Writing like a transcendentalist.

Abstract

Thoreau's Walden presents a teaching challenge: students expect to enjoy a celebrated environmental book but then are disappointed when they find it repetitive and inaccessible. This article traces the development of a writing assignment designed to help students overcome their disappointment. The assignment asks students to conceive their own Thoreauvian vision of the natural world, encouraging them to engage in Walden's practice of sustained attention to detail and complex use of analogy. In the process, students learn that sticking with evidence does not necessarily amount to repetitiveness but rather adds depth to analysis. This awareness makes them more attentive and sympathetic readers of Thoreau and shows up as greater critical scrutiny and meaningful reflection in their writing.

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While preparing to teach Henry David Thoreau's Walden for the first time, I polled colleagues to find out about their experiences teaching the text. Cautionary tales came in quick succession; students, my colleagues claimed, have a lot of trouble with Walden. They have all heard about Thoreau and expect to like him, not find him so difficult, One close friend specifically warned: students do not imagine Thoreau will sound so cantankerous.

I turned to the MLA Approaches to Teaching volume on Thoreau for ideas and the assignment I dubbed "Writing Like a Transcendentalist" began to take shape. One contributor discussed exploring the structure of leaves and how they compare to human life to help students understand Thoreau's analogies (Lebeaux 65). Another described bringing organic objects into class and having students choose one to write about for ten uninterrupted minutes each day while they read Walden (Blair 98). These prompts reminded me of Ann E. Berthoff's dialectical or double-entry notebook, in which students record notes or reflect on a topic and then later use the facing page to reconsider their original musings. She even prescribes use of the notebook to write on shells, seedpods, or 'any natural object that can serve as "text,"' reasoning that "reading the book of nature is probably the oldest writing assignment in the world" (46, italics in the original).

I set out to combine these approaches into a writing project originally designed to guide the class reading of Walden, demanding personal reflection from students that would encourage more sympathetic analysis of Thoreau. I liked the idea of letting students choose from a variety of natural artifacts, tapping into one reliable tenet of college students: they like to get things in class. Prizes for impromptu competitions or props for in-class exercises always seem to gratify them. I imagined their excitement over picking their objects could be a clever way into the text. Further, I wanted to emphasize the complicated workings of analogy in Walden. Perhaps if students forged connections between their lives and natural objects, they could better grasp Thoreau's analogies--how he looks at processes in nature and links them to social issues, ultimately unfolding them into his philosophy for deliberate living. What I did not fully anticipate was how this writing exercise, intended largely to make students better readers, would also make them better writers. "Writing Like a Transcendentalist" teaches the prose-writing lessons of choosing evocative subjects, making personalized connections to material, not dropping evidence too soon, and being relentlessly specific.

That one well-chosen, unambiguous image--far from being too particular to the writer to be useful to anyone else--sets readers down a path of deliberation that makes them see something familiar in an entirely new light. And it is this kind of experience, I tell students, that can inspire readers to say, "That was a great piece of writing," even if they cannot pinpoint exactly why.

As I expected, the organic objects initially enchanted my students. I watched them run their fingers over branches, shells, pinecones, and seedpods before choosing one, eyes glued on their bits of nature. But those attentive eyes clouded over with concern as I rehearsed the assignment in greater detail: students would observe their objects carefully and write for twenty minutes every day for ten days (Blair's ten minutes seemed too short for my intentions), describing their objects in the painstaking detail that characterizes transcendental writing and making links to Thoreau, other course readings, and their own experiences. I was immediately barraged with questions: "How many days in a row do we have to do this?" "What if I miss a day?" They eyed their objects suspiciously and then asked: "What's the name of the beach where these shells came from?" "Do I get to keep this?" "Where did you get this pinecone?" Students became obsessed with origins and captivated by the tiniest, most singular trait, secretly hoping it would give them something to write about when they ran out of things to say, a failure of the muse that many of them somewhat sullenly expected.

