A. Touch: Grace after the Fall

In 1866, Moncure Conway remarked that, “[under] Thoreau’s touch the smallest, most ordinary facts attain a mystic significance,” much like the effect wrought by “the hand of the true priest of nature” in whose hand “the most barren rod blossoms.”^{Footnote 37} The reference to “touch” here is most likely metaphorical, referring to the poet-naturalist’s ability to find greater meaning in the seeming minutiae of the natural world. However, as with most assessments of Thoreau, the reference to his senses is never incidental. In the Thoreauvian universe, skin and its primary sensory mode, touch, was the base point of contact with God. Here, “base” implies two different (yet related) interpretations: base in the sense of crude, brute, even tainted; and base in the sense of first or foundational.

To understand Thoreau’s view of touch, it should be read with an eye to the implicit and explicit links between theological prescriptions against tainted touch and his own views on the subject. In the traditional Christian universe, the human body, in general, was fallen and corrupted, but the assessment of human beings as “corrupted in the flesh” implicates the skin explicitly. First of all, biblical references abound that connect humanity’s creation to God’s literal “cloaking” of human beings with “skin and flesh” (Job 10:10–11, for example). Thus, when God’s creation fell, their skin became the visual revenant of status lost. As the sense most connected to the fallen flesh, touch was dangerous. Further, it was contact with the skin and its network of nerves that could draw human beings into impure and immoral acts. Touch invited intimacy; such intimacy experienced with fallen senses was sinful.

Conversely, redeemed touch means holy intimacy with God. According to Boyd Taylor Coolman in his analysis of medieval theologian Alexander of Hales, “to touch God,” was “the goal and fulfillment of all spiritually sensuous knowledge.”^{Footnote 38} It is touch, so conceived, that enabled one to “delight in the suavity of God,” argued Alexander’s contemporary William of Auxerre.^{Footnote 39} The term suavity—meaning charm or affability, among other things—is significant, given that it implies a certain relationality. Not majesty, not power, not knowledge—all characteristics God is known to have—but suavity implies that the experience of touch conveys warmth, even friendship—the sensual equivalents of grace. Touch, interpreted from this angle, implies a change in how one feels about God, because he has reached out to indicate how he feels about that individual. Redeemed touch also inoculated oneself and others from the deleterious effects of the Fall. Only Christ or, as would be woven into Christian notions of salvation, those gifted with the grace of God could touch without spreading the taint of sin. In fact, with grace came the lifting of proscriptions against touch; as Paul implored in Col 2:20–22, “If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as, ‘Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!’ (which all refer to things destined to perish with use)—in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men?” (NAS). This admonition refers broadly to the Christian notion that Christ’s life and sacrifice nullified the need to follow the specific laws of the Hebrew Bible; however, it is notable that Paul used the senses, and touch specifically, as evidence of the effects of grace.

Conversely, redeemed touch means holy intimacy with God. According to Boyd Taylor Coolman in his analysis of medieval theologian Alexander of Hales, “to touch God,” was “the goal and fulfillment of all spiritually sensuous knowledge.”^{Footnote 38} It is touch, so conceived, that enabled one to “delight in the suavity of God,” argued Alexander’s contemporary William of Auxerre.^{Footnote 39} The term suavity—meaning charm or affability, among other things—is significant, given that it implies a certain relationality. Not majesty, not power, not knowledge—all characteristics God is known to have—but suavity implies that the experience of touch conveys warmth, even friendship—the sensual equivalents of grace. Touch, interpreted from this angle, implies a change in how one feels about God, because he has reached out to indicate how he feels about that individual. Redeemed touch also inoculated oneself and others from the deleterious effects of the Fall. Only Christ or, as would be woven into Christian notions of salvation, those gifted with the grace of God could touch without spreading the taint of sin. In fact, with grace came the lifting of proscriptions against touch; as Paul implored in Col 2:20–22, “If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as, ‘Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!’ (which all refer to things destined to perish with use)—in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men?” (NAS). This admonition refers broadly to the Christian notion that Christ’s life and sacrifice nullified the need to follow the specific laws of the Hebrew Bible; however, it is notable that Paul used the senses, and touch specifically, as evidence of the effects of grace.

