Sunset, Sunday, 19 July 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Adapted from Walden, by Thoreau:

I have no doubt that some of you who read this are unable to pay for all the dinners you have actually eaten and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour.

Guess that goes for quite a few of us.

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My first real foray into my richest blackberry-picking grounds today was pretty discouraging. (While looking for blackberries, very narrowly missed stepping on some ... evidence of our local black bears.) (Sorry!) (Yes, a bear does, in the woods.)

Three factors, concerning the blackberries. The most important would be the assiduous tree- and brush-clearing carried out this winter and early spring by an outfit under contract to the Rappahannock Electric Cooperative. I would like to have seen their manual or their instructions, because I got the impression that if their directive was to cut, say, every tree within 30 feet from the power lines, they liked cutting so much they decided, aw heck, let’s cut another five feet ... or why not another 10. And that included everything clear down to the ground. The third or least important factor seems to be the natural up and down cycles of different shrubs and vines in the margins of the woods. In between, at number 2 like Tom Watson, is the dismayingly conscientious job of field cutting done by the landlord’s freelance crew – the very same guys who killed me in a justifiable homicide back on June 24th. Even though I know they know their employer will never bother to go through the fields and check up on their work, they give it everything. These fellows make Yanqui myths about the Latin work ethic look really stupid.

Update on Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 09:35PM by BVD

My feeling is that Thoreau sometimes doesn’t reach modern readers – and maybe this was also true for his contemporary readers – because some of his most powerful thoughts are either a bit screened or diffused in context. Sometimes little moralistic preachments or ornate curlicues distract. I had read the thought cited above three times before I really saw it.

Here’s the original paragraph:

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another’s brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

Not that I presume to know how it could have been done, exactly, but I would like to think that a gently edited Walden could have outsold Emerson, back in the day.

Thoreau: Factitious Cares & Finer Fruits

It amazes me how I can read something five or six times and still not understand, “Hey – wait a minute – that guy is talking about me.” So it has been with this line from Thoreau’s Walden:

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

Sometimes it’s just the language that keeps me from fully understanding what the author’s really saying – in this case, the ‘plucking’ of fruit just never did it for me. Funny, because I’ve spent portions of several evenings lately following the sunset while thinning fuzzy little peaches from the literally overbearing volunteer peach tree at the back of the back yard.

Plus, the reference to ‘coarse labors,’ by sounding like the farm labor of Thoreau’s day, screened me from the reality that he was talking about a wide range of activities. Today I think they might include quite a few things that we tell ourselves constitute leisure but that are actually forms of running in place. Certainly much of my ‘wasting time on the computer’ falls right into that category.

I believe that when I started going outside to paint the sunset, for me it was a little like going out to Walden Pond on the instalment plan – even if it was another twelve years before I read the book and began to see a connection. As Henry Miller said in his essay on Thoreau, Walden can be anywhere. The deep glacial pond for me has been inverted, in the sky.

Thoreau: What Did the Sunset Say?

In his beautifully made and thoroughly, thoughtfully edited Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, Jeffrey S. Cramer quotes from a letter Thoreau wrote 10 years after he left his experiment on the pond:

Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, – returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience, is in it. Give this good reason to yourself for having gone over the mountains, for mankind is ever going over a mountain. Don’t suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at ’em again, especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. It did not take very long to get over the mountain, you thought; but have you got over it indeed? If you have been to the top of Mount Washington, let me ask, what did you find there? We never do much climbing while we are there, but we eat our luncheon, etc., very much as at home. It is after we get home that we really get over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do?

The purpose of painting so many hundreds or thousands of sunsets is not to be the Cal Ripken of twilight, but to find out what this routine daily experience may say. What is in it. To account for the sunset to myself.