Their suspicions translated into stiff writing. As students did not immediately share my enthusiasm for the text or the assignment, their writing reflected uncertainty and indifference. They made forced connections to textual passages or unrelated memories and left their philosophical mediations half-finished, as if completely unconvinced by their ideas. For instance, one student observed, "The pinecone's projections curl upward, fragile arms to the sky in apparent celebration. But perched on the corner of my computer monitor, it's a stark reminder of what we really choose to celebrate." She was on to something but immediately dropped it, failing to sustain her analysis on the intriguing tension between nature and technology that she had identified--a type of failure that plagued many students' work.

But all was not lost. I relished the reward of some lively writing, like the piece simply titled "A Leaf," accompanied by an illustration. The writer, reserved in class, took to his drying leaf with imaginative indulgence; on paper, he became effusive. He depicted his leaf in grand terms, as a soldier militantly returning to the same task of budding, unfurling, and discoloring every year, symbolically defying nature's insistence on death. The student's memory of Octobers punctuated by the perennial chore of yard cleaning served to align him with his leaf, further energizing his depiction. He recalled "raking piles and piles of leaves in autumn, and seeing new leaves sprout to make the forests more opaque." I wrote "lovely image!" in the margin. I felt like I was getting somewhere.

Another positive outcome quickly surfaced. The assignment not only opened student eyes to the wonders of Walden; it also informed my teaching. I noticed that, like the student with his leaf, others entered into the spirit of the assignment through the paradigm of cycles. In response, I spent more time addressing the cycles in Walden: the structuring device of the seasons, the temporal face of the pond, and Thoreau's intimate, methodical hoeing of beans, along with his unconventional vision of husbandry. Thoreau relishes his work in the bean field, I told students, yet happily relinquishes his produce to the squirrels, accepting their part in the cycles of growth and consumption.

This attention to life cycles motivated one student to contemplate his role in cutting his organic object, a small branch, from its mother plant, speeding it toward its demise. He reasoned: "The coming chill of winter would have brought a temporary death and the same withering effect. The imminent spring would then have breathed life back through the plant. But even now, sitting on a sheet of paper, its wasted seeds scattered about it, this amputated limb is part of the same wholeness that can create new life."

While these early thoughts gracefully began to emulate Thoreau's elevated writing style, suggesting that the student did not find it alienating but rather appealing, they also evaluated the branch in abstract terms, generalizing on life cycles in a way that kept the writer at a distance from his subject. However, the student would soon make more immediate, concrete connections between his fading branch and the experience of losing a friend in high school. In turn, this would direct him back to our course readings, leading to evocatively flesh mediations on death and renewal by his second week of writing:

   My flower withers. And as it does so, it forsakes old arguments and
   explains new things to me. I notice the edges of its leaves are
   eaten away. Everywhere I set it down, it leaves something of itself
   behind. I cannot gather all the seeds and bits of foliage from my
   desk. It seems to know that its life is over and its parts are
   needed other places now. "This dust was once the man," Walt Whitman
   declares in his poem of that title about Abraham Lincoln. Walt
   Whitman--here today in the form of a book, and in the form of my
   disintegrating twig, from which a few particles of his own body
   likely fall.

Suddenly the student became present, locating himself with a repetition of my and I, a writer intimately touched by the branch's mutability. As I read, I could imagine him sweeping tiny seeds off his desk into a wastebasket littered with false starts. And I applauded his use of a poet we would soon consider in class. Through the student's contemplative reading and writing, I began to fashion a host of possible transitions into our upcoming classes on Whitman.

Encouraged, I further developed the assignment. I invited students to find their own natural objects if they wished and discussed Thorean's meticulous revisions, asking students to rewrite their original meditations after getting feedback from me and peer editors. I also had students compose each day's writing as an individual entry with a subtitle but allowed them the creative leeway to combine or reorder separate passages in revision. I then expanded the daily writing sessions from twenty to thirty minutes. And finally, I devoted more class time to considering what it really meant to write like a transcendentalist, giving students both heightened insight into our readings and copious material for their writing.