Thoreau was fundamentally aware of the deleterious impact of touch in the natural world. In his essay “Wild Apples,” he begrudged the person whose hands held an apple only to inspect it for value; such touch had the effect of “rubbing off all bloom” and causing “those fugacious ethereal qualities to leave it.”^{Footnote 40} And in the broader manuscript from which “Wild Apples” arose, Wild Fruits, Thoreau admonished empirically motivated scientists—and himself, by extension—not to “presume to probe with our fingers the sanctuary of any life, whether animal or vegetable” because “if we do we shall discover nothing but surface still.”^{Footnote 41} Those with strictly commercial or strictly scientific motives would sour whatever they touched—literally, in the case of the apple. Thus, while Thoreau did not subscribe to the Christian theology of the Fall, disbelieving as he did that the flesh was inherently sinful, he did believe such consumerism resulted from a fall from wildness and that “graceless” touch was corrupting, to nature itself and to the individual. In Cape Cod, Thoreau revealed the effects of redeemed touch. While visiting with the Wellfleet oysterman, Thoreau mentioned holding sunsquall and feeling no deleterious effects, despite the fact that it was a jellyfish.^{Footnote 42} By anomaly or by sensory-spiritual readiness, his skin was not marred by the sunsquall’s touch.

In spite of the risks and Thoreau’s occasional musings at the majesty of “untouched nature,” Nina Baym argues that Thoreau did not believe that nature should not be touched; in fact, the touched, or “humanized landscape,” could be “sometimes salvific” even if, in the wrong hands, it was “sometimes despoiled.”^{Footnote 43} He also most likely saw touch as both the simplest way of encountering nature and as the sense perhaps most in need of redemption by contact with nature. The flesh’s constant, uninitiated, and unavoidable contact with the air mirrored in certain ways the Reformed doctrine of irresistible grace—although, in Thoreau’s version, all, not only the elect, were touched. One’s skin felt the movement of air—or noticed its stagnation—and the sensation of heat or cold in various degrees without effort and without the ability to shut these sensations out. In Walking, Thoreau remarked that there was something in the mountain air that “feeds the spirit and inspires.”^{Footnote 44} On his descent of Ktaadn, before the moment of “contact,” Thoreau listed “rocks” and “trees” as examples of our daily contact with nature, but it was the “wind on our cheeks” alone that invited extended discussion.^{Footnote 45} The wind, in this moment, was “the spirit of the universe,” reaching out to the reverent communicant. The feel of the air on one’s skin provided a semblance of universality to the sensorial experience of nature, making a case for its primacy among the spiritual senses. As Horton writes, contact implied tactility.^{Footnote 46}

B. Smell: Accessing Sacred Time

Experience of the divine through touch was only the beginning, of course. Contact with the divine, with the immaterial and eternal God, could relocate someone in time and space. During moments of intense, sensible contact, Thoreau described feeling time and space “double”—being both in and out of time, in and out of body or space. Quite often, those moments where Thoreau evoked temporal doubling and time-bending specifically were prompted by his sense of smell.^{Footnote 47}

