521 prompt #9

In your own words, what is Thoreau's view on man's relationship with nature? Can we see this philosophy in any of the Romantic poetry we've read in the class so far?

I’m perhaps a bit hung up on this, but I still find Julie’s visual model from her presentation on Muir most useful in illustrating a way to contextualize (and therefore, for me, to understand) Thoreau. In the presented triangular representation, Thoreau was located in the corner designated “Logos”, related to anthropocentrism, nature-as-observable object.

I hesitated a bit at first at this categorization: at first blush, Thoreau’s “Walking” had struck me as a manifesto that advocated nature-as-escapism. But in reality, this was more my own idea of The Walk intruding on what Thoreau was trying to say. His Walking is a response to civilization, to mad progress, to reckless industrialization, but it is a response that is still grounded in the same foundation of these more civilized pursuits.

What I mean to say is that Thoreau’s walk is indeed a walk of science; if it separates man from modern civilization, it is only geographically, not ideologically.

To me, it seems as if Thoreau sees nature as an eternally present, easily accessible balm for anyone who grows tired of civilization’s banal pursuits and needs a day away. Not unlike a Thomas Kinkade painting hung in a suburbanite’s living room, nature is a hobby, a distraction, a way to keep life from becoming one-dimensional. It is not, as we see in later nature writings, a resource to be appreciated, maintained, protected.

In this way Thoreau’s vision of nature is very similar to the Romantic view of nature in the sense that for him it is idealized; something to be admired, something to draw inspiration from. But not something that has a direct, real-world bearing on day-to-day life.

Though I would agree that some of Thoreau’s sentiments regarding nature are insightful and that some look especially nice on the back of a postcard with trees on the front, but his perspective on nature is more a privileged, removed perspective, and not the type of applied perspective that acknowledges nature and civilization as parts of a greater whole. This second type of perspective seems far more functional and useful in our own time.