The last time I taught Walden, my class's catalogue of transcendental writing qualities covered key territory, making it one of our most constructive discussions. Everyone immediately agreed that transcendental writing is highly descriptive and rich in figurative language. Fascinated by beauty and intuition, it follows an optimistic pursuit of some "truth," often spiritual in nature but not formally religious. One student remarked that transcendental writing deals with causes, not effects--more interested in the processes of observing the physical world or experiencing new journeys than the outcomes of observation or experience. Another class member described what she called the transcendentalist's broad knowledge base. She prompted us to think of Thoreau, whose writing reveals intimacy with a variety of fields, referencing everything from Hindu philosophy to early modern English diarists. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we decided that transcendental writing stems from everyday life, sprouting from an immediate, mundane reality into a surprising bouquet of meanings. Transcendentalists reveal natural objects and processes in a new light by linking them to familiar human feelings, realizations, or adventures, under the premise that when humans can see themselves in nature, they really see nature: the physical world is illuminated. In class, we discussed a quotation from Walden: "A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature" (186). One student interpreted this quote by imagining Thoreau's motivation in going to Walden Pond and his unanticipated returns. She commented, "Thoreau spent so much time looking at the pond, the ice on the pond, and the land around the pond, so much time recording details, that after a while meaning was everywhere." Philosophy tumbled from Thoreau's pen like ice blocks falling off harvesting trucks, I thought. If students were realizing this, they were ready to write.

Like my students before them, they expressed concern over being able to sustain interest in their objects. However, my alterations in the assignment and approach to the text helped nurture their writing and over time, students claimed to have more to write. If their objects changed, they described the alteration. Initially expecting to have to stretch to fill thirty minutes, they often wrote away the allotted time playfully, exploring possibilities. Some imitated Thoreau's characteristic dry humor while others took on Ralph Waldo Emerson's sermonizing rhetoric or lifted phrases from Margaret Fuller like "the Sage of Concord." They engaged in what I called "mind travel" when we discussed Emerson's lack of interest in globetrotting, a popular activity among his wealthy contemporaries. I pointed out that instead of advocating world travel, Emerson encourages us to explore our own backyards; he thus suggests that from the vantage point of the local, we can imagine our own worlds of possibility. I asked students to do that with their objects: to see what was directly before them and then push beyond its most apparent boundaries. The exercise made them more receptive to the assigned readings, forcing them to engage in detail with the suggestive potential of both their objects and class texts.

In thus nudging student receptiveness to Thoreau and his contemporaries, students started to identify Walden as their favorite reading. This had not always been the case. The first time I taught Walden, several students became exasperated with what they saw as Thoreau's repetitiveness. "Writing Like a Transcendentalist" helped dispel such criticism, plugging students into the complex and finely wrought language of our readings and helping them re-imagine "Thoreau's repetitiveness" in terms of an uncanny ability to cultivate an idea through astounding attention to detail. In turn, students became more willing to look for and stare into the eye of Thoreau's work and, through writing about what they saw, learn something about their own nature.

Along with a heightened awareness of the uncanny in Thoreau came an understanding of his humor. No longer merely cantankerous, Thoreau became funny, and the humor students found in Walden started to creep into their own work. In one case, a student's roommate turned up in his piece after invading the aspiring transcendental writer's workspace and swiping his pinecone. The agitator ran off yelling, "You can't do your homework, I got your Piney," mockingly emphasizing the name that the student had bestowed on his object in a moment of unguarded affection. Several students named their objects and still more carried them around, hoping to catch a spare thirty minutes in the library. I interpreted this connection to the objects as yet another sign of students emulating Thoreau: in developing a hyperbolized fondness for their natural artifacts, they became mildly, delightfully eccentric.

