A passage in Thoreau's "Walking, " which contains redefinition, social criticism, a visionary moment, and bitter satire, demonstrates both how rich and varied a symbolical grotesque can be and also how effectively it can sum up the concerns of an entire work. Thoreau begins with a simple declarative sentence that serves to redefine a term beloved of materialist society in his age and our own: "Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap." The next sentence makes a sharp contrast to this declarative one by calling for an improvement by his contemporaries — literally for a new people, a new and higher race of beings who could appreciate nature: "A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand!" Then after this clause, which essentially states a prayer for the future, Thoreau plunges us directly into a visionary world in the manner of Isaiah and St. John.
I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the middle of Paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the midst of a boggy Stygian fen, surrounded by devils and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor. [199]
Like the millenarians who were so popular throughout much of the nineteenth century, he opens his thumbnail vision with the beginnings of heaven on earth, after which he satirically places a "worldly miser" in the midst of this transformation. The scene changes, and the worshiper of Mammon who violates the earth and destroys its blessed wildness has found his place in hell — and with him so have all members of his readership who fail to recognize that the earthly paradise already exists in wild nature.
Last modified 19 March 2008