Perhaps no sense is quite as capable of transporting perceivers to their own pasts than smell. Physiologically, this is the case, explains Benjamin Zeller, because smell “is wired into the limbic system,” or the “memory and emotional center of the brain.”^{Footnote 48} In his journal, Thoreau once exclaimed, “How full of reminiscence is any fragrance!” Further, smell also had the power, like touch, to bring perceivers into mythic time. “To my senses the dicksonia fern has the most wild and primitive fragrance, quite unalloyed and untamable, such as no human institutions give out—the early morning fragrance of the world, antediluvian, strength and hope imparting,” wrote Thoreau. The smell of the fern enabled Thoreau to time-travel to a moment prior to human touch and invention, prior even to the biblical flood.^{Footnote 49} Smell could also orient one toward a future moment, a world reborn, like the one he envisioned at the end of “Slavery in Massachusetts.” Following the high-profile trial and reenslavement of Anthony Burns, Thoreau delivered the essay as a searing critique of Massachusetts’s moral bankruptcy and abject failure to do right in the face of evil laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. After venting his rage, he chose to finish with a familiar motif: his recollection of a recent walk. At first, the walk was a dismal one, for his “remembrance of my country” had spoiled it. Suddenly, however, he smelled a water lily, which appeared as if to recall to him “what purity and sweetness reside in and can be extracted from the slime and muck of earth.” Scent reminded him in this moment to have faith that “Nature” and “man too who is fitted to perceive and love [this fragrance]” retain “integrity and genius unimpaired,” even in the midst of an ethical quagmire.^{Footnote 50} Foul smells did not issue from moral, beautiful things, and the lily’s scent rescued him from his emotional and intellectual “funk,” to remind him that the good (eventually) would prevail.

There are also instances in his writing where scent seemed to produce in Thoreau moments of precognition. Thoreau once remarked that scent was more “trustworthy” than the eye, that it revealed “what is concealed from the other senses.”^{Footnote 51} For example, while some senses, like touch, imply proximity, smell need not. Further, the fact that smell often heightened the experience of other senses (such as sight or taste) or was required by another sense, specifically taste, to function gave smell a certain supersensory power. Fragrance, Thoreau once remarked, “is the only food of the gods.”^{Footnote 52} The divine act of smelling seemed occasionally to trump the experience of taste itself, such as the moment Thoreau discovered that the imagined taste produced by the sweet smell of both wild and cultivated apples exceeded the taste of the fruit itself.^{Footnote 53}

Just as Thoreau’s sense of smell transported him to the past and foretold of the future, it also brought him firmly into the present. Thoreau’s task of creating a “Kalendar” of nature in Concord—an ambitious endeavor to observe, record, and thus anticipate the occurrence of every natural phenomenon throughout the course of a year—operated in conjunction with all of his later writing projects.^{Footnote 54} From 1850 onward, passages where Thoreau’s organs of sensing aided in carving out the annual cycle of birth, death, and renewal were innumerable. His nose, in particular, acted as an internal calendar. In June 1850, Thoreau described walking “to Goodman’s Hill,” where he found “that the atmosphere was never so full of fragrance and spicy odors,” such as “apple blossoms” and “ripe strawberries” (although he remarked “it is quite too early for them”), but it was the “lady’s slipper and the wild pink” that announced “summer is begun according to the clock of the seasons.” Thoreau’s “[f]ieldwork” operated as a “continued testing [ground] of his faith,” and smell particularly and consistently linked Thoreau’s project of the “Kalendar” to spiritual health, tethering him to the spiritual vocation of his scientific ambitions. In 1852, Thoreau wrote that “nothing but the cool invigorating scent which is perceived at night in these low meadow places where the alder and ferns grow can restore my spirits.”^{Footnote 55} His nose helped him carve out his own hallowed time of day, his own holy hour.

It was not only pleasant but also pungent smells that renewed the spirit and kept the observer attuned to the sacred rhythm of the year. In A Week, Thoreau lamented the loss, not only of “sweet-scented grasses and medicinal herbs” but of “many odiferous native plants” that “formerly sweetened the atmosphere and rendered it salubrious,” martyrs to the expanding industry of agriculture and animal husbandry.^{Footnote 56} The aromas of decay were a natural part of the order of the year—new life could not emerge without the death and decay of old life. For this reason, he touted fall as one of the richest, and therefore most important, times for smells that varied in their strength and level of funk.^{Footnote 57} He found the divine in stench, ascribing to the “universal fragrances of the meadows and woods” words like “fugnacious.”^{Footnote 58} Both pungency and fragrance were signs of sacred vigor that brought him simultaneously backward, forward, and consciously present in time.

