Hooks Baited with Darkness

Scott Russell Sanders

I ½rst read Walden when I was seventeen, the sum-

mer before starting college, at the urging of a high
school teacher who sensed that my adolescent
头脑, brimming with questions, would bene½t from
grappling with a truly radical thinker. 大部分的
book baffled me. The tone shifted unpredictably
from conversational to prophetic, from jokey to
stern, from earthy to mystical. I was bewildered by
some of the lengthy sentences, which zigzagged
among ideas and images, and I was stumped by the
cryptic short ones, which seemed to compress whole
paragraphs of meaning into a few words. Not yet
having made any big decisions about how to lead
my life, I couldn’t ½gure out what was troubling
this Henry David Thoreau. So what if his neighbors
thought he should use his Harvard degree to land a
job and a wife, and then proceed to have kids, buy a
房子, get rich, and distribute alms to the poor?
Couldn’t he just ignore the scolds and go his own
方式? Not yet having lost a loved one to accident,
illness, or old age, I only dimly understood his brood –
ing about that amoral process we call nature. 所以
what if armies of red ants and black ants slaugh-
tered one another, herons gobbled tadpoles, a dead
horse stank up the woods, or a thousand seeds per-
ished for each one that took root? What did all that
mayhem and waste have to do with us, the owners
of souls aiming at heaven?

At seventeen, still a believer in souls and heaven,
I didn’t know which parts of the book were sup-
posed to be wise and which parts cranky, so I read it

115

SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS, A
美国科学院院士
自从 2012, is Distinguished Profes-
sor of English, Emeritus, at Indiana
大学. He is also a novelist and
essayist. His recent books include
Earth Works: Selected Essays (2012),
A Conservationist Manifesto (2009),
and A Private History of Awe (2006).

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Hooks
Baited with
Darkness

all with an open mind. While missing
much, I was suf½ciently intrigued by the
story of Thoreau’s sojourn in the woods
and suf½ciently engaged by his cocky,
inquisitive manner to keep reading. 他的
brashness was evident from the opening
段落, where he announces that he
will write in the ½rst person, thus break-
ing one of the cardinal rules of composi-
tion I had learned in school, and he places
himself at the center of his book without
apology: “I should not talk so much
about myself if there were any body else
whom I knew as well. 很遗憾, I am
con½ned to this theme by the narrowness
of my experience.”1 As a boy from the
back roads of Ohio, untraveled and unso-
phisticated, wondering what to make of
my own narrow experience, I felt Thoreau
was speaking to me, an impression con –
½rmed a few lines later: “Perhaps these
pages are more particularly addressed to
poor students” (2). While I was a good stu –
dent academically, I was a poor one ½nan-
cially, able to enroll in an Ivy League college
that fall only thanks to a full scholarship.
Short of cash, I was long on country
技能. My parents and neighbors, all of
them frugal, taught me how to hunt, Ⅹsh,
garden, 能, fence a pasture, care for live-
库存, fell trees, ½x machines, repair a
房子, run electrical wiring, and sew on
buttons. That summer of my ½rst Walden
reading I spent as an apprentice carpenter,
learning to frame, hang drywall, install
trim, and shingle roofs. So I took seriously
Thoreau’s suggestion that the students at
哈佛, instead of paying rent, could have
saved money and gained practical knowl-
edge by building their own dormitories. 我
was fascinated by his detailed account of
the cabin construction, from the digging
of a cellar hole and the laying up of a chim-
ney to the plastering of walls. Because I
enjoyed such work, I understood why he
would ask: “Shall we forever resign the
pleasure of construction to the carpen-

特尔? What does architecture amount to in
the experience of the mass of men? I never
in all my walks came across a man engaged
in so simple and natural an occupation as
building his house” (48). Since I had cob-
bled together treehouses in the backyard
maples, forts in the meadow, and brush
huts in the woods, and since I had helped
frame homes for strangers, I expected to
build my own house one day.

Here was a philosopher with dirt under
his ½ngernails and calluses on his palms.
Here was a man famous for his ideas who
could say, “To be a philosopher is not
merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even
to found a school, but so to love wisdom
as to live according to its dictates, a life of
simplicity, 独立, magnanimity,
and trust. It is to solve some of the prob-
lems of life, not only theoretically, 但
practically” (14). The thrifty, resourceful
people among whom I grew up prepared
me to admire Thoreau’s effort to provide
some of the necessities of life with his own
hands: not only by constructing a cabin,
but also by sawing and splitting fallen
trees for the stove (from Emerson’s wood-
很多), by hauling water from the pond (仍然
safe to drink in his day), and by hoeing
豆子 (he made it only partway through his
seven miles of rows and resolved to plant
fewer the following year).

