hermit's thatch

Some years ago this blog ran a series of entries titled “The Politics of Eremitism.” Eremitism does not propose guidelines for others, but the guidelines for the person are themselves a cultural foundation as much as a personal one. The historical hermit (not necessarily the quirky individuals here and there) is eminently qualified to offer ethical and logical insights into what are the components of the most beneficent organization and functioning society.

This notion of practical hermit wisdom is not new. Ancient Chinese thinkers recognized the urgency of discovering society’s benign face. Confucius – who was not a hermit – realized that who holds power at whatever level should reflect values that promote benignity. He dedicated his life to crafting ideas and rituals that would reinforce cultural values. Throughout his life Confucius traveled the provinces of China to educate authorities in need of instruction. But even Confucius himself doubted whether he had convinced anybody in his efforts.

The famous anecdote wherein Confucius meets hermits presents the notion of the possibility of reforming society. Confucius was traveling between provinces and was lost. Stopping his carriage, he asked his attendant to get directions from a man plowing a field. The attendant introduced himself and the old man replied, “Why is your master traveling about trying to convince others? He should be fleeing the world instead of wasting time engaging it.” When the attendant returned to inform Confucius of what the man had told him, Confucius nodded and replied, “That was a hermit.”

Later, the Taoists presented an autonomous view of society, including Lao-tzu, Chuang-tzu, and the intriguing Tillers and Farmers school of thought. The latter promoted the (mythical) first king of China, Shennong, who was also the founder of agriculture and medicine, an herbalist and healer, befitting the notion of a perfect ruler because of Shennong’s high ethical standards. What greater king than one who governed so benignly that his subjects were content and prosperous, who governed so discretely that he was seldom seen but known through wise edicts, who governed so deferentially as to work shoulder to shoulder with the people plowing in the fields with them.

This was the sort of non-authoritarianism that could be labeled “the politics of eremitism,” that is, autarky. Autarky rejects authoritarianism that is domineering but also authoritarianism that is governance by a superior. Just as when Rousseau tells us that the notion of property is derived from the moment an obnoxious man stood on land and declared it to belong to him alone – so, too, is this how authoirty came to be. The concept of autarky is based not on the imposition of history, convention, or power, but on the values of the simple and natural, not grasping or covetous. As a society it would naturally follow “the Way,” would inevitably ensure wise action without institutionalization.

A famous Taoist saying is that the universe accomplishes its tasks through non-action (wu-wei). This is not a modern Stirner-egoism nor libertarian indifference, not celebration of self, as the West expresses antipathy for order versus power, for naturalness versus contrivance. Taoism envisions a society that functions with ethics derived from nature itself, not from a subjective attitude of individualism and not from existing political relations, institutions, or culture, which have historically and invariably devolved into a chronicle of suffering, exploitation, greed, and violence.

The American essayist and poet Gary Snyder found the philosophy of benignity in Zen Buddhism, itself an amalgam of Buddhism and Taoism. Snyder’s 1961 essay – anticipating a generation of Eastern thought that was to affect the West – is titled “Buddhist Anarchism,” and derives from the thought of the eighth-century Chinese hermit Han Shan (or Hanshan) among many other sources. The conformity to nature and the Way produces the manner of life and social association which Snyder calls “anarchism.” But Snyder does not derive this notion of anarchism from its historical advocates Proudhon, Kropotkin, or Bakunin. With Zen Buddhism there is no need for specifically Western inputs. In later years, Snyder refines the notion of anarchism with anthropological study of indigenous peoples, peoples with close relationship with nature, land, mountains, and rivers (including hermits described by the Japanese Zen master Dogen and poets of the “rivers and mountains” school in China).

The cultures Snyder references forged a constructive and benign social structure of mutual aid and self-sufficiency. The eremitical inputs might conjure benign elders, or shamans and sages, as Bill Porter has observed of the latter in ancient China. The hermits are the true sages in the maturing cultures of ancient Asia. Snyder saw the natural process as “wilding,” pursuit of a benign relationship with the natural world as a source of personal and social values. Especially in the “rivers and mountains” poetic tradition among Chinese hermits already alluded to, Snyder saw the connection to nature as both a revelation of insight and a source of physical and psychological livelihood.