C. Taste: Healing through Sacrament

“A man may esteem himself happy when that which is his food is also his medicine,” Thoreau mused in A Week. Given that it is couched in his critique of modern medical “quackery,” one could read this statement as a wry chastisement of doctors who recommend different, often opposing, herbal remedies as palliative “cure-alls.” However, Thoreau also used this moment to lament the nonexistence of physician-priests, those who were able to “minister to both soul and body at once, that is, to man.” This mistaken belief that matter was somehow “independent of spirit” was also “quackery.”^{Footnote 59} In this sense, the food that was also medicine should ideally heal both body and soul. It was no wonder, argues Porte, that Thoreau prescribed “the tonic of wildness” for the human condition.^{Footnote 60} Thus, Thoreau located both spiritual and physical healing in the sensation of taste.

Religious healing is the purview of no one religion. Even for the seemingly matter-eschewing New England Protestant tradition that Thoreau absorbed, the physical body and world were constantly impacted by the soul and spiritual realm, meaning that a cure for the former inevitably invoked the latter.^{Footnote 61} In fact, Thoreau’s understanding of taste as the physical source of spiritual healing aligned in various ways with Catholic eucharistic theology. Before the Protestant Reformation, the standard position on the Eucharist was that after consecration the bread and the wine were the real substantial presence of Christ. Although the elements still tasted like bread and wine because their accidents perdured, the communicant ate the body of Christ. The Eucharist, writes Coolman, was “the locus of an experiential and, indeed, ‘sensuous’ encounter with God.”^{Footnote 62} In the Orthodox tradition, Maximus the Confessor referred to the consumption of the host as an act of “healing,” which, Frederick Aquino argues, when accompanied with proper cultivating of the mind through ascetic practices, enabled the communicant not only to know God, but to become divinized.^{Footnote 63} The physical host, then, as the body of Christ and as an extension of God’s grace worked upon the soul, marred by sin, and redeemed the flesh of the body. By tasting of Christ, one soothed the bruises from Adam’s fall.

The notion that taste has such far-reaching, spiritual power relates to the way taste operates as a sensing agent. “Individuals taste with their bodies, and develop tastes in their minds,” writes Zeller, noting taste’s capacity to incite memories (often with the help of its ancillary sense, smell) and to form cognitive “patterns engendered by … embodied and sense-based experiences.” Taste is also “cross-sensual”—meaning that it is affected and modified by the actions of the other senses. Thus, the body and its sensory context, as well as the “brain” and “mind”—alternatively, the soul—“work together to create and respond to taste.”^{Footnote 64} For Thoreau, taste was, first, about bridging the often literal gap between people and nature: by tasting nature’s bounty, particularly that foraged by the consumer, one was brought most intimately into contact with nature. Second, taste operated internally, through the mechanism of the soul: by tasting nature’s bounty, the soul bridged its domesticated and wild halves. Wildness forgotten, like a repressed memory, came to the surface through taste. Thus, tasting nature was a sacramental act that physically and spiritually healed the breach with nature and within one’s being. Writing in his journal in 1845, Thoreau described a fruit as satisfying “much more than an animal appetite.” The sensation of eating the fruit was to Thoreau “a sacrament, a method of communion, an ecstatic exercise, a mingling of bloods, and [a] sitting at the communion table of the world.”^{Footnote 65} In spite of the occasional carnivorous flight, when describing the sensation of tasting or his taste, the food consumed was almost always plant-based and shrouded in language of healing, spiritual reconciliation, and knowledge. “I have been thrilled to think that I … have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which I had eaten on a hill-side had fed my genius.” The act of consuming fruits over fowl, like the act of consuming the Eucharist, actually sparked an internal change whereby “the animal died out in him day by day, and the divine was established.”^{Footnote 66}