I did not yet appreciate, 然而, why he
took such pains to distinguish between
the necessities of life and luxuries, 之间
enough and too much. When I packed for
college that summer, everything I owned–
衣服, 图书, towel, toiletries, clock
收音机, slide rule–½tted into my grand –
father’s sea trunk, which I could carry on
my shoulder. I did not feel encumbered
by property. Nor did I feel, with a radio as
my only electronic device and without a
car, that technology was forcing me to live
at a faster and faster pace, and thus I could
not grasp why Thoreau fretted about the
accelerating influence of railroads, facto-

116

代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & 科学

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里斯, and telegraph. 同样地, in that
limbo between high school and college,
without bills to pay or appointments to
保持, with no occupations aside from
carpentry, 阅读, meals, and sleep, I felt
no need to simplify my life.

While my upbringing enabled me to

follow the practical side of what Thoreau
called his “experiment” in simple living,
my youth prevented me from fully under-
standing the philosophy that accompanied
it.2 My dif½culty had as much to do with
his style as with his ideas. I puzzled over
his paradoxes: “We do not ride on the rail –
路; it rides upon us” (98–99). I resisted
his exaggerations: “I have lived some
thirty years on this planet, and I have yet
to hear the ½rst syllable of valuable or
even earnest advice from my seniors” (8).
出色地, I found myself asking, who had
taught him to build houses, grow beans, 或者
tie his shoes? If people older than thirty
had nothing to teach him, why did he read
all those ancient–and presumably elderly
–sages from India and China and Greece?
I bridled at his boastful claims: “There is
a certain class of unbelievers who some-
times ask me such questions as, if I think
that I can live on vegetable food alone;
and to strike at the root of the matter at
once–for the root is faith–I am accus-
tomed to answer such, that I can live on
board nails” (69). Really? Would those be
the nails he salvaged from the Irishman’s
shanty? Would he scrape off the rust be –
fore devouring them? Such faith, as he
called it, reminded me of certain implau-
sible beliefs I was beginning to question
in church.

Thoreau often seemed to hide his mean-
ing in riddles, like a Shakespearean fool
wary of offending the king. (I had read
King Lear at the urging of the same high
school teacher.) What did he mean, 为了
实例, by saying “I have a great deal of
company in my house; 特别是在

早晨, when nobody calls” (147–148)?
Or what did he mean by saying of the
men who came to ½sh in the pond at
night that “they plainly ½shed much
more in the Walden Pond of their own
natures, and baited their hooks with
darkness” (141)? It was far from plain to
我. Baiting with worms or crickets, sure.
But darkness? Or when he claims, “It is a
surprising and memorable, as well as valu –
able experience, to be lost in the woods
any time,” how does he arrive, a few lines
之后, at his grand conclusion: “Not till
we are lost, 换句话说, not till we
have lost the world, do we begin to ½nd
ourselves, and realize where we are and the
in½nite extent of our relations” (186–187)?
Getting lost in the woods I could imag-
ine, but I could not see how this might
lead to ½nding one’s place in in½nity.

Time and again, Walden makes such diz –
zying leaps from the literal to the symbolic.
Consider one further example, from a pas –
sage on carpentry, a subject I was less ig –
norant of than most other things:

I would not be one of those who will fool-
ishly drive a nail into mere lath and plaster-
英; such a deed would keep me awake
nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel
for the furring. Do not depend on the putty.
Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully
that you can wake up in the night and think
of your work with satisfaction–a work at
which you would not be ashamed to invoke
the Muse. So will help you God, 所以
仅有的. Every nail driven should be as another
rivet in the machine of the universe, 你
carrying on the work. (358–359)

I knew about lath, plaster, putty, 和
furring; I knew about the satisfaction of
driving a nail home with two or three
blows. So I followed this passage easily
enough until I came to the Muse and God,
and then I scratched my head, wondering
how they entered the picture, and won-
dering even more how a well-driven nail

斯科特
拉塞尔
Sanders

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117

Hooks
Baited with
Darkness

and the person who hammered it could be
useful to the universe.

