The Pond in Winter

The chill in the air bespeaks the coming of Winter. The time is still only mid-October but the falling rain and gusty winds will soon pull the leaves off of the trees and they will be bare. Thoreau writes in his journal, “I knew a crazy man who walked into an empty pulpit one Sunday and, taking up a hymn-book, remarked: “We have had a good fall for getting in corn and potatoes. Let us sing Winter.” So, Thoreau says, ‘Let us sing winter.’ What else can we sing, and our voices be in harmony with the season?” As for me, I am not yet ready to sing winter, not anymore, and when it does arrive, I hope to be packing for warmer climates. 

But I have been thinking about “The Pond in Winter” a chapter in Thoreau’s Walden. When Thoreau lived on its shores and in winter the pond froze over to a depth of a foot and a half, Thoreau surveyed Walden. There exists his detailed surveying maps showing his considerable skill and thoroughness in the practice of surveying. In fact, Thoreau eventually worked as a professional surveyor, so accomplished in this profession that to support himself he traveled all about New England contracting as a surveyor. Thoreau was hardly an unemployed, unemployable, idle man, as he has too often been accused over the years. It may be that his skill as a surveyor, as Linda Walls suggests, led to his discovery of Walden’s bottom and the fulfillment of his purpose for coming out there to live for two years, two months and two days. That purpose Thoreau declared was “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived, living being so dear.” I think that by his thorough survey he had found Walden’s bottom and had found in that bottom what he called reality. Walden Pond, he discovered, was not bottomless but was, indeed, rock solid at its bottom. Though Thoreau celebrates that “while men believe in the infinite some ponds will thought to be bottomless,” he knew that in such belief there would be no “hard bottom and rocks in place” which could be called reality. All would remain ungrounded, unsteady, and in constant flux. If a belief in bottomless ponds is a belief in the infinite, then there would be for the individual no solid ground on which to stand, there would exist no rock-bottom and no reality. I believe that this discovered bottom of Walden was the symbol Thoreau sought. Thoreau knew that it was necessary in and for his life to discover the bottom, to front the absolute essentials. He wrote, “Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake, and then begin, having a point d’appui . . . a place where you might found a wall or a state . . . .” Thoreau declared, “There is a solid bottom everywhere," and one had only to find it. Our rock-solid bottom is discoverable: “We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality,” Thoreau asserted.

 Thoreau’s sounding and surveying of Walden made the pond for him a symbol for he discovered that when he drew his rule across the greatest breadth and length of the map, he discovered that “the lines intersected exactly (italics in the original) at the point of its greatest depth.” He considered that the law of the two diameters that had been true for the pond might be also true for an individual’s ethics—their personal moral code—as well. As the length and breadth of Walden intersected exactly at the point of its place greatest depth, so that intersection in a person would occur at the point of greatest depth. Thoreau wrote that one could “draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character.” I suppose that the length and breadth of any person’s daily behaviors would intersect at a point of greatest depth, but sometimes that depth would be found not to be very deep and the reality shallow. The artist, Ben Shahn, complained that his own early work lacked the reality of his self. He said, “And then I began to realize that however professional my work might appear, even however original it might be, it still did not contain the central person which for good or ill, was myself . . . . All my views and notions on life and politics, all this material and much more which constitute the substance of whatever person I was, lay outside the scope of my own painting.” Shahn’sr ecognized that his paintings might have come from his skill but not from his reality, and he had to sound his depth to paint that reality, survey the length and breadth of his activities, measure where they intersected, and sound his depth.

I’ve wondered: does one first sound one’s Walden to find its depth. Or does one find its depth by measuring where the length and breadth of activities intersect?  Of course, for a bottomless pond there would be no depth and therefore no intersection of length and breadth would ascertain the place of greatest depth. Indeed, there would be no depth. There would be, then, no knowledge of self. But I wonder what would be the skill required to survey the length and breadth of a person’s action, to find the point of the intersection of the lines and to know the depth of character. I think Thoreau knew that to be good was not an immanence but an effort in the daily life of the individual. In Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Nice and the Good, Willi, a holocaust survivor says, “We are not good people, and the best we can hope for is to be gentle, to forgive each other and to forgive the past, to be forgiven ourselves and to accept the forgiveness, and to return again to the beautiful unexpected strangeness of the world.” That would be one answer, I suppose, but it would not be one Thoreau might profess. He wrote, “It is not necessary for a man to put himself in opposition to society, but rather. to maintain himself in whatever attitude he finds himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he could chance to meet with such.” 

But yes, let me measure the breadth of my daily activities and the lengths to which I go to fulfill them. And where they intersect I will discover my depth, my rock bottom, my reality.