124 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865the real life out of them. “Instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruction” of all the
detritus the deacon has accumulated, Thoreau reflects, “there was an auction, or
increasing of them.” And the witty play on the Latin root word for “auction” (which
literally means to augment, to increase), is followed by an even wittier renovation of
a cliché. “When a man dies,” Thoreau concludes, “he kicks the dust.” The “dust” here
is plainly the effects spread among the buyers at the auction: the deacon has now
scattered the contagion of his own materialism further. He has kicked others into
the same slough of getting and spending, and acquiring, as himself. Characteristically,
Thoreau uses a complex web of images, allusion, anecdote, and wit here to explore
and express one of his core beliefs: that everything – education, reform, clothing,
shelter, and furniture – should be tested by its fitness to living needs and that,
correspondingly, anything beyond that is “dust,” superfluous and even destructive
waste. He does not tell the reader, he shows him or her: Thoreau’s theory of organic
functionalism, his belief in having only what answers to our immediate necessities,
is not so much stated as demonstrated, dramatized through elaborate and excited
verbal play.
The dramatic imperative is at work in the overall structure, as well as the verbal
texture, of Walden. Thoreau spent over two years at Walden Pond. In Walden, the
sojourn lasts from one spring to the next, the seasonal transit corresponding to the
spiritual growth and rebirth of the hero. The first spring is associated with youth and
innocence, a spiritual equivalent of “the heroic ages.” There is clearly beauty and
good in this condition, as Thoreau perceives it, but there is also radical limitation. In
this stage, in which “the animal man” is “chiefly developed,” “the intellect and what is
called spiritual man” is left “slumbering,” Thoreau tells us, “as in an infant.” It is nec-
essary to develop a spiritual nature as well; and this Thoreau does through a gradual
process of introspection that is associated with the seasons of autumn and winter. “I
withdrew yet farther into my shell,” Thoreau recalls of the winter, “and endeavored
to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast.” He drew in on
himself, just as he drew in on the house and fire he built for himself; and just as, in a
sense, the entirety of nature drew in on itself during the cold season. Thoreau deploys
a complex web of natural imagery throughout Walden to enact the various stages in
his self-emancipation. The life of “quiet desperation” he had led before coming to
Walden, for instance, is associated with snakes lying “torpid” in mud; like them,
Thoreau has to slough his old skin, layers of habit, before he can be renewed. And his
withdrawal into his shell is compared to the condition of a grub, or chrysalis; out of
that comes eventually, in the second spring, the butterfly, a “beautiful and winged
life” that embodies the idea of resurrection, renewal. But the central image of nature,
the element in the physical landscape that most fully and vividly corresponds to the
spiritual landscape of Thoreau, is the pond itself. The correspondence, Thoreau
points out intermittently throughout Walden, is intimate and extensive, making
Walden Pond a type of his own spirit, or soul. “Lying between the earth and the
heaven,” Thoreau reflects, the pond “partakes of the color of both”; it is mortal but
also partakes of immortality, just as the soul is attached to the Over-Soul. It was cre-
ated by a divine power, it has origins that go back beyond historical record, it isGGray_c02.indd 124ray_c 02 .indd 124 8 8/1/2011 7:54:39 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 39 AM