In Wild Fruits, the passages that focus description on tasting what he found in nature almost invariably invoked notions of reconciliation with God—the culmination of Christian healing. In the entry “Black Huckleberry,” Thoreau emulated the animals who “pluck and eat as they go,” who find refreshment in “the cordials, wines of all kinds and qualities” that are “bottled up in the skins of countless berries.” Here, eating berries represented a desire for sociality, not only to eat with the animals who eat from the same plant but to “picnic with Nature.” To eat huckleberries, was “to eat in remembrance of her,” Nature—a clear allusion to Christ’s own directive to eat the bread and the wine “in remembrance of me” (Lk 22:19).^{Footnote 67} This was also an allusion to the nature of New England, pre-European settlement, which Jim Minick emphasizes was covered in blueberry and huckleberry bushes. Just as the Eucharist connected the communicant to the body of Christ, it connected the consumer to the Body of Christ, the community of the Church, past, present, and future.^{Footnote 68} So, for Thoreau, eating huckleberries also connected him to this mythic past and a historical community of people and animals who had consumed the fruit. “It is a sort of sacrament, a communion—the not forbidden fruits, which no serpent tempts us to eat,” wrote Thoreau.^{Footnote 69} This allusion to Eden was made explicit and complicated when, a few lines later, Thoreau equated the prelapsarian paradise with the biblical promised land, which would be flowing with “milk and huckleberries” (Exod 3:8, originally, land of “milk and honey”). Salvation is often envisioned as a return to Eden, which Thoreau replicated by bringing past and future together in this single act of consuming huckleberries. He could only hope that the “sacramental consumption of wild fruits … be taken up by the hundred instead of just the one,” which, Lance Newman speculates, might prompt the removal of offending fences and the redemption of “a New England society that [had] modernized itself into an almost total ignorance of nature.”^{Footnote 70}

No fruit, argues Hodder, was held in higher regard for its saving and healing properties than the wild apple. Neither was any fruit a more fitting symbol for Thoreau’s theological understanding of taste, which bore so many striking similarities to the Catholic understanding of Eden, the Fall, and sacramental healing through the Eucharist, even as he reversed course on the apple’s dooming effect.^{Footnote 71} For Thoreau, to eat of the wild apple was to “avert doom, our second fall from Eden,” except instead of avoiding the tempting fruit, people must “eat again of the tree of knowledge, the knowledge of the wild.” It was for this reason that the seemingly inevitable replacement of the wild apple with the cultivated apple was so dire; for Thoreau, argues Walls, “the loss of wild apples” meant losing “the possibility of harmony between [the] wild and [the cultivated].”^{Footnote 72}

Poor spiritual and physical health came from “intemperate” eating of any kind, but most often by overeating rich foods made from animals or animal by-products.^{Footnote 73} Thoreau’s advocacy of vegetarianism was not fussy, but he did believe that the eating of flesh could effect spiritual damage, something he addressed most pointedly in the “Higher Laws” chapter of Walden.^{Footnote 74} Simple food, plucked by hand, and consumed with proper, pietistic intention, was the best way to “retain health and strength,” of both physical and spiritual varieties—and to stem the rapid advance of civilization. It would have pleased Thoreau to know, then, that Kathryn Cornell Dolan has speculated on the “prelapsarian diet, believing that Adam and Eve must have been vegetarians.” By consuming plants, Thoreau hoped to reverse (and subvert) the effects of the Fall.^{Footnote 75} Only those foods that had been plucked by hand and consumed out in nature were true sacraments; only such foods mended the broken soul. Thus, Thoreau admonished, “Let Nature do your bottling and your pickling and preserving. For all Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well.”^{Footnote 76}

D. Hearing: Continuing Revelation

Sound—and its lack—is most directly related to both the experience and expectation of the holy. For Thoreau, the holy was the work of God, often used interchangeably with Nature—the divine force—as he/it created, recreated, and destroyed the universe around him. “Any melodious sound,” Thoreau wrote in his journal, “apprises me of the infinite wealth of God.”^{Footnote 77} Again in his journal, Thoreau wrote that “the sound of the wind in the woods” caused him to “suddenly recover my spirits, my spirituality, through my hearing.” A few years later, he described the experience of hearing the wood thrush as one that “[lifted] and [exhilarated]” him, which acted as a “medicative draught to [his] soul.” Both the wood thrush and the “Aeolian harp” acted as “missionaries” who produced “ecstasy” in those whose hearing was “pure and unimpaired.”^{Footnote 78} Sherman Paul notes that Thoreau understood sound as “the herald of correspondence … the source of inspiration or divine influx.” Thus, hearing became the sense that most often required Thoreau to act as “poet-mystic,” rather than “scientist,” since the impressions of sound required “intuitive leaps,” which were revelations in their own right. In this way, both the “soul and nature were harps,” in that they waited, taut, ready to vibrate from divine contact, even that which occurred from afar.^{Footnote 79}