Even in more societal and urban contexts, the historical hermits always reserved a “backroom” – as Montaigne put it – where they could commune freely with God, the Way, or nature, as they preferred, as was constituted their personal autarchy. Meanwhile, the rest of society would have to recognize these values or observe them percolate through sages if it aspired to this benign self-sufficiency.

Many books and media discuss Stoicism, its tenets, its historical advocates in ancient Greece and Rome, its ethical components, its life advice. In the history of Stoicism there is no longer any controversy about meaning. Thinkers like Montaigne extended and adapted Stoic ideas to contemporary circumstances, to varying degrees of success. The Stoic attitude or point of view towards the pursuit of eudemonia not as hedonic pleasure but as methods of reconciliation towards a world of imperfection, disappointment, and suffering, is well understood and often recommended. The author acknowledges the well-known centurie-long identification of Stoic methods with current thought:

“While these beliefs about daily life rested on a foundation of physical and metaphysical theory, the attraction of Stoicism was, and is, in the therapeutic element of its exercises: cognitive behavioural therapy, or Buddhism, for guys in togas.”

With this consenssus, therefore, it is startling, perhaps, to see one commentator at Psyche declare that:

“Despite the benefits of Stoic spiritual exercise, you should not become a stoic. Stoic exercises, and the wise sayings that can be so appealing in moments of trouble, conceal a pernicious philosophy. Stoicism may seem a solution to many of our individual problems, but a society that is run by stoics, or filled with stoics, is a worse society for us to live in. While the stoic individual may feel less pain, that is because they have become dulled to, and accept, the injustices of the world.”

A few important points are to be made:

1. The first fallacy of this comment is the assumption that an adherent of a philosophy will automatically or intentionally convince others to blindly – if not intelligently – practice that philosophy. This is the obverse of omnism, the common view that most religions, philosophies, and psychologies already contain the same core of tenets simply expressed according to culture, society, and historical and psychological circumstances of the expressed tenet.

2. A subtle (or not so subtle) shift is made from an individual studying Stoic ideas to the prospect of “a society that is run by stoics.” This assumes that everyone will begin following stoic ideas blindly and take over society and run it! So if you read about hermits suddenly everyone will want to become a hermit? or learning about a celib will turn everyone celibate? And soon the whole of society will be run or overrun by hermits? Or celibates? Nonsense. Human nature doen’t work that way.

What needs to be done in reflecting upon philosophies and their merits in applying them is to recognize the many circumstances that surround our circumstances. That philosophies are applied only by degrees, by situations, by appropriate strengths they bring or backd away from or modified when the proponent was speaking of another time, another era, another culture, other material and social conditions. All philosophies arise from this ground and are most fully understood when presented in this context.Ethics is always a measure of successful transference of an idea, but even ethics is a cultural and social product of evolution that requires reason and understanding to reconcile with the winds of one’s era.

3. That the goal of the Stoic is the diminution of pain does not mean that the Stoic is indifferent to the suffering of others. But who can propose a remedy who has not used it to cure themselves? Are we to put off assuaging pain in our personal lives because pain and suffering continue in the society around us? Rather, we must clearly and unflinchingly consider the causes of pain and suffering and build methods of addressing them. In this the usual Stoic is competent because not an abstract philosopher but ond who has actually suffered pain. Having suffered is sufficient for asking the right questions and pursuing the most helpful courses or exercises. This is both a personal quest and a collective social one. The awareness of the intelligent observer can take in both the indivual and social demands around us. No one can afford to be indifferent to the suffering of others, nor to postpone addressing their own suffering.

URL:”Don’t Be Stoic” https://psyche.co/ideas/dont-be-stoic-roman-stoicisms-origins-show-its-perniciousness

Reigen Eto (1721-1785) was a student of the renowned Zen Master Hakuin. At one point, Reigen left Hakuin’s temple to pursue the solitude of the mountains as a hermit. He remained in mountain solitude for ten years, pursuing the teaching and practice of his master. One day, he learned that Hakuin was giving a lecture at a nearby retreat. Reigen Eto left the mountains to attend, and was so inspired by the talk that he resumed his studies with Hakuin. Eventually, Hakuin declared Reigen’s enlightenment. Reigen eventually became head of a Kyoto temple, where he introduced Hakuin’s teaching, the popularity of which spread.

Hakuin was also a painter, and Reigen Eto became one, too. Painting was a precise art suited to Zen single-mindedness of expression. Reigen pursued standard themes, depicting Bodhidharma, Hotei, Mount Fuji, and natural objects like crows and pine trees. A lesser known work and its object, however, may be his most persuasive.

In 1543, the Western world intruded upon Japan. A Portuguese warship landed on the island of Tanegashima, and two sailors armed with guns alighted. Eventually, the island became the chief stopoff for Portuguese trade — the Westerners concept of trade being extortion, violence, and force then visited on hapless Japan. The Japanese remembered the metal objcect that was the source of the intruders’ power: the gun. Having no knowledge or experience with this weapon, the name of the island — the word “tanegashima” — became synonymous with “gun.” And this is the topic of Reigen Eto’s painting titled “The Gun,” a work strangely obscure among his own works and among historical Zen paintings.

The work, which is not reprinted on the Web at this writing — was painted in stylized form, with a haiku at the top and an object (in this case a gun) at the bottom. The gun is painted in swift brushstrokes, quick enough to represent the streaks of faded black ink callled “flying white.” The haiku reads: “The sound of the gun / is the entrance / to hell.”

The late John Daido Loori, co-editor of The Zen Art Book, remarks in that text on Reigen Eto’s painting: “Here we stand over two and a half centuries later and the only difference is that our instruments of destruction have become more sophisticated and efficient while our way of perceiving the universe and ourselves has remained virtually static.”

“Blindness is not darkness; it is a form of solitude.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, “August 25, 1983” in his Shakespeare’s Memory

The unsentimental view from earliest history judges blindness to be a curse or punishment. The view is represented in an anecdote related in the Gospel of John (9, 1-23), wherein Jesus and his disciples encounter a blind man, born into the condition of blindness, a man “born blind.” The disciples ask Jesus: “Teacher, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus replies: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned… but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

This reply is designed to set the scene for a miracle showcasing the divinity of Jesus, but,in fact, exemplifies an essential biblical notion of God. The passage suggests the arbitrariness and capriciousness of Yahweh that Kierkegaard observes in the command to Abraham to kill his son, as much as in the divine attitude toward the treatment of the suffering Job. Accursedness is arbitrary punishment.

In the biblical Book of Tobit, the protagonist Tobit is blinded even while performing a good deed, burying the dead – but the dead man was proscribed by the authorities. For this God punishes Tobit, blinding him. After winding moral lessons, Tobit’s eyesight is restored – not by God but by a sympathetic angel.

When the French-born explorer Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) visited the Himalaya Mountains in an early twentieth-century search for hermits, she encountered one old hermit who revealed that his vision was nearly gone. The explorer asked what he would do. When I am blind, he replied matter-of-factly, then I will die. No sense that blindness was exceptional, a curse, or a punishment.

Blind characters in literature have often been presented as a foil to and contrast with the sighted, conjuring contrasting images of wisdom preserved (in the sighted) and wisdom lost (in the blind). In the Oedipus plays of Sophocles, the hapless Oedipus blinds himself in tortuous guilt over his twin crimes of murder and incest. The blinding of the Earl of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Lear is presented as a metaphor, blindness considered to be a lack of discernment, a lack of insight, literslly a lack of sight. Even today one can speak of a foolish blunderer as “blind.” The English novelist Samuel Butler (1835-1902) cound writein his Hudibras that: “A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog, but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.”

Gloucester’s blinding in King Lear merely completes the presentation of the man lacking judgment, therefore “blind.” Butler uses physical blindness as a foil to psychological or spiritual incapacity. Later, Kierkegaard’s notion of faith would be summed up as “blind faith,” or a leap, avoiding the real ramifications of physical blindness or the ubiquitously pernicious metaphor.

The famous author of the ancient Greek epic ballads The Iliad and The Odyssey is the well-known blind bard Homer. While even his existence can be questioned, why is “Homer” presented as blind at all? Perhaps an allusion in The Odyssey to a blind poet Demodokus suggests the identity of the anonymous Homer, but as likely it is the assumed fulsome character of the blind, attuned to voices and moods, assigned by fate to a secret insight, makes blindness here an attractive literary device, adding to the skill of the author Homer’s talent for lyric song and prodigious memory. Here blindness is an ironic gift, salvaging, even redeeming, the blind from curse.

We know less of the reaction of early and familiar historical figures to being left blind. We know the famous for their redeeming intelligence, less for their curse or what they thought of their blindness. Galileo (1564-1642) suffered from a mucocoele in one eye and progressive glaucoma leading to blindness. The fate of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is tragic, based on the era’s wide-spread practice of “cataract couching.” Bach underwent the surgery on both eyes by a traveling surgeon. The surgeon destroyed not only the presumed cataracts and the lenses, but inevitably much of the eye structure, provoking copious bleeding, and blindness. Bach was left in agonizing pain for days before he died.

The notion of blindness as punishment, reverberating through the centuries, is addressed by the English poet John Milton(1608-1674), who was blind by his fifties from glaucoma or cataracts. In “Sonnet 19,” the poet laments the loss of his eyesight more for the loss of the creativity that would have led to composing so many more literary works. In the poem Patience replies:

“God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Nor was blindness a complete solitude for Milton. He was not isolated from his work nor from his circle of colleagues. Indeed, Milton wrote his masterful Paradise Lost after losing his sight. He happily enjoyed the attentiveness of many amanuenses.

In our time, similarly, the blind Argentinian short story writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) enjoyed the company of many literati, functioning as a public intellectual. He was even named director of the National Library of Argentina in 1955, the very year of his definitive blindness. His mother, who lived to the age of 91, dutifully transcribed her son’s stories and essays for publication throughout her life. Like Milton, Borges thrived as a creative figure.

Borges is perhaps the most articulate describer of blindness. He sympathized with those who lost their sight suddenly, without a transition. He tells us that he knew he would one day lose his sight, as had his father, his paternal grandmother, and his great-grandfather, all of whom suffered cataracts. After multiple eye surgeries in youth, Borges had lost vision in one eye and the vision in his other eye continued to deteriorate. In 1955, while walking with friends in Buenos Aires, he tripped and fell, rising to discover himself blind, due to retinal detachment. But Borges never rued his blindness, writing once that “A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument, everything has been given for an end.” He adds that “If a blind man thinks this way, he is saved. Blindness is a gift.” And Borges was accommodating, recognizing all who had helped him along the way. “Blindness has made me feel surrounded by the kindness of others. People always feel good will toward the blind.” Borges, like Milton, left a poem of benign sentiment concerning blindness, titled “On His Blindness.”

In the fullness of the years, like it or not,
a luminous mist surrounds me, unvarying,
that breaks things down into a single thing,
colorless, formless. Almost into a thought.
The elemental, vast night and the day
teeming with people have become that fog
of constant, tentative light that does not flag,
and lies in wait at dawn. I longed to see
just once a human face. Unknown to me
the closed encyclopedia, the sweet play
in volumes I can do no more than hold,
the tiny soaring birds, the moons of gold.
Others have the world, for better or worse;
I have this half-dark, and the toil of verse.

Those born blind are seldom remembered, unless, like Milton or Borges, they overcome their blindness to excel in another venture. Yet there are wuch exemplars. The social reformer and activist Helen Keller (1880-1968), became blind before two years of age, and deaf as well, due to diphtheria. The famous Spanish classical composer Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999) suffered the same fate of diphtheria at age three. Rodrigo also surmounted his incapacity to enjoy a career in composition, among his works the popularly-received “Concierto de Aranjuez.” Like Milton, Rodrigo enjoyed the strong support of family and creative colleagues. Another well-received musical figure is the contemporary opera and pop singer Andrea Bocelli (b. 1958), who lost much of his eyesight from congenital cataracts, and become blind in youth from a sport accident.

