God in the Details, continued

So it was that Thoreau sought after not merely the fish, but more importantly the use of the "hook of hooks with which to angle for the pond itself" (Thoreau, 1970). In so doing, in axing away at the basics, in confronting, or "fronting," the most basic dilemmas of the human condition, he found nature as the nexus where the savage physical meets the imagination of something more (Bennett, 1995). He attempted to reconcile his sense of the lower-order reptile in each of us with his sense of connection to what is larger than life. He saturated himself (and took us all who listen along) with apparent opposites and paradoxes, with the opposite forces he saw all around, of decay and rebirth, with the opposite understandings represented by science and poetry, with the opposite instincts of simply enjoying the world on the one hand and righteously changing it on the other (White, 1968).

Without the reconciliation of these disparate parts, there is merely survival. Lewis Mumford said:

"With the same common ground between them in their feeling towards Nature, Thoreau and the pioneer stood at opposite corners of the field. What Thoreau left behind is still precious; men may still go out and make over America in the image of Thoreau. What the pioneer left behind, alas! was only the burden of a vacant life." (1962)

In a vacant life there is no uniting of poles into a grander scheme of wholeness, there is no pursuit of deeper excellence, no aiming for higher ground, no real question--real, personal, heartfelt question--of God at all. Thoreauvian God questions are not structural or institutional or too much guided by the common line, rather they are inherently anti-establishment and individualist--Transcendentalist in their placing emphasis on personal experience as the proper course to divine knowledge, but with more faith in nature as distinct from and no less necessary than a perception of or existence of spirit.

There are of course elements of loathing for the physical in Thoreau's words. He says, "He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established" (1970). But when he adds, "Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute it" (1970), it is understood that establishing the divine in a person does not mean an abandonment of the flesh, an ignorance to it or brutality toward it, as Muir's Calvinist father, for example, was apt to advocate. Rather, divinity is found in the effort to sink more completely into the body, into this physical reality, and to live fully, without sloth or excessive self-gratification, to redeem one's body by aiming its efforts high, to refine one's features by noble courses of action.

There is no single answer, though, as a devotee of one of the world's great mainstream religions might assert, saying the answer is in Jesus, or Allah, or Buddha. In Thoreau's world, there is a constant interplay between the wild and the good, the flesh and the soul, the animal and the higher layers of the brain--this for all people. He says:

"If the hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such savage tidbits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made from calf's foot, or for sardines from over the sea, and they are even...The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking. Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice." (1970)

There is the loathing again, found in "this slimy, beastly life," but there too, no less significantly, is the promise of virtue, the implication that there is an ongoing moral battle on its behalf. Though the higher virtues apparently are fighting the lower aspects of the physical, there is no implication that victory is to be found anywhere else but here, on this physical, complex, beautiful, and sometimes brutal earth; the trick is to lift the physical up out of its base temptations, not to forsake it. This obtuse dichotomy that is not a dichotomy--high versus low, beginning versus end, origin versus goal--and these questions about the locus of the sacred and its implication for us fleshy beings are well illustrated by Thoreau's John-Farmer interlude, as Pickard shows. Here, the very personal burden of redemption and reconciliation is poetically associated with discipline and attentiveness--the fight for virtue, for knowledge of God, cannot be separated from the fight against sloth and the fight to perfect this very physical life we've found here.