Henry Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, is a literary excursion recounting a two-week hiking and boating trip he and his brother John took into the White Mountains of New Hampshire a decade earlier  in the late summer of 1839. In that richly symbolic work, this river represents the passage of all things in time, from individual lives to the whole histories of civilizations, while the elevated and wild region to which the brothers are travelling represents ascent into the realm of spiritual awareness. In other words, the brothers are tracing time to its timeless source.

Thoreau writes in symbols because, as he said fancifully to his friend and fellow Transcendentalist, Ellery Channing, “The earth is God with his coat on.” In A Week Thoreau fuses the New England landscape with inner meaning, for, as a Transcendentalist, he believes that natural law is analogous to spiritual law, that Nature is a similitude of God. Each individual, however, sees only so much of the spectrum of reality as his or her consciousness can embrace. Emerson calls this our angle of vision, and, in his poem “Two Rivers,” refers to the same archetypal waters as Thoreau does in A Week:

Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, 

Repeats the music of the rain; 

But sweeter rivers pulsing flit

Through thee, as thou through Concord Plain.

It is these two concurrent streams Thoreau would have us sail on in his book, for the divinity he finds in Nature is that very Wildness which is the preservation of the world.

“I think of no natural feature which is a greater ornament and treasure to this town than the river,” Thoreau writes in his late lecture on “Huckleberries,” a celebration of Wildness he wrote for his townspeople but did not live to deliver. “They who laid out the town should have made the river available as a common possession forever.” He continues: 

Indeed I think that not only the channel but one or both banks of every river should be a public highway – for a river is not useful merely to float on…Now it is accessible only at the bridges at points comparatively distant from the town, and there there is not a foot of shore to stand on unless you trespass on somebody’s lot – and if you attempt a quiet stroll down the bank – you soon meet with fences built at right angles with the stream and projecting far over the water – where individuals, naturally enough, under the present arrangement – seek to monopolize the shore. At last we shall get out only view of the stream from the meeting house belfry.

But it is not just man’s fences which right-angle – or rather, wrong-angle – to the stream; even more invasive and invidious, dams run right through the river at cross-purposes to Nature. The river, as Thoreau concludes from his survey of it in 1859, “is dammed both ends and cursed in the middle.” The river is thus confined because our consciousness is dammed at both ends and cursed in the middle. Until we are wholly of the spirit, we are not wholly of the earth; until we are wholly of the earth, we are not wholly of the spirit. So heed the law of Emerson’s “Two Rivers” and learn to step into the same river twice. Otherwise, we remain a stream of unconsciousness dammed at both ends and cursed in the middle.

The passage I have chosen to illustrate this inseparable continuum of Nature and Soul is from the “Saturday” chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, adapted there from a lecture on the “Concord River” Thoreau delivered to his townspeople in March 1845, about the same time he borrowed Bronson Alcott’s axe and went down to Emerson’s woodlot at Walden Pond to begin “the grand process of devouring [himself] alive.” In this poignant

passage Thoreau laments the disappearance of the Shad from the Concord River, which formerly, with Salmon and Alewives, had been abundant, “taken in weirs by the Indians, who taught this method to the whites, by whom they were used as food and as manure, until the dam, and afterward the canal at Billerica, and the factories at Lowell, put an end to their migrations hitherward.”

To Thoreau, who said that the world rests on principles, it seems a matter of common sense that an unswerving idealism is the only practical answer to our problems. The rest is a puffball or a will-o’-the-wisp. So Thoreau goes so far as to suggest that a crowbar against the Billerica Dam may be the best solution. But remember that Thoreau is a Transcendental Symbolist, and that the first dam he would have you take a crowbar to is whatever it is in yourself which blocks a sympathetic appreciation and holistic understanding of Nature. Break through that dam and you break the curse in the middle too. Then let your own higher consciousness be the crowbar you take against all the Billerica Dams of the world which would counter universal law for private gain.

American poet Walt Whitman said wisely and truly, “Thoreau stands for a fact – for an upheaval.” So let us take that crowbar first against the Billerica Dam within ourselves, and, who knows but, as Thoreau prophesied in Walden, “even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats.”

SAMPAN, published by the nonprofit Asian American Civic Association, is the only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England, acting as a bridge between Asian American community organizations and individuals in the Greater Boston area. It is published biweekly and distributed free-of-charge throughout metro Boston; it is also delivered to as far away as Hawaii.