Controvertialist and artist-writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was afflicted by a pituitary tumor that incapacitated his optic nerve. The artist lost his command of color in 1937, and was completely blind in 1951. He acknowledged the event in the short story “The Sea Mists of Winter,” the title describing his eyesight. Like Borges, his blindness culminated in misty greens and blues, not blackness or profound darkness. Lewis completed several additional books with the help of transcribers and editors.

Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941) is famous for his original diction, invented vocabulary, made-up sound words, and run-on phrases. His characters and subplots were often pursuing dead-end and tortuous self-reflections. Joyce is the character Stephen Dedalus, suggestively called the “blind stripling” in his novels Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By age thirty Joyce was blind. He had from youth undergone multiple surgeries for eye inflammation (leading to anterior uveitis), for iridectomies for closed-angle glaucoma, and for removal of cataracts. Today, these and many of Joyce’s other non-ocular medical symptoms such as abscesses, partial paralysis, and psychological instabilities — plus Joyce’s use of prescription Galyl, an arsenic-phosphorus drug with debilitating eye effects — point to syphilis as the cause of his blindness. Joyce himself acknowledged an understanding of his blindness (and all his other maladies) as curse or punishment.

American cartoonist and humorist James Thurber (1894-1961) was popularized by his contributions to The New Yorker magazine. As a child of seven he was playing with an older brother who had just acquired a bow and arrow set — and shot an arrow towards James, blinding his right eye. Inflammation spread to the left eye, leading to significant loss of vision. As an adult plagued by diminishing vision, Thurber consulted a New York eye surgeon who diagnosed cataracts and iritis (uveitus), pursuing both failed surgeries successively, reducing Thurber’s vision to about seven percent. Perhaps Thurber’s vivid imagination was due in part to the visual hallucinations experienced by victims of Charles Bonnet syndrome. Towards the end of his life Thurber expressed to friends the notion that his blindness was perhaps after all a punishment for mocking other with his humor and sarcasm.

Erasmus wrote that “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” In a short story with a similar title, H. G.Wells (1866-1946) extrapolated the saying to try to reproduce in fiction the logic in a “real” setting. Wells only deepened the paradox. For among the blind, no one is king. And among the half-blind and among kings, none has sight. Nor can a pretender share the curse or fate – nor dare to empathize with a curse. Blindness remains a solitude.

Following World War II, liberal Catholic thinkers embarked on a grand intellectual project of convergence — or at least dialogue — with religious thought East and West. This effort was circumscribed by more conventional Catholic authorities as ecumenism, wherein the effort of convergence was restricted to other Christian sects, with the tone of accommodating other sects sufficiently to reabsorb them. The more ambitious style was reflected in a 1963 book titled Matter & Spirit: Their Convergence in Eastern Religions, Marx and Teilhard de Chardin. Within the ambitiously-titled project, religion and science could be reconciled, for wasn’t Teilhard a scientist and anthropologist to boot? And political reconciliation with a new post-war democratic impetus would reconsider socialism.

A convergence project of an intellect sort only was undertaken by Aldous Huxley in his book The Perennial Philosophy, first published in 1945. Huxley presented passages from classics of world religion with a minimum of his own commentary. He gathered passages under various headings: God, Charity, Good and Evil, Suffering, Faith, Grace, Will, and the like. The premise was not convergence but appreciation, the presentation of cultural traditions, similar and yet the reader senses, not reconcilable.

But the project was too ambitious, too abstract. As Harvey Cox observed in his 1955 classic The Secular City, the shadows of ideology and material progress, specifically in the United States in this period, was promoting secularism wherein Christianity, long associated with Western tradition, became pragmatic, increasingly diluted by material life, and a passive expression of convenience and conformity. The American masses had little appetite for universalism when exceptionalism was sufficient to propelled society’s values.