Even where the style posed no problems,
I often balked at the philosophy. Take the
chapter grandly entitled “Higher Laws.”
In the opening lines, Thoreau confesses an
urge to kill and devour a woodchuck raw,
an impulse that stirs him to reflect: “我
found in myself, and still ½nd, an instinct
toward a higher, 或者, as it is named, spiritual
生活, as do most men, and another toward a
primitive rank and savage one, and I rever-
ence them both” (229). Thus far I stayed
和他一起, for I felt simultaneously the al –
lure of science and girls, of books and
篮球, and I was glad to think that
both of these instincts deserved respect.
But then Thoreau spends several pages
elevating “purity” and denigrating every-
thing “primitive rank and savage” about
人类生活, from the eating of meat and the
drinking of tea to “sensuality” of every
种类, especially the “generative energy,
哪个, when we are loose, dissipates and
makes us unclean, when we are continent
invigorates and inspires us” (239–240).
Lest readers miss the allusion to sex, 他
goes on to insist that “Chastity is the
flowering of man” (240), sounding less
like a dissident thinker than like a Scout-
master or high school nurse. Having
begun by claiming to “reverence” the
body’s urges, Thoreau ends by declaring,
“He is blessed who is assured that the ani-
mal is dying out in him day by day, 和
the divine being established” (240)–
advice that could have come from St. 保罗,
the chief source of shame in my childhood.
Somewhere between hungering after a
woodchuck and repudiating sex, Thoreau
provoked me to say no. I could not have
fully explained the grounds of my objec-
的, neither at this point in my reading nor
at any other point where I disagreed with
他, but the fact of my disagreement, 和
the force of it, was exhilarating. I sensed
that to question his philosophy, to test his

ideas and opinions against my own reason
and experience, was wholly in keeping
with the philosophy itself.

Despite my reservations and confusions,

what came through to me from Walden,
and what most excited me, was Thoreau’s
desire to lead a meaningful life. The very
title of the second chapter–“Where I
Lived, and What I Lived For”–thrilled me.
The “where” concerned me less than the
“what for.” At seventeen, I imagined that
life must have a purpose beyond mere sur-
vival and the passing on of genes, 超过
piling up money and possessions, 超过
auditioning for paradise. But what might
that purpose be? How could one discover
它? And if life did have a purpose beyond
those dictated by religion, 经济学, 或者
生物学, what then? How should one live
in light of it?

I was haunted by such questions, yet my
friends never spoke of them, and the adults
I knew seemed to have resigned themselves
to one or another conventional answer.
So it was heartening to ½nd Thoreau ask-
ing these very questions, in a passage I
would later discover to be among the
most celebrated in the book:

I went to the woods because I wished to
live deliberately, to front only the essential
facts of life, and see if I could not learn
what it had to teach, 并不是, when I came
to die, discover that I had not lived. I did
not wish to live what was not life, living is
so dear; nor did I wish to practise resigna-
的, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted
to live deep and suck out all the marrow of
生活, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as
to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a
broad swath and shave close, to drive life
into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest
条款, 和, if it proved to be mean, 为什么
then to get the whole and genuine mean-
ness of it, and publish its meanness to the
世界; or if it were sublime, to know it by

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经验, and be able to give a true ac –
count of it in my next excursion. For most
男人, it appears to me, are in a strange un –
certainty about it, whether it is of the devil
or of God, and have somewhat hastily con-
cluded that it is the chief end of man here
to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” (97)

Behind the bravado, I could hear his
long ing to ½nd a true path, a way of spend –
ing his time and talents that would be
worthy of the precious, fleeting gift of life.
I shared that longing, as I shared his wari-
ness about otherworldly philosophies. 我
did not recognize the source of his quota-
tion in the last line–the Westminster
Shorter Catechism, which opens with the
declaration that “Man’s chief end is to glo-
rify God and to enjoy him forever”–but I
had heard such pieties often, in sermons
that discounted the value of life here and
now except as preparation for life here-
后. What appealed to me most deeply in
that ½rst reading of Walden was Thoreau’s
determination to observe and enjoy the
marvels of Earth, to be fully awake and
活, right here, right now.

今天, ½fty years and many rereadings

之后, Walden is quite a different book for
我: less bewildering, since I have made
my share of dif½cult choices and suffered
my share of losses, and also more chal-
lenging, since I have come to recognize
more clearly my own limitations as well
as those of the book.

Although I have renovated the old house
in which my wife and I reared our chil-
德伦, and in which we now entertain our
grandchildren, I realize, at age sixty-seven,
I will never build a house from scratch.
Although I remain cautious about tech-
nology–agreeing with Thoreau that
many of our inventions merely offer “im –
proved means to an unimproved end”
(55)–my life depends on electricity and
petroleum and the devices they power, 作为

well as on the global networks that sup-
ply them. I try to minimize my posses-
西翁, giving away whatever I don’t use,
yet I keep acquiring new ones, which must
be paid for, stored, insured, cleaned, 关于 –
paired, and eventually replaced, thus dem –
onstrating the truth of Thoreau’s dictum
that “the cost of a thing is the amount of
. . . life which is required to be exchanged
for it, immediately or in the long run”
(32). I would rather not think about
钱, yet I spend hours keeping track of
its coming and going, mainly to satisfy
the irs, merchants, and banks. As a hus-
乐队, 父亲, and now a grandfather, 作为一个
teacher for the past four decades, and as a
citizen engaged in numerous causes, 我
bear responsibilities that I could not have
imagined at the age of seventeen. 不
matter how I strive to simplify my life, 它
remains stubbornly complex. In short, 我
have failed to become the unencumbered,
self-reliant, perpetually awake person I
had envisioned in my youth.

Neither, I discovered, was Thoreau as
unencumbered as he appeared to be on
my ½rst reading of Walden. During his
sojourn in the woods, he frequently visited
the village, saw friends, ate meals with
his family, helped in the family pencil
商业, earned money from surveying
and other jobs, carried on correspon-
登塞, gave lectures, and took trips. 他
revealed only part of himself on the page,
which is all that even the most personal
book can do. 另一方面, he pre-
sented far more of his thoughts and ob –
servations than actually occurred during
the twenty-six months he spent living in
the woods. The chronicle of his experi-
ment at Walden Pond draws on material
recorded in his journal from a period
beginning years before and extending
years after his time at the cabin. 就好像 –
苏尔特, many passages in the book seem over –
stuffed, as if he felt compelled to include
every anecdote, aphorism, witticism,

斯科特
拉塞尔
Sanders

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119

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图像, and insight that had ever come to
him concerning a given topic. Having
worked with many young writers in my
类, and having once been a young
writer myself, I recognize this tendency
to excess as a common sign of ambition.
Better overdo it than leave out something
valuable.3 I am more tolerant now of this
and other stylistic quirks in Walden. 这
bluster and bragging are more than com-
pensated for by the vigor and candor. 为了
every showy allusion to classical litera-
ture or mythology, there is a burst of gritty
American vernacular. For every willful
obscurity in the prose, there are a dozen
brilliant clarities.

While I am less inclined to quarrel with
the style of Walden, I am more inclined to
question some of the postures and opin-
ions of the brash narrator. Thoreau’s por-
trait of a solitary, self-suf½cient life in the
woods now appears to me as excessively,
if unconsciously, male. His radical indi-
vidualism, however necessary in his day as
a bulwark against demands for conformity
from church and society, now appears too
狭窄的, rejecting as it does all responsi-
bility of the self toward others. His oppo-
sition of spirit and flesh strikes me today
as an expression of the dualism at the root
of our ecological crisis, a dualism that sets
mind against matter, culture against wild –
内斯. Thus our patron saint of environ-
mentalism can declare: “Nature is hard
to be overcome, but she must be over-
come” (241). Recognizing such misgiv-
ings does not diminish my appreciation for
the book’s many strengths, or my grati-
tude for all that it has taught me.

When I compare my current reading of
Walden with impressions from that ½rst
阅读, I am reminded of Italo Calvino’s
remark that books read in youth can be
“formative, in the sense that they give a
form to future experiences, providing mod –
这, terms of comparison, schemes for clas –
si½cation, scales of value, exemplars of

美丽. . . . If we reread the book at a
mature age, we are likely to rediscover
these constants, which by this time are
part of our inner mechanisms, but whose
origins we have long forgotten.”4 My ex –
perience differs from Calvino’s descrip-
tion only in that I have not forgotten the
source of those “inner mechanisms.” The
example of Thoreau’s life and the chal-
lenge of his thought remain potent influ-
ences for me, as they have been potent
influences for generations of readers.

Of all his writings, Walden has had the
broadest impact, moving countless peo-
ple to seek a way of life that is close to
自然, materially simple, purposeful, 和
reflective. His vision has been transmit-
ted and transmuted through a lineage of
American writers, from John Muir and
Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson to Wen-
dell Berry and Terry Tempest Williams
and Bill McKibben, all of them striving to
harmonize human behavior with the con –
straints and patterns of our planetary
home. We are far from achieving such a
harmony–as witness climate disruption,
例如, or the accelerated extinction
of species–but we would be farther still
without the questioning and imagining
Thoreau inspired. We have him to thank,
as much as anyone, for the shift in con-
sciousness that led to the creation of Amer –
ica’s national parks, designated wilder-
ness areas, and laws aimed at protecting
air and water and soil. We still need his
cautionary, curmudgeonly voice, 因为
in our day the craving for more–more
stuff, more money, more power–no lon –
ger merely enslaves individuals; it de –
grades the conditions for life on Earth.

Great books read us as surely as we read

他们, 揭示, by the aspects of our char-
acter and personