the Green Line between Dorchester—where David and I still lived—and Boston College, in Brookline. Every day I plunged deeper into the mind of this Christian Seer—nobody knows what his name was—as the subway rolled along in its hour-long journey. My fellow passengers must’ve noticed how glued I was to that book. Oh, little did they know. I was attuned to this fourteenth-century mind as if we’d both happened onto the same fascinating channel on the radio. That channel came in clearer and clearer every day in my reading.
I ran across my dog-eared copy of The Cloud again recently in my library, and I opened it. Almost every sentence in the book is underlined. The energy in the underlining itself is palpable. Exclamation marks and circlings are everywhere. I was lit up! My new friend was speaking directly to me from the fourteenth century. At night I would pray to this author, though I didn’t even have a name for him. I actually fancied—and still do—that I knew what he looked like. I had visions of him. (Really. He’s skinny and bald and aside from his head, he is very, very hairy.)
Once this kind of soul resonance becomes possible, of course, the world fairly explodes with opportunity.
Do my poems live? asked Dickinson of her new mentor, Colonel Higginson. Indeed they did, and do. They vibrated in Higginson’s mind for decades. It took the rest of the world a hundred years to catch up.
12
Have you read much of the work of Henry David Thoreau? Well, this guy was simply always falling in love—there is no other way of saying it—with the minds of fellow thinkers and writers, both great and small.
The story of his mystic love affair with one English writer in particular, the Reverend William Gilpin, is one of my favorite among many Thoreauvian love stories.
I’ll tell you the short version.
13
April 1852 was the wettest spring eastern Massachusetts had seen in sixty-two years. Twenty-six-year-old Henry David Thoreau—scruffy, bearded, mildly unkempt, and with big, mesmerizing blue eyes—had just left his self-constructed cabin on Walden Pond after a life-changing two- and-a-half years.
Thoreau, as you probably remember, had gone to the woods with purpose. In his great book about the adventure, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, he wrote very explicitly about his lofty intentions:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.
Suck out the marrow! Thoreau had indeed wrung a great deal of life out of his two-and-a-half years in his cabin on Walden Pond. (Almost everything great that Thoreau ever wrote was in fact written—or at least begun—at Walden Pond.) Thoreau was now living again “in town”—in Concord, Massachusetts—less than a mile from his sacred woods, with his sometime mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. What was he doing? Well, Thoreau, during the years immediately after Walden Pond, was engaged in final revisions of his masterpiece, Walden.
As Thoreau wrestled with the prose in his great work, he was particularly focused on his “nature writing.” He was struggling with his descriptions of landscapes, experimenting with various ways to make his words and sentences “live.” (The thing itself!) But Thoreau felt confined by the limits of the very language he had at his disposal. We know from his journals that Thoreau felt boxed-in, limited, and deeply frustrated during these months. He longed for a larger bandwidth of sheer language with which to express his insights and his vision.
American essayist Gordon Boudreau writes compellingly about Thoreau’s struggle to infuse life into his prose during these months: “Thoreau wrote in his journal of how nearly impossible it was to describe ‘the infinite variety of hues, tints, and shades’ in nature, ‘for the language affords no names for them, and we must apply the same term monotonously to twenty different things.’ To describe such colors truly, he felt, ‘language . . . would have not only to be greatly enriched, but as it were dyed to the same colors herself, and speak to the eye as well as to the ear.’”
In fact, Thoreau was engaged in an epic challenge—and one that he would eventually master. He was trying, in his descriptions of nature, to make an energetic connection between the vivid and enchanting world of nature and the inner world of the human mind and soul, and to do it through the written word. This was no small task; it required enormous subtlety of language. The words themselves must be a bridge to the inner world, Thoreau insisted. He wrote in his journal: “He is the richest who has most use for nature as raw material of tropes and symbols with which to describe his [inner] life. If these gates of golden willows affect me, they correspond to the beauty and promise of some experience on which I am entering.”
Dip into almost any paragraph in Walden. You will see that in his writing, Thoreau shifts back and forth between the inner and the outer worlds—between the depths of the human mind and what he perceived as the subtle interior life of nature itself. In the meadows of Concord that wet April, for example, Thoreau was wont to see “the moods of the Concord mind.”
Whenever I read about this phase of Thoreau’s life—this struggle to connect the inner and the outer—I cannot help but think of D. W. Winnicott’s description of the mature human being. The mature human being has a rich, fulsome inner life, says Winnicott, but this selfsame being must, at the very same time, be profoundly engaged in external reality. Winnicott is fascinated by the ongoing conversation—the rich dialectic, the tension—between inner and outer. The connection between the two was precisely the issue with which Thoreau was struggling. (Would that he could have availed himself even more deeply than he did of the Eastern understanding of increasingly subtle layers of experience—the sheaths. He would at the very least have found confirmation, instruction, and encouragement in those ancient, mystic views.)
14
In the midst of his all-consuming quest to reach deeper into the “mind of nature,” young Thoreau stumbled upon the works of the Reverend William Gilpin—a then-well-known English travel writer and Anglican clergyman. Gilpin had apparently mastered this very territory—the use of prose imagery to evoke the reflected subtleties of both nature and the depths of the human mind. Gilpin was, as Thoreau would soon find out, “the mystic of nature writing.”
Above all, the Reverend Gilpin, like Emerson, understood that words themselves had energy; that words themselves could shimmer with the deeper truth of nature; that words themselves could (must!) offer a kind of clear window into these deepest truths. “Language, like light,” wrote Gilpin, “is a medium: and the true philosophic style, like light from a north window, exhibits objects clearly, and distinctly, without soliciting attention to itself.”