Reportedly endowed with a “preternaturally acute sense of hearing,” Thoreau’s listening to nature began early. His parents took young Henry and his siblings on walks, where they were made to “listen to birds.”^{Footnote 80} Brian Harding argues that sound, particularly sound as music, was often the “means by which Thoreau was able to recapture the ecstasy of youth.”^{Footnote 81} Occasionally, music referred to what most would think of as music—as compositions plunked out on instruments—but more often music was a synonym for sound itself, because, for Thoreau, unlike civilization, “nature never made noise,” only music.^{Footnote 82} The sound of pebbles on the frozen pond in December, “discoursed pleasant music,” prompting him to call this new instrument “the Ice-Harp.”^{Footnote 83}

Hearing music was a translocative experience, either because its source was unclear or because its strains “moved” the soul, disorienting the hearer or even causing her to lose sight of herself. After listening to a “series of sounds called a strain of music,” Thoreau asked, “What are ears? What is Time?” Music, it seemed to him, could “be wafted down through the centuries from Homer to me,” could recall “a passage of the Vedas,” and served as a reminder “to trust the remotest and finest as the divinest instinct.”^{Footnote 84} As ever, it was the origin of this divine experience—the ears—that tied such moments of translocative ecstasy to a particular location and to the embodied experience of the hearer.

Not only natural sounds but also human and industrial sounds served as revelatory sources of the divine. In his journal of 1853, he described the telegraph wire as his “redeemer,” which brought both “a special and a general message to [him] from the Highest.”^{Footnote 85} In Walden, Thoreau devoted an entire chapter to sounds (appropriately titled “Sounds”), in which he intertwined the “whistle of the locomotive” with sounds of cows, owls, and other birds. Although the keen of the train was jarring at first, it was soon absorbed into the natural rhythm of the Concord forest.^{Footnote 86}

However, it was the hearing and anticipation of “wild” sounds that seemed most often to open a revelatory connection to the divine. Learning to anticipate sounds usually began with the sounds of animals. While hunkered down for the night on Ktaadn, Thoreau described “listening to hear if the wolves howled,” and though he heard none, he described what he might have heard as “unearthly” sounds—those sounds that seemed to transcend the world even though they were born from it. On a later trip in Maine, up the Chesuncook River, Thoreau described what the actual experience of hearing a wild animal was like. The sound, this time from a moose, seemed to enhance the “impression of solitude and wildness” of both their physical surroundings and of themselves. Listening to his Penobscot guides converse in their language, offer the Abenaki names for various fauna, and, occasionally, sing produced a similar feeling in him.^{Footnote 87}

Thoreau wrote often about loud sounds such as the call of a bird or the whistle of a train, of ambient sounds such as the wind or of water flowing over rocks, of quiet sounds such as the rustle of leaves, melting snow, or echoes retreating in volume.^{Footnote 88} Yet he devoted equal time to moments seemingly void of sound. Sound, for Thoreau, always reminded him of the silence underneath them.^{Footnote 89} Thoreau believed that silence was crucial for the revelation of the divine, since much of its work in nature—growth, decay, change—made sounds audible only to the trained ear. Silence could manifest in “stillness,” which was “a natural Sabbath,” remarked Thoreau.^{Footnote 90} Just as a Sabbath was intended for reflection on God, silence was a reminder of how much about God we do not yet know, both in nature and in ourselves.^{Footnote 91} To Thoreau, writes Jane Bennett, “silence was a celestial sea of eternity, the general, spiritual and immutable; sound was the particular and momentary bubble on its surface.”^{Footnote 92} Further, silence compelled one to listen harder, to be “conscious of sounds in nature which [the ear] could never hear,” which would, with time and effort, make ears capable of hearing the voice of God. To hear “celestial sounds” like the growth of a tree, for example, would indicate true alignment with the work of the divine in the world.^{Footnote 93} Silence, in other words, was replete with the sounds of creation and destruction, often available only to those whose hearing had been attuned to listen for them.^{Footnote 94} Thoreau, whose ears were so attuned, could “attend to [the] faintest sound” and “then declare to man what God hath meant.”^{Footnote 95}

