A Wider View of the Universe

Thoreau’s name has become so synonymous with “nature” that it’s easy to imagine he was always familiar with everything that flew, swam, burrowed, or grew in the general vicinity of Concord. The truth is otherwise. A Wider View of the Universe asks, “What did Thoreau know about nature, and when did he know it?”

Robert Kuhn McGregor argues convincingly that before his sojourn at Walden Pond, Thoreau’s knowledge of nature went not much further than the utilitarian know-how of the local farmers. Even the first draft of Walden itself had remarkably little in it about nature. Chapters such as “Brute Neighbors” and “Winter Animals” came only later. Yet when he discovered nature, he did it with a vengeance, and in the last decade of his short life he was a true authority.

Kuhn has delved into his subject far enough to know that when Thoreau refers to “clams” in the Concord River, he is referring to freshwater mussels. “Crow blackbirds” are grackles, and when Thoreau writes about seeing “lizards” swimming in a ditch, he meant newts. (Lizards, I noticed some time ago, are missing from the index of the 1906 edition of the Journal—perhaps to avoid drawing attention to an embarrassing slip.)

The best reference for Thoreau’s intellectual development remains Richardson’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, but Kuhn’s summary of what Thoreau was writing at different points in his life is a helpful contribution. And his chapter “The River” is an exceptional achievement.

Kuhn describes this chapter as “a compound descriptive analysis of a year in the life of the river during the 1850s, as derived from Henry Thoreau’s journals.” At first he seems to have done nothing more than to narrate an impressionistic description of the change of the seasons in Thoreau’s Concord.

Fast-flying migratory green-winged teal passed through in March, as did goldeneye ducks driven inland from the Atlantic Coast by heavy storms. Blue-winged teal flew past Concord a month later, resting briefly in marshes and shallow pools. Herring gulls visited briefly in March and April, feeding on newly hatched shellfish, fresh fish, and berries.

As you continue reading, though, you notice an impressive specificity in the description.

As the sun rose higher in the spring sky, plants responded to the increasing light. In the river shallows, common naiads appeared. Greenish sweetflag blossoms opened in marshy grounds along the shores, and meadow saxifrage bloomed on the higher banks. Not many varieties of flowers emerged that early, however. The greatest activity was among the river shrubs. In the shallow water, sweetgales bloomed. In marshy thickets, winterberries, black currants, leatherleafs, slender willows, and common elders came to life. On the banks, the buds of a variety of willows, alders, and maples began to expand.

But it is only in the notes at the end of the book that you comprehend the research and rigor that went into the easy flow of the chapter.

In organizing the material for this chapter, I have in some ways mirrored approaches undertaken by Thoreau himself. Working with the whole of the journals, I have abstracted his nature observations and organized them according to geographic location, particular habitat, species classifications, time of year, and so forth. The result was a series of phenological tables describing the typical behaviors of nature in the various Concord habitats as Thoreau found them. This material is far too voluminous to recreate in these pages, or even to reference. The pages of this chapter are a narrative presentation of the essence of this material; the reference notes reflect major (but not all) sources in the journals where information was derived.