A pensive pupil named Jen even pulled out her shell during class and passed it between her hands for a full hour, absent-mindedly caressing the smooth underside. Having grown up near a beach, Jen naturally gravitated seaward. She was so inspired into personal reflections by her object that she tended to linger too long in her descriptions. After reading her draft, I asked Jen to economize with language and think about the narrative between her separate passages, to connect her descriptions to the theme of preservation that interested her in Thoreau. In response, she wrote about a time when she was so small she "kept tripping over the tracks left by the all-terrain vehicles." Out of school early due to inclement weather, she went to the beach with her family to watch the storm break over the horizon. She recalled being pulled into a warm waltz with her father and concluded her description of that day by jumping forward in time, to a recent summer spent monitoring endangered birds for a conservation group:

   I am still. I am silent. A plover chick is wandering towards my
   bare foot. I slowly put the binoculars down; I don't need them
   anymore. It is one of those shimmering July days, and I have been
   watching this bird for an hour. It runs to my toe, touches its beak
   to it, and then scurries away. The world shifts: the sky becomes
   larger and brighter. A glimmering envelopes the bay and the
   shoreline and the nearby marsh in which I will lose myself a year
   later, and something in me gives way, deepens, becomes soft like
   sand that has been newly covered by a wave, and for the first time
   in my life, I can actually see where I am.

As Jen's detailed recollections circled around to the issue of seeing, so crucial in Walden, she helped readers understand it by encouraging them, through the richness of her description, to remember too.

Similarly, Thoreau asks readers to take note of their immediate worlds, to be galvanized by Walden Pond to newly see their own backyards, wherein they can discern truths ultimately more revealing than the symmetry of a pinecone or the suggestive veins of a leaf. My plan was that "Writing like a Transcendentalist" would make students adopt Thoreau's method of examining the physical world, finding meaning, and translating that meaning into something personally or culturally significant. In order to help them grasp the complex analogies of Walden, I asked students to forge an attachment to an object in nature that I hoped would open up ways of seeing not only that object but also Thoreau, our other readings, and finally themselves in the context of the natural world. Happily, the assignment would do even more, making students invest in specifics to the point of discovering one method to make writing especially evocative. Jen's detailed observations of a shell fed into memories of a beach she frequented throughout her childhood. This led her back to the act of surveying, of monitoring the endangered birds on her local beach, and finally of really seeing her surroundings and expressing them richly, in a way that might urge her readers to freshly see their own unordinary worlds.

For me, her waltzing embrace with her father called up my own introduction to salt water: bouncing over waves, enfolded in a dance in the arms of my mother. And if a piece of writing triggers that first memory, then a whole series of connections might follow. I might recall next how much I learned about writing from my mother, a spirited devotee of language who read my work with the same enthusiasm she applied to all her reading. In the third grade, I brought home a poem about a snail making a long, deliberate line to the sea, leaving shallow sand seams under its smooth belly. My mother benevolently insisted I could not have written it; I must have copied it off the board, a penmanship exercise. Basking in her praise, I began to fancy myself a writer. A snail's march, or a rendering of youth through the image of little feet tripping over deeply dug tracks in the sand, tells a recognizable story about time that strikes us all the more forcefully because it comes in the form of a familiar, natural image. Meaning resonates out from the organic object to touch off first one personal reflection and then a host of possible interpretations, until we find ourselves in a field of reading--and writing--where other stories about time, such as Thoreau's meditative sowing of beans, cultivate unanticipated returns, row upon row.

Note: All student work quoted here is used by permission of the author.

References

Berthoff, Ann E. The Making of Meaning. Monclair, N.J.: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1981.

Blair, Stanley S. "'What Are You Doing Out There?': Teaching Thoreau to College Freshmen." Approaches to Teaching Thoreau's Walden and Other Works. Ed. Richard J. Schneider. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1996.

Lebeaux, Richard. "The Many Paths to and from Walden." Approaches to Teaching Thoreau's Walden and Other Works. Ed. Richard J. Schneider. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1996.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Cheryl C. Smith, Baruch College--CUNY, NY

Smith, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of English. She teaches writing and directs the immersion program in writing. Before coming to Baruch, she taught expository writing, American studies, environmental studies, and literature at Tufts and Harvard.