E. Sight: Beholding the Face of God

After catching her young son lying awake late at night, Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia, recalled that Henry said he was “looking through the stars to see if I couldn’t see God behind them.”^{Footnote 96} Years later, Thoreau wrote that one should look at nature only with “the side of [the] eye,” that the observer must look “through and beyond her,” for to look at her directly was “fatal as to look at the head of Medusa” and would “turn the man of science to stone.”^{Footnote 97} It is the preposition “through” that appears to Transcendentalize these sightings, because in the process, nature becomes reduced to the role of mediator between humanity and God. However, Thoreau, who was both idealist and incarnational in his orientation to the world, trained himself to see the reality of both the phenomena and the divinity that lay beyond. In this way, he learned to disappear as well, only to see and to avoid editorializing or intimating his presence as he reported what he saw. Beyond the professional need for keen eyesight in order to serve as a surveyor, scientific methods of taxonomy and classification depended heavily on the fine details of what one saw.

In his writing, sight becomes the readiest means for Thoreau’s beatific descriptions of nature. From the “universal barrenness” of the “shrubby hill and swamp country” of Provincetown in Cape Cod to the glorious foliage of October, “the month of painted leaves,” about which he rejoiced in “Autumnal Tints,” Thoreau saw beauty everywhere.^{Footnote 98} It seemed at times to him that “Nature [had created] this profusion of wild fruit, as it were merely to gratify our eyes!”^{Footnote 99} By the reckoning of some medieval Christian theologians like William of Auxerre, vision was the source of delight in God, since it was through the act of “seeing” that one took joy in the immediate presence of God. Seeing, along this line of theological reasoning, was most closely connected to the intellect, which was what truly knew and perceived the beauty and majesty of God.^{Footnote 100} Observers who gave nature a cursory glance or gazed indifferently at the landscape ignored the clear overtures of God to reach them through the created world. Like Emerson, who articulated the concept of a true “seer” in his essay “The Poet,” Thoreau lamented that there were only a few who could “appreciate the naked and absolute beauty of” and morality in “scientific truth.”^{Footnote 101}

Sight was also the pleroma of all the senses, since all worked collectively to anticipate nature and to see God. Like Augustine, who, according to Lootens, assessed the ability to see God “face to face” as both evidence of a “pure heart” and the culmination of all spiritual perception, for Thoreau, to see was to sense.^{Footnote 102} For this reason, training all of the senses contributed to his ability to be a “seer” of nature. Becoming sensible to the physical facts of each object was the first act of perception, but the seer would catalog these facts, note their beauty, and then apprehend the truth within the created object. Thoreau believed that to “see,” truly “see,” something was to see it anew or to affect “cultivated ignorance,” as Gould describes the process whereby Thoreau would “cease to understand it” as the material “thing” in front of him. This does not mean that it ceased to exist, nor that it lost its distinctiveness, but that by looking at and through the fact itself, he realized how a vast world of knowledge could be held in the tiniest leaf.^{Footnote 103} Of course, the danger of focused attention on a given natural fact or phenomenon was that one could look too hard at one object and unwittingly edit out everything else that the eye chose not to see. Such was the plight of his poor fellow surveyor who seemed oblivious to the “heaven” that surrounded him, so occupied in “looking for an old post-hole” that he failed to realize he stood “in the midst of paradise.”^{Footnote 104} Such tunnel vision was what Thoreau critiqued in scientists who tended to, quite literally, forget the forest and see only the trees. Lest one adopt the myopia of the scientists, Thoreau reminded the reader to see “wholes.” The facts of nature reveal their own divinity while also nodding to the divine source of their creation; so, to see nature, neither can one simply look “beyond nature” nor “look at it.”^{Footnote 105} In and through the yearly “Kalendar” of natural phenomena, God worked, revealing just how much and how little human beings could apprehend of his work. To see nature in its wholeness took tremendous effort and was only the beginning of what one could know about God.

