Back home after the New England Literature Program, I crawl into my sleeping bag on the living room floor unwashed, still dusted with Lake Winnipesaukee sand and Mt. Washington soil. I keep the lights off, and the windows open. No air conditioning. I wake up sweat-licked from the 100-degree heat wave in New York City.
As much as I pretend otherwise, “I am a sojourner in civilized life again” — Henry David Thoreau’s words on the first page of “Walden.” Knowing the date, reading the news, doing my business on a toilet instead of a hole I shoveled between trees 10 feet from a trail and 20 feet from running water, of which there is none in this city. I opened The Atlantic’s July issue and lurched at the Editor’s Note: “In wildness is the preservation of the world” over a white tombstone marked, “Henry.” Thoreau, again!
NELP is anti-civilization in the same way Thoreau was in the two years he lived by Walden Pond. And like Thoreau at the pond, we “reduced (life) to its lowest terms” — no Internet and no Gregorian calendar, only encyclopedias in a library we unpacked. We read a dozen Transcendentalists: Douglass and Du Bois, Dickinson, Frost and Stevens, Morgan Talty and Jorie Graham. In lieu of assignments, we produced journals with class notes and entries written by the lake or on the three mountains we hiked. We made collages and found insects, birch bark and lichen.
The Amtrak from Albany to Penn Station, where I left NELP runs two hours and 35 minutes. In that span, wildness recedes into civilization. (“Recedes” is a rhetoric-laden word, as is my imposition of a wild/civil dichotomy.) The wetlands flanking the Hudson River tamed as the water rolled south, straightening into shorelines of light-packed towns, then into Manhattan’s West Side Highway where the train dipped underground, swerved left, and spat me out at 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue. Under Madison Square Garden’s LED-studded awning, I waited for a Lyft to lug my box of books home and looked up.
The moon hung in the sky like a useless rock. I, too, domesticate as the days pass and distance gathers. Back on the Amtrak, I scrawled this. Try to read it:
Photos courtesy of Emily Sun
I sound ridiculous, I know. There is shame in unabashed conviction — about literature, life, what matters and what does not, about the possibility of subsisting on art instead of the near-inevitable internship-to-corporate career. The week after NELP, I sat at the dining table scrolling Handshake until my mind metastasized and I jammed its dissent with YouTube. I haven’t touched a book since. I don’t think in full sentences, let alone in metaphor. My sojourner status is sliding into a permanent nuptial with civilized life, any wildness bulldozed by the inertia of old routine.
“I’ll become a hermit in the woods,” I told a friend from high school as I paid $21 for three sliders at a wine bar the second night after I returned. They laughed. I meant it. Every time I try to talk about nature and tech, I sound like a company executive after a digital detox on some island. I sound incomprehensible. The antonym to “civilized” in Ancient Greek, “barbarian,” originated as onomatopoeia: Bar…bar…bar, the unintelligible noise uttered by everyone who didn’t speak Greek.
“Civilized” stems from the Latin civis, a city resident. In Sue Halpern’s essay, “Migrations to Solitude: The Quest for Privacy in a Crowded World,” she offers another definition, which we read aloud mid-NELP, adrift on canoes in Green River Reservoir while a loon surfaced nearby: “Before everything else, civilized man (and woman) is a consumer. He lives in a market economy, he feels bound to do his part … It is symptomatic of how civilized we have become that poetry must now be written by poets.”
I took the One Train up Broadway on my third day back. On the wall behind my rattling seat, the MTA yielded an ad spot to a Poetry in Motion poster. It hung across a skincare company’s customer testimony, like opposite pages of an open book:
Lullaby
Ilya Kaminsky
Little daughter
rainwater
snow and branches protect you whitewashed walls
and neighbors’ hands all
Child of my Aprils
little earth of
six pounds
my white hair
keeps you sleep litSeriously!
This works!
So happy I found something that actually works for my skin.
Before driving to the Amtrak station on the last NELP day, we stopped at Walden Pond. We hiked up the dirt path to Thoreau’s house, its site cordoned by nine stone stakes and introduced by a plaque of his most quotable quote — emblazoned on everything that can be emblazoned. Some tourists posed before it for a photo. We watched them, scoffing while holding our earmarked and annotated copy of “Walden,” but I wondered how different we really were. If any of us understood what the words truly meant. What is “deliberately?” What are the “essential facts of life?” Where are “the woods?” Can it be here?
Thoreau is casual and flippant in his use of “civilized” across “wild,” “barbaric,” “savage” and “primitive.” He refers to Euro-Americans with the former terms and Indigenous and ancestral humans with the latter. Modern parlance deems “civilized” a dirty word, its antonyms more so. We shun the categories, pretend they are no different — but still believe it is good to be civilized, good to speak intelligibly and buy what we’re told and care how we look and live a prescribed path and follow our Google Calendar and leave poetry to the MFA-program graduates and scroll because we’re too tired to think. But isn’t your mind worth more than fodder for some conglomerate’s quarterly earnings report? That is not a rhetorical question.
Better to prescribe a limit to “civilized.” Pin down what it means, so we can transgress it. Wildness and civilization are not as mutually exclusive as I wrote. The falcon swooping over the Adirondacks is no more wild than the one nested in a New York City skyscraper, a NELP instructor told us before we left; it conceives of itself the same — an animal with animal needs. Like us. There is falsehood there, a meek attempt at reconciliation through simile, but truth is a choice. Under the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a week after I returned, I waited to walk home and looked up.
A silhouette perched over a security camera on the roof, two sets of surveillance, too big for a pigeon, sparrow or starling. “Red-tailed or Cooper’s?” A man beside me asked. It swooped to a low branch by the sidewalk as if to taunt our unknowing; really, just to feed. It did not care for us or our gawking. A woman held her phone towards it, Merlin Bird ID recording, “I need it to talk.” The hawk said nothing.
Bar…bar…bar…
Statement Contributor Emily Sun can be reached at emisun@umich.edu.
The post Looking for Walden in Midtown Manhattan appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
Leave a Reply