Young Thoreau was immediately consumed with the Reverend Gilpin. (Beethoven found his Bach; Thoreau found his Gilpin.) Thoreau realized right away that Gilpin saw more deeply than he did. Gilpin had discovered a more complex inner order to nature, one that corresponded to the subtle inner world of the human mind. And he’d found a way to make this inner world remarkably real and present in his writing. His words were alive! Just as Emerson instructed: They were not about nature. They were nature.
Few of us, I imagine, have actually read Gilpin’s books. But they were indeed quite a phenomenon. Gilpin’s books were lush, and they were filled with vivid and detailed descriptions of nature and its deeper reverberations for the human mind. And in order to make the whole presentation come even more alive, Gilpin combined his essays with his own drawings and paintings—subtly tinted and washed sketches of what he dubbed “the picturesque.”
What fascinated Thoreau most was that Gilpin seemed to see the transcendent meaning of nature in the most ordinary of sights. In this passage from Gilpin’s well-known Remarks on Forest Scenery, for example, the good reverend’s prose reverberates with the deeper meaning of an ordinary acacia tree:
As I sat carelessly at my window, and threw my eyes upon a large acacia, which grew before me, I conceived it might aptly represent a country divided into provinces, towns, and families . . . As I sat looking at it, many of the yellow leaves . . . were continually dropping into the lap of their great mother. Here was an emblem of natural decay, the most obvious appearance of mortality . . . Among the branches was one entirely withered; the leaves were shriveled, yet clinging to it. Here was an emblem of famine. The nutriment of life was stopped. Existence was just supported; but every form was emaciated and shrunk.
Gilpin saw not only the tree, but the way in which the decaying tree was teaching us the laws of nature. Impermanence. Everything arises and passes away.
In another section of the same book, Gilpin wrote of the habit—common in nineteenth-century American landscape painting—of putting part of a dead tree in the foreground of a painted landscape. Why a decaying tree? Thoreau is fascinated to find that Gilpin sees a deeper meaning of this otherwise ordinary decaying tree:
These splendid remnants of decaying grandeur speak to the imagination in a style of eloquence, which the stripling cannot reach: they record the history of some storm, some blast of lightning, or other great event, which transfers its grand ideas to the landscape . . .
Thoreau was on fire with Gilpin’s insights. Gilpin gave the sage of Walden a whole new way of organizing his thinking about the forests surrounding his little village of Concord. Two weeks after Thoreau checked Gilpin’s book out of the Harvard library, Thoreau’s journal entries were lit up with references to the English naturalist. He found Gilpin’s prose to be “moderate, temperate, graceful, roomy, like a gladed wood.” It was, he said, like “. . . some of the cool wind of the copses converted into grammatical and graceful sentences, without heat.”
During a twenty-three-day span in the early spring of 1852, Thoreau mentions Gilpin by name in eight journal entries, often quoting directly from Gilpin’s classic Remarks on Forest Scenery. His April 19 entry, for example, finds that the mist as he looks from the railroad to Fair Haven Hill, makes “‘those near distances which Gilpin tells of,’ giving four distinct tints to the landscape.”
Thoreau is seeing anew—seeing through the eyes, now, of the Reverend Gilpin. Thoreau had found a new mystic friend—a mind with whom he resonated, a distant mentor, a guide, a doorway.
And what exactly had Gilpin discovered? What was his secret? It was so very simple. Gilpin was exceptionally present for, and attentive to, subtle detail. Today, we might call this “mindfulness,” which is simply the practice of being thoroughly present for experience—beyond concepts, and beyond judgment. (Buddhist texts call this “bare attention.”)
15
After Thoreau discovers Gilpin, he begins to imitate him, to try him on. In these months, we see Thoreau writing more deeply. He copies large portions of Gilpin’s nature writing into his journals. (Imitation in the service of finding his own voice.) In some instances, Thoreau repeats direct quotations from Gilpin, almost verbatim, in his own work.
Thoreau simply can’t get enough of Gilpin’s writing. He raves about his new mystic friend to his colleagues. He wrote to his close friend Daniel Ricketson that “my thunder ‘lately’ [is] William Gilpin’s long series of books on the Picturesque . . . ” He continues, “I cannot just now form a better wish than that you may one day derive as much pleasure from the inspection of them as I have.”
This new mystic friendship with Gilpin was, for Thoreau, one of the deepest soul connections of his life. And yet, of course, Thoreau would never meet Gilpin in the flesh.
The Reverend Gilpin had two effects on Thoreau, says Thoreau biographer Robert Richardson, Jr. First: “[Gilpin] gave [Thoreau] a language for certain effects and appearances, and by describing them, he made them visible, in the sense that one often sees only what one has been prepared to expect.” And even more importantly, perhaps, “Gilpin taught Thoreau to expect more. Gilpin gives fresh descriptions of light, distances, mist, haze, and the effects of different kinds of weather, and the characteristics of different trees. . . . the poet in him was revived. He characterized an oak tree as an ‘agony of strength,’ described the white pine as ‘the emblem of my life,’ and observed how ‘the bluebird carries the sky on his back.’”
Contact with the mind of Gilpin changed Thoreau forever. And the master of Walden knew it, and commented on it frequently throughout the remainder of his life.
“Language, like light, is a medium.” And sometimes it is the very medium through which we connect with our mystic friends.