What is the purpose of emotions? What value do they have? And perhaps more importantly, do they add any meaning to our lives?
It might be surprising to some that I would turn to Thoreau for answers to these questions but contrary to what many think of him, I have always found Thoreau to be peculiarly impassioned and sensitive, especially in the Journal. And though he doesn’t answer my questions about the purpose, value, and meaning of emotions I think he does offer fruitful ways to think differently about how to answer them.
These regular phenomena of the seasons get at last to be—they were at first, of course—simply and plainly phenomena or phases of my life. The seasons and all their changes are in me.
Journal, 26 October 1857
That last line—the seasons and all their changes are in me—has affected me more deeply than any other he has written. It is often on my lips and in my thoughts.
As always with Thoreau, context is crucial. The passage may not seem to be about emotions at first, but when placed in context I think a strong case can be made that he is talking about that part of his life . Two sentences later he writes the following:
After a while I learn what my moods and seasons are. I would have nothing subtracted. I can imagine nothing added. My moods are thus periodical, not two days in my year alike. The perfect correspondence of Nature to man, so that he is at home in her!
26 October 1857
Taken together (and indeed they begin and end a single paragraph) he seems to be referring to his emotional landscape. It also suggests to me a way of interpreting and relating to our emotions, moods, passions, affects, etc.
It’s tempting to read this as a Romantic attempt to bridge the gap between nature and humanity or to reunite Spirit and nature. But I think this is different in kind from the type of idealist unity espoused by Emerson.
Laura Dassow Walls argues that the rational holism of Emerson and Coleridge, in its attempt to unify man and nature, actually reinforces the Cartesian dualism between mind and matter, nature and spirit. The obsession with finding a unifying law or principle, when built on this bedrock of dualism, leads to the dismissal of the particular in pursuit of the universal.
“We are assured over and over again in this literature that transcendent unity embraces All in the One, but we see that it embraces the All by throwing off the many. The price of transcendence is the death of the self and the world.”
Seeing New Worlds, Laura Dassow Walls
In this view, the transcendent realm of Spirit is unchanging and immutable. It is the worldly, material realm that changes and transforms.
“The celebration of flux and flow has disappeared in the longing for the absolute, stasis which can never threaten change… The idealist model of the world divides divides it into two realms, the transcendent, which is order, certainty, and security, against the worldly, which is chaotic, atomized, sensual.”
Seeing New Worlds
With this in mind, Thoreau’s obsession with the seasons and phenology—with change—is striking. It is a different kind of unity that he is after: not a unity that “throws off the many” in pursuit of the One or that prioritizes stability over change, but one that emphasizes the particular-in-relation to the universal and the stability within the change. Thoreau finds a unifying relationship in “perfect correspondence,” so that the “flux and flow” of nature is something within him just as his own flux and flow is within nature.
What begins as a recognition that the daily weather or seasonal changes affect his mood and emotional state, becomes a realization that the changes and transformations of the weather and seasons are his affect and mood. Compare this passage from 1855 to the one I first mentioned from 1857:
“In a journal it is important in a few words to describe the weather, or character of the day, as it affects our feelings. That which was so important at the time cannot be unimportant to remember.”
5 February 1855
These regular phenomena of the seasons get at last to be—they were at first, of course—simply and plainly phenomena or phases of my life. The seasons and all their changes are in me… After a while I learn what my moods and seasons are. I would have nothing subtracted. I can imagine nothing added. My moods are thus periodical, not two days in my year alike The perfect correspondence of Nature to man, so that he is at home in her!
26 October 1857
What significance does this insight have for how we experience our emotions and nature?
Thoreau’s conception of the correspondence between emotions and seasons suggests to me that there is an emotional aspect to nature and that perhaps the particular relationship we as individuals have to our emotions is mirrored in the kind of relationship we have with nonhuman nature. That is, whatever the purposes, values, and meanings we ascribe to nonhuman nature might also be the same purposes, values, and meanings we give to our human emotions. Or, at least maybe it should be.
Viewing nature as a subject with emotions—and made up of subjects with emotions—not only makes me think I should relate differently to nature, but to myself as well. Rather than denying our emotions any importance, or privileging some of them over others, or even allowing for unconstrained emotional outbursts, maybe there should be a rhythmic acceptance of them and their endless transformations. Not only allowing or permitting each to be what it is in its season, but to fully embrace the influence of each unselfconsciously without judgment.
Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
23 August 1853
Although I haven’t yet found satisfactory answers Thoreau’s realizations are fertile ground for sowing these questions and waiting to see whether they flower into truths. And if the seeds fail to germinate then hopefully I can at least find ways to live with the questions until next season.
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