The art of seeing in itself, illuminated and simultaneously reified natural objects. In describing the beauty of wild apples, which he lamented were being lost and forgotten, Thoreau issued the imperative that “they must be seen.” He linked the extinction of wild apples—or at least their relegation to a dark and unknown existence—to the fact that they were not often seen by the human eye.^{Footnote 106} The fact that some things were noticed and some things remained unseen had nothing to do with the “amount of light in the world,” which was always the same, but with “the modes and degrees of seeing.” As light shone steadily from the “heavens,” the “eye of the beholder [turned] to stone” by lack of use and by a failure of vision.^{Footnote 107} Darkness could be self-made, in other words, and occurred often when all the profane eye saw was “civility.”^{Footnote 108} Thoreau admonished the reader, subtly, through his constant allusions to the light of the morning, that there existed a daily reminder that light fell upon many places in the world, many of which the reader probably had not deigned to see.^{Footnote 109}

Yet, obstructed sight also reminded the seer that divine nature could occlude him: the fog on Ktaadn, the reminder that there were aspects of nature, at its wildest and most dangerous that civilized people could not see.^{Footnote 110} Through sight, or its obstruction, Thoreau (and his reader) was reminded that he was never fully “one” with nature, as it might opt to withhold truth or knowledge, because he was not ready or incapable of understanding or, simply, because nature could. This also occurred when the nature Thoreau had been so carefully working to anticipate surprised him, like the sight of raspberries that appeared suddenly, and seemingly earlier than expected.^{Footnote 111} Even while encountering the reality of obstructed vision or unanticipated sights, Thoreau “[held] open” the possibility that the “fullness of visible reality could still be revealed,” which compelled him to keep looking.^{Footnote 112}

Still, trying to see as much as possible was a Herculean task; just as the eye could play tricks, so too could the memory. Although Thoreau often spoke of revisiting a phenomenon in his “mind’s eye,” the mind’s reconstruction would pale next to the minute detail perceived by the trained eye. To help him remember what he saw, Thoreau wrote. In writing, the pencil became the extension of the eye. Bronson Alcott wrote of Thoreau that Thoreau never “theorized” about what he saw in nature, but “[saw] only and [described].” Yet, through a “seventh sense,” continued Alcott, Thoreau’s mind worked upon these facts so that “his page [was] a creation.”^{Footnote 113} Through his words, Thoreau brought his poetic sensibilities to bear, making descriptions that moved beyond the data mining of science: he saw with the “eye of the naturalist” and wrote with the “mind of the poet.”^{Footnote 114} As Richard Schneider writes, according to Thoreau, seers could read the facts of nature and their “symbolic spiritual meaning contained in the physical,” “balance them,” and then, through the poetic exercise of writing, “[add] their own insights” in order to “express the meaning of the relationship between the two.”^{Footnote 115} As a result, Thoreau became part of the landscape he described, without becoming mystically absorbed. Robinson asserts that Thoreau acted as the mirror for readers to see their own relationship to nature, to become “creative seers and reflectors of truth themselves.”^{Footnote 116} It was also through writing that Thoreau acknowledged his own limitations as a seer: this was only his view of nature, as perceived through his senses, at particular moments in time in a specific place. To avoid the problem of “globaliz[ing] the local,” writes Walls, the true seer recognized both “the particulars of time, place and temperament” and those “higher laws” that permeated everything.^{Footnote 117}