The Moonlight book By Henry Thoreau Commentary and Explanations by Mark Koslow With 46 paintings by others, 6 by Mark Koslow “I fear the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming more distinct and scientific” Aug. 19th. 1851 Suppose you attend to the hints, to the suggestions, which the moon makes for one month, …. -will they not be very different from anything in literature or religion or philosophy Sept. 7 , 1851 To-day first I smelled the earth. May 11, 1852 Fairhaven Bay from Fairhaven Hill in Moonlight. Art and photo work by Mark Koslow Moonlight on Fair Haven Pond seen from the Cliffs . A sheeny lake in the midst of a boundless forest, the windy surf sounding freshly and wildly in the single pine behind you ; the silence of hushed wolves in the wilderness, and, as you fancy, moose looking off from the shore of the lake. The stars of poetry and history and unexplored nature looking down on the scene. This is my world now, with a dull whitish mark curving northward through the forest marking the outlet to the lake. Fair Haven by moonlight lies there like a lake in the Maine wilderness in the midst of a primitive forest untrodden by man . This light and this hour take the civilization all out of the landscape. June 13, 1852 From the cliffs you looked off into vast depths of illumined air. Henry often wrote outside during his walks, carrying a small notebook and his pencil, which he made himself. He is writing here on the cliffs of Fairhaven Hill. This is based on photos I took myself there in 2003. There were wild Blueberry bushes there and Star Moss, as well as Pitch Pine and White Pines in the distance. An old woman showed me this spot. I felt standing there that he was standing there too. There were too many people at Walden Pond to feel him this way, but on Fair Haven Hill, he was still there, as it were. All the exclusive rich people’s houses built near there were excluded, gone, and disappeared and it was again the 1850’s, and Henry was studying the Moonlight again. The Sudbury River is below the cliffs of Fair Haven Hill, and on some maps is called the Concord River, though both the Sudbury and Assabet are tributaries of the Concord. Fair Haven Bay or Pond is part of the Sudbury River almost directly south of Fair Haven Hill. The above painting made on a computer is a cousin to the one far below which shows Henry rowing on the Sudbury northwest of Fair Haven Hill, so not very far from this spot, which is up the hill from there. I see Fair Haven Pond from the Cliffs, as it were through a slight mist. It is the wildest scenery imaginable, (note: in the PDF I am using the search function is called up by ctrl-F, that is control F. This will give you a search area and type in your word like for instance, “Irish” , and if you press the down arrow you see the next of the 23 references, or “frog’ there are over 150 references. Being able to search a document like this is important. Henry talks about all sorts of things, so I hope to put in an index eventually) Table of Contents Introduction, pgs, 1-60 1.Moonlight book, Journal Entries, 1850-1856 Pgs, 60-440 2.Henry’s Revisions of the Moonlight book: Pgs. 440-504 a.Wild Simplicity: b.Cosmos in Daily Life c.Themes and Motifs d.Dry Pastures Flooded with Moonlight Conclusion Pgs 504-506 Introduction Of all the 19th century writers, Henry David Thoreau is the most relevant today. His work was far seeing into the future, and advocated for the notion of nature as a citizen, to be ecologically taken account of, the conquest and destruction of nature stopped. He started writing a book exploring the largely unknown facts of night, twilight and moonlight, after Civil Disobedience and Walden, and continued to do so up till 1856. It is a largely unknown effort, and one that goes to the heart of his main concerns. I will be commenting on his concerns. The Moonlight book is a largely unorganized part of Thoreau’s work that is still fragmented, even ignored. The original order that Henry put together was lost, ironically, due to his publishers. But it still exists, even if no one will ever be able to put it back together again as he conceived it. But he did leave an elaborate series of indexes for it. So it can be roughly put back together. The long winded beauty, as well as the depth and haunting exactness of the effort can still be intuited, by those who are willing to spend the time to feel it. The purpose of this book is to begin to explain, at least partially, what he was doing. Brad Dean writes that: In "Moonlight" Thoreau explored the realm that the English poet John Milton in his epic Paradise Lost referred to as "Chaos and Old Night." The lecture describes the salutary effects on the saunterer of nocturnal excursions into familiar territory that had become de-familiarized by the perspective-altering light of the moon on the landscape, a light that compels the saunterer to experience what Emerson in “Nature” called "an original relation to the universe." I disagree with Brad Dean that the Moonlight book is about Milton’s notion of “Chaos and Old Night”. Brad is talking here about the lecture, not the Moonlight book.1 Nor do 1 The lecture happened on Oct. 8 1854. Howarth discusses how Thoreau doctored and scrambled the Journal transcripts to make this lecture, apparently hating every minute of it. Howarth comments on I think Thoreau is redoing Emerson in most of his moonlight explorations. In fact, he grows increasingly weary of Emersonian transcendentalism. There is much more to it than Brad’s supposition of a link between Milton, Emerson and Thoreau, though there is that in what remains of the lecture. I specify when I have added something of Henry’s that is out of the order of Henry indexes. William Howarth claims in his book on Henry’s writings that he wrote some further versions of journal entries, later, which he calls “transcripts”.2 I am only using one of these here, partly because those that I have looked at are not relevant, Also, it is too hard to locate these transcripts, due to costs or “ownership”. Moreover, the ones I have seen are not very different that the Journal entries. 3 Someone can make the effort to find and see them all. I only could find one that matters. Moreover the original Journal has a freshness and direct honesty that is fine with me. Henry himself often says that it is the original perceptions of an observer that often matter the most. His journal entries on Moonlight go way beyond the mythic and rehashed claims of the lecture. I follow here the organization of Henry’s index of journal entries closely, not the lecture. His lecture on the moon does not interest me much, and partly because Henry himself thought it was failure. I am NOT doing Henry’s lecture on the Moon here. I underline that. I suspect that something like this lecture was put together by Channing and Sophia Thoreau in 1863, using Henry’s texts. The piece called “Night and Moonlight”, is credited by William Howarth as having been written by Ellery “the degree to which Thoreau sacrificed his original structural plans for the sake of a lecture deadline. Perhaps that sacrifice explains his sardonic reference later in the text: 'Ah yes even here in Plymouth horizon Apollo is at work for King Admetus-whose other name is Getting-a-Living. This is what makes mythology true & interesting to us' (LMHDT, G15.16). But he could deny neither Plymouth nor 'Getting-a-Living' in reality;” 2 Some of these can be found in Howarth The Literary Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau, in the section on Moonlight. 3 Many libraries now have single or more pages of Henry’s work, sold to them by a very corrupt market place. They require elaborate forms to be filled out and money to be given them. I am doing this book for nothing and require of a library that they give me the document for free, as Henry would wish. He never wanted private ownership of his work. Only one library so far has let me use his work. Channing and Sophia sounds very true to me, and logical, though some of it comes out of the Journal. While evidently being based on some of Henry’s things, Henry’s Moonlight texts (transcripts) were not sold and dispersed as they are now. The essay put together by his sister Sophia and Ellery Channing strikes me as not really by Henry, even if it quotes the Journal and evokes, very loosely, the lecture of 1854. Howarth agrees that the lecture was similar to what was put together by Sophia or Channing, when he writes in his essay “Successor to Walden, Thoreau’s Moonlight—an Intended Course of Lectures”(pg, 110), but that the Sophia/Channing essay is merely a “ collation of 'Night and Moonlight' indicates that it is mostly abbreviated-and often unrevised-portions of the old 'Moonlight' lecture, clipped from the original source and pasted together with scant regard for continuity or coherence.” That lecture is lost, though some remnant of it was pieced back together by his sister.