Another factor at this time in Catholic circles is the absence of critical studies, either textual or historical. The era of udolf Bultmann’s demythologizing had not yet taken hold, let alone the later quest for the historical Jesus. The voaculary of theology was still reflective of scholasticism and medieval mustiness.

One outstanding Catholic commentator on the times was Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk with wide religious interests, especially in Zen Buddhism. The glow of convergence-thinking was wspecially compelling to Merton. Merton had met T. D. Suzuki, foremost expositor on Buddhism, and Suzuki’s influence on Merton was deep. Merton was a prolific writer, and began shifting his interest from Catholic theology to convergence projects when he published Mystics and Zen Masters in 1967, drawing on the work of Christian mystics, especially Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross, to make analogies with the writings and expressions of Zen. Merton was interested in not only pursuing analogies only but also explaining Zen to his readers, with an understanding that both traditions are comparable in their trajectories, their vocabularies complete with analogous terms.

But Merton was still obliged to oxthodox theology, and the biggest obstacle when dialoging with D. T. Suzuki was, perhaps, the topic of human nature. For example, where Buddhism presented no tradition-laden metaphysics, Merton was confined to the Genesis myth of Paradise, wherein human suffering derives from fallen nature, from the knowledge of good and evil. Whatever Merton’s philosophy or knowlede of Catholic doctrine, he could not explainmind and consciousness without this origins myth, whereas Suzuki could discuss more appropriately the Buddhist concept of innocence,

Many passages of Mystics and Zen Masters reflect Merton’s enthusiastic discoveries about Buddhism and Zen, always finding Christian equivalents of Zen expressions, as if they justified his effort to the censor. For example: “The Zen of Hui Neng comes rather close to the Gospels and St. Paul …” and “Suzuki loves to repeat the formula that for Zen ‘zero equals infinity,’ and in this case he is close to the formula todo y nada of St. John of the Cross.” And Merton concludes with a passage (essentially summing up his approach) dismissing “the cultural accretions and trappings of Zen [that]… no longer have the living power they had in the Middle Ages.” But there is no context to the trappings, the power, or the Middle Ages here. Like the Catholic liturgy, Merton tells us, “Zen practice calls for an aggiornamento.” The Italian term for “updating,” refers to the Second Vatican Council’s updating of the Mass but updating little more. And who would undertake this updating of Zen? No mention by Merton that the mystics of his title – and therefore of his analogies for future rapprochement – may not have had the living power he imagines they had, since they dismissed in their day as heretics and thwarted from future influence.

What is characteristic of Merton’s treatment is ahistoricism. All of the theology and attempted analogies are presented without reference to history, either of Japan (except as Catholic missionaries defined Japan) or of the history of Christianity and the Catholic Church. Granted, the mystics of Catholicism were a minority whose influence was being rescued by Merton, but without a context, it is difficult to recommend them as mainstream within Christian thought. Similarly, Merton acknowledges that the Zen masters of his book title were not mystics. There was no mysticism in Zen. But their approach to metaphysics is very compelling, hence Merton’s pursuit.

As with Mystics and Zen Masters, Merton’s last book was a compilation of previously published essays. The posthumous book Zen and the Birds of Appetite appeared in 1968. Here a more cogent pursuit of Zen is presented. The curious title and prefatory note suggests a dampened enthisiasm for convergence. Is the interest in Zen due in part to the exhaustion and death of the West, to be beseiged by birds of appetite?

Merton wonders if Zen reveals more of itself with a structuralist approach, and that suggests a social science perspective missing from his previous book. But this approach is soon dropped as Merton hones in on his previous project of building analogies, doing so even more readily in this book. There is a lot of Eckhart. “Whatever Zen may be, however you define it, it is somehow there in Eckhart.” In the end, Merton offers a detailed apologia for the Catholic doctrines circling God and Christ and Genesis, seeing Zen as a piquant intellectual exercise, as did a contemporary Alred Graham, author of the 1963 book titled Zen Christianity. Merton concludes, defensively, with an eye on his superiors, and perhaps despairing of Zen’s insistence on not defining metaphysics, that Zen can be “used to clear the air of ascetic irrelevancies … [that it is] still worth while [being] exposed to its brisk and heady atmosphere.”

October is the time to revisit Thoreau’s October 1862 essay “Autumnal Tints,” even for readers not living in Thoreau’s New England. The essay is representative of Thoreau’s skill in merging observation of nature with a philosophical aesthetics, yielding insights into both nature and thought. Thoreau describes the variety and beauty of the autumnal foliage of his Massachusetts region both as a lay scientist and a phiosophical popularizer.
A central analogy in the essay is of autumnal leaves with fruit. Both are fruit, Thoreau notes, both responding to the peak of their ripeness, signaling separation from the tree that bears them:

“Generally, every fruit, on ripening, and just before it falls, when it commences a more independent and individual existence, requiring less nourishment from any source, and that not so much from the earth through its stem as from the sun and air, acquires a bright tint. So do leaves.”

Further, the colors of ripeness in fruit attract our eye and confirm the readiness to take the fruit to ourselves. So, too, the colors of the changing foliage at autumn signal by their magnificent colors the leaves’ ripeness, their maturation and age, their readiness to fall, expiring to attain this natural circle.

“How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last.”

Thoreau contrasts such a treę (maple, elm, chestnut, birch, which he mentions specifically) with its green arboreal neighbors about it green deciduous trees, which do not lose their leaves). But as the multitudinous hardwood leaves fall, nothing is wasted. Nature carefully husbands this abundance.

“Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. The trees are now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from it. They are discounting. They are about to add a leaf’s thickness to the depth of the soil. This is the beautiful way in which Nature gets her muck, while I chaffer with this man and that, who talks to me about sulphur and the cost of carting. We are all the richer for their decay. I am more interested in this crop than in the English grass alone or in the corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future cornfields and forests, on which the earth fattens. It keeps our home stead in good heart.”

But Thoreau wants to present this autumnal phenomenan as not only natural but necessary, for do we. too, not age and quit the threaded source of our vitality. We must admire nature’s methodology, leaving us a brilliant show of aesthetic value, and to boot a lesson of natural philosophy and science, a tutorial in agriculture, sustainability, and wise instruction for a metaphysics. Simply by pointing to what is before us.

“How many flutterings before the leaves rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe, with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails.”

“When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no lying nor vain epitaphs. … Let us walk in the cemetery of the leaves,—this is your true Greenwood Cemetery.”

Thus the aesthetics of autumnal tints harbor a deeper lesson and a melancholy which may check the aesthetics of the colors, pointing us to the reality of finality. But nature is never final. We must observe and reflect on every season to capture the whole lesson. The molding leaves will feed the soil around the forest, and spring will return to build the leafy armor of the trees again, fortify them in summer, usher them through livelihood until the return of autumn and the completion of another cyclical journey, pointing to still another. There is melancholy, but perhaps of the Eatern expression, evoking poignance in the scene before us. At such moments, we ought not tofail to observe the heartfelt lessons Thoreau suggests.

The formal gardens of history were never intended to be places of respite and tranquility, rather the opposite. The formal gardens of Mesopotamia, Persia, later Spain and France, among others, were secluded spaces projecting the power of its resident monarch or autocrat, the aloofness and protected status of emperor and court.

Though the Garden of Eden was described as Paradise, the origin word “paridaiza” is the Persian term for “walled,” as in walled garden, a paradise for the ruler but not for a subject. The image of Eden depends upon its naive residents, not on the architect Yahweh, for its benignity.

The formal gardens are noted for symmetry and imposing dimensions, a large,forbidding landscape where ornament and artifice reign. For example, Xenophon records (in his book The Economist, 1 16-23) an anecdote of Lysander visiting Cyrus, the Persian emperor, and walking with the latter in his formal garden:

Lysander, it seems, had gone with presents sent by the Allies to Cyrus, who entertained him, and amongst other marks of courtesy showed him his ‘paradise’ at Sardis. Lysander was astonished at the beauty of the trees within, all planted at equal intervals, the long straight rows of waving branches, the perfect regularity, the rectangular symmetry of the whole, and the many sweet scents which hung about them as they paced the park. In admiration he exclaimed to Cyrus: “All this beauty is marvellous enough, but what astonishes me still more is the talent of the artificer who mapped out and arranged for you the several parts of this fair scene.” Cyrus was pleased by the remark, and said: “Know then, Lysander, it is I who measured and arranged it all. Some of the trees,” he added, “I planted with my own hands.” Then Lysander, regarding earnestly the speaker, when he saw the beauty of his apparel and perceived its fragrance, the splendour also of the necklaces and armlets, and other ornaments which he wore, exclaimed: “What say you, Cyrus? Did you with your own hands plant some of these trees?” whereat the other: “Does that surprise you, Lysander? I swear to you by Mithres, when in ordinary health I never dream of sitting down to supper without first practising some exercise of war or husbandry in the sweat of my brow, or venturing some strife of honour, as suits my mood.” “On hearing this,” said Lysander to his friend, “I could not help seizing him by the hand and exclaiming, ‘Cyrus, you have indeed good right to be a happy man, since you are happy in being a good man.'”

Doubtless such conversations surrounded all of the monuments of imperial antiquity up to the present, for the formal gardens are not sources of food but confections flattering their resident and owner, reflecting the imagined wisdom of king and emperor. The walls keep curious onlookers and peasants out, as much as do the castle walls, the fortress walls, the palace court, and the dungeons.

We are a long way from simplicity, even from aesthetics. The formal garden is vulgar, pompous, and completely unnatural. Symmetry projects the appearance of marching troops. Walls repel outsiders and nature itself, while imprisoning subjects and oher creatures. We should not admire “paradises.” Will we pine after them when they are inevitably lost? Expend our energies maintaining them for someone else, or for some ideal or vanity? We are better left cultivating our garden, imitating nature, then looking at someone’s else and longing for it rather than working on ours.

The Taoists of ancient China wanted their rulers to be anonymous, because their pompous edifices were not to be seen, indeed, did not exist. The Taoist Tillers school proposed that the king not have his own fields and forests, let alone gardens, but work shoulder to shoulder with peasants in the field. Shen-gong, the mythical first king of the Chinese, was lauded for being a healer, herbalist, and farmer — unseen by anyone, so perfectly did the kingdom function.

Contrast the formal garden, too, with the simple hermit’s hut: Kamo no Chomei, describing his hut, casually notes: “To the north of my little hut I have made a tiny garden surrounded by a thin low brushwood fence so that I can grow various kinds of medicinal herbs.” Adding, “Such is the style of my unsubstantial cottage.” The Buddhist monk-hermit and poet Ryokan considered Dogen’s “celestial garden” too abstract, too formal, instead celebrating wildflowers and even the weeds that offended Dogen so much.

How, then, to “garden”? Grow what is essential, edible (even flowers), nourishing, and substantial. Let scale and dimension reflect need, not excess or appearance. Mingle vegetables with flowers in conviviality. Establish perennials, for they will establish themselves forever (well, for a few years!) and return in greeting every spring to celebrate the passage of time and tenacity. Let all flourish, picking what is to be consumed the same day. Let nature express aesthetics, without too much human contrivance. If there are rock borders let them be overrun by creeping thyme. If there are walls, let flowering vines flourish climbing them, as if to mock the false boundary between nature and gardener. Individual bed spaces will be overlapped by prolific and flourishing plants. Let those plants that demand space be given their due, that they may reciprocate. Adding space is better than constricting self-development.

Here is a snippet about the garden, by Kahlil Gibran, from his “Sand and Foam”:

In the autumn I gathered all my sorrows and buried them in my garden. And when April returned and spring came to wed the earth, there grew in my garden beautiful flowers unlike all other flowers. And my neighbors came to behold them, and they all said to me, “When autumn comes again, at seeding time will you not give us of the seeds of these flowers that we may have them in our gardens?”