Elizabeth L. Ihle
13 April 2008
Serendipity caused this sermon. Last fall my bird club book club was reading Annie Dillard’s 1974 classic, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her Pulitzer prizing-winning account of her time living in a home near Hollins College and observing the natural world around her. Simultaneously, I was reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden in preparation for visiting Concord and Walden Pond. Ah ha, I thought, look at the parallels! There’s a sermon here! And, of course, there is, but a thought about a sermon is one thing, and actually writing one’s thoughts in a sufficiently coherent fashion and making them mildly inspiring and perhaps a bit entertaining is quite another, and I have really struggled with this topic.
Speaking about Thoreau to this audience is especially daunting, since we have our own HUU Thoreau expert, Robin McNallie, in our midst, and I know that a number of you have visited Walden Pond yourselves. One of the first things I learned from the Thoreau Society, which is the oldest literary society dedicated to an American author, was that Henry David pronounced his last name as “thorough,” like a “thorough job,” but I think it will be easier on our ears if I continue in the error of my ways and refer to Henry David as Thoreau. I talked over this point with Robin, and he absolved me from my guilt and said that he did the same thing with his students: told them the correct pronunciation and then used the common one.
So why have these two books-Thoreau’s Walden and Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker CreekÂ-been so popular? I’ll tell you some more reasons later on, but first let me start with the most obvious reason: they inspire us to follow their example and get our own cabin in the woods and explore nature. If only we have our own cabin in the woods, then we too could observe nature carefully and deduce our place in the world. At least for us folks who have don’t have to worry daily about safety, shelter and food, that focus on figuring out our place seems to be a strong human concern. (As I was in a water aerobics class with Kathy and Charlie the other week and discussing this upcoming sermon, Kathy pointed out that to them it’s not a cabin in the woods but a boat in the bay, but you get the idea– a place to run away to.). I have a longtime friend who talked for years about buying a cabin in West Virginia to use at a getaway, and she finally did about five years ago. Apparently, just owning that cabin has scratched her cabin itch because since then she has spent just two nights in it.
When I visited Walden Pond, I had a number of surprises. If I had been in charge of naming stuff, I’d have called it Walden Lake-I was surprised how large it was, but I felt a little justified because Thoreau speaks of it as a small lake too. Speaking of sizes, I was also surprised by how small the replica of Thoreau’s cabin was and how small the statue of Thoreau himself was. The cabin is 15 by 10, the size that Thoreau built it, but to our eyes it looks just like one room. All three of these size surprises were a good lesson: size is a lesser factor in claim to fame and endurance than the resonance of ideas, and that, of course, is the kernel of Thoreau’s greatness.
Thoreau began his time at Walden on the Fourth of July, 1845, and ended on September 6, 1847-two years, two months, and two days. The cabin, which he built himself for a total cost of $28.12 and one-half cents, was about a mile and a half from Concord.[1] The guide who took me through the nearby Ralph Waldo Emerson house in Concord explained that Thoreau didn’t spend every night in his cabin. When the weather was really cold, he stayed in the Emerson’s spacious home and occasionally went to town to barter or buy supplies. At one point during his Walden Pond experience, Thoreau left the area entirely to visit Mount Katahdin in Maine. So Thoreau’s “little cabin experience” was certainly not that of a total hermit.
Although Walden wasn’t published for nearly eight years after Thoreau abandoned his cabin and wasn’t an immediate success, its reputation has steadily grown as readers recognized the importance of his ideas written in fine prose. I’m not proud about the fact that I spent nearly sixty-two years without ever having read Walden, though I could recognize many famous quotes from it.
Walden appealed to contemporary writer Annie Dillard at a much younger age than it did to me. Dillard, born like me in 1945, grew up in an affluent Pittsburgh family and attended Hollins College, in the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley, where she studied literature and creative writing. She married her writing teacher, poet R. H. Dillard, the person she said who taught her everything she knows about writing. In 1968 Annie Dillard received a Masters Degree in English from Hollins, and her forty-page thesis was about Walden Pond as “the central image and focal point for Thoreau’s narrative movement between heaven and earth.”[2] Although I’ve not read her thesis, I bet this following quote from Thoreau was fundamentally important to her work: He says of Walden, “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”[3] Being a lover of lakes myself, I think Thoreau is right on target.
So maybe her study of Walden prompted Dillard to go to her own “little cabin in the woods,” but it is worth mentioning that in 1971 when she was 26 she had pneumonia and nearly died. I’m firmly convinced that such a life-threatening experience like that can dramatically change the subsequent course of one’s life. Dillard decided that as a result of her near demise that she needed to experience life more fully and subsequently moved to Tinker Creek. As her book begins, she tells the reader what she is attempting: “I propose to keep here what Thoreau called a ‘meteorological journal of the mind,’ telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead.”[4] She wrote Pilgrim based on the journals she had kept about her Tinker Creek experience. When published, her book was almost immediately recognized as a masterpiece and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. Although I haven’t read all of Dillard’s subsequent work, I think she has never been able to equal the success of Pilgrim. I suspect that winning a Pulitzer when you’re not quite thirty may set a person up for a standard of future achievement that is just hard to meet.
Just like Thoreau, Dillard chose a “little cabin in the woods” that was not in what we would call real wilderness. Dillard’s wilderness experience took place in a house surrounded on three sides by Tinker Creek, but apparently the creek runs through a somewhat suburban neighborhood. While Dillard lived at Tinker Creek and intensely observed nature around her, again like Thoreau she didn’t spend all her time there. She spent a lot of time in the libraries researching various topics of interest, and her book shows it. Pilgrim has far more information than you would even want to know on a Sunday morning about factoids of the natural world like parasites, a mosquito’s biting a copperhead, the number of muscles in the jaw of a goat moth, and a frog being sucked to death by a giant water bug.
I’ve concluded that three factors have made both Walden and Pilgrim such enduring classics and worth our time this morning. The first is their literary organization and style. Both authors are superb writers and structured their books in a similar fashion. Each book is organized around four seasons of life in the woods, yet both authors actually spend more than a year living in their respective little cabins and wrote their books over a larger expanse of time. To my mind Thoreau sounds pretty nineteenth century-but that’s simply a given. Thoreau tends to an epigrammatic, a terse style, while Dillard’s writing style is complex and beautifully descriptive. Because it’s so complex, I asked Pat to do a handout of some of the quotes from both this morning. You can easily see how their writing differs, and overall I’d estimate that Dillard uses two words to every one of Thoreau’s. But writing style is not why we come to the UUs.
The second factor of their appeal is that both authors offer us a window into natural science. Thoreau’s science was actually pretty original. For example, he carefully measured the depth of Walden Pond and made lots of notations about the fish in it. He was a dedicated journal keeper and became such a careful note taker about plants that professional botanists today consider his notes as a reliable source of information about plant life 160 years ago.[5] Based on his data, they have concluded that plants bloomed a couple weeks later then than now. Dillard too was a scientist, but in her case, noticing something carefully in the woods apparently made her run off to the library to research on it. She had a microscope in her cabin and reports on her examination of pond water. Her stories are fascinating and amply support the cosmic questions that she asks, but she is a user of science, not a creator of it.
But it’s probable that neither outstanding literary style nor science by themselves t have made Walden and Pilgrim classics. Instead, both authors connect human lives and nature in ways that have universal appeal. Thoreau’s themes are ones that still resonate today: self-reliance, contemplation, and closeness to nature that transcends the supposedly crass existence of most people. We look to Thoreau as a beacon towards the simple life.
Dillard’s themes, on the other hand, are more complex and more overtly spiritual; she was reared a Presbyterian, but while writing Pilgrim she was thinking enough out of the Protestant box to name her goldfish for a famous UU, William Ellery Channing. In the 1990s she converted to Roman Catholicism. In Pilgrim she looks at nature and makes some not-always-pleasant connections between her observations and the divine, eco-theology, as one scholar as named it. She asks all kinds of hard questions about the divine. How can people be moral in an amoral world? Why would a compassionate deity create a world so fertile that billions must necessarily die in order for the world to continue? What if God doesn’t care any more about us than we do for all the death that surrounds us daily?[1] One of her most telling points for me was her chapter about being nibbled. She compared the beauty and wholeness of spring insects and leaves to their frayed state in August. Everything alive gets nibbled. We may be perfect at birth, but life is gonna nibble us until we die.[2]
So there are three good reasons to cherish both Walden and Pilgrim. They are beautifully written, they offer us an accessible glimpse into science in the world around us, and they make connections between the natural world and the divine. Yet, beyond those, there is the simply appeal of going off into our own “little cabin in the woods.” But let me end with a caution.
The beauty of creating a world within a book is that you include and exclude what you want, and both authors don’t tell us about all the inconveniences of life maintenance even in a little cabin in the woods. Although Thoreau grew some of his own food, I was surprised to learn from Wikipedia that his mother cleaned his cabin and brought him meals. Oh, if the rest of us were so lucky to have that kind of assistance with our daily lives, then we too could have more time to ponder our place in nature! Although Dillard was apparently married during the time she wrote Pilgrim, there is no mention of her husband and no reference to trying to be self-sufficient. Before beating ourselves up for not having the perseverance to live as simply as Thoreau and Dillard did in their little cabins, we need to remember that their books are edited accounts of the authors’ lives. To some degree it’s our imaginations that make life in the woods so simple.
So I don’t think that we should give up our fantasies for running off to our own versions of a little cabin in the woods. We all need time to get away from daily responsibilities and make time to think about our place in the world at large. The other week I decided for the sake of writing an authentic sermon that I too needed a little cabin in the woods experience all by myself, so I rented a heated cabin at Lost River State Park in West Virginia, just about an hour from here. No television, no phone. Now, three nights in a cabin, of course, is a lot different than a couple years, but it taught me some lessons.
So what did I get from it? An escape from distraction-no major housework to do, no cats to tend, no mail or email. I hiked each day, and it was the first time I had hiked much in late winter/early spring. . Since most trees at Lost River are deciduous, the forest looked a bit naked, and I could see long distances. Some trails were still so leaf-covered that I had to look twice to make sure I stayed on them. The only green around came from two sources. The first was the moss; if I had been Annie Dillard, it would have sent me scurrying to the library to learn about the different kinds. Is moss an evergreen or just an early bloomer? I still don’t know, but the brown of the forest highlighted the beauty of the moss. The other source of green was the mountain laurel, which I didn’t know until then was an evergreen. So learning some stuff about nature was fun. However, the plague of flies in my cabin and the abundance of green logs that made very unsatisfactory fires weren’t fun at all. Quite frankly, that particular little cabin experience left much to be desired.
Thoreau and Dillard offer us worthwhile and stimulating models for thinking about nature and our place in it .They offer us the hope that “getting away from it all” will give us new insight. Spring is definitely here, and it’s a good time for us to step once again into nature and enjoy the world around us. Let’s each make an opportunity this year to enjoy our own little cabins in the woods and ponder our places in nature.
[1] “Fecundity,” p. 167.
[2] “The Horns of the Altar,” p. 242.
[1] “Economy,” Walden, pp.48 and 49..
[2] “Annie Dillard,” Wikipedia.
[3] “The Ponds,” Walden.
[4] Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York:HarperPerennial, 1974), p. 11.
[5] Michelle Nijhuis, “Teaming Up with Thoreau,” Smithsonian, October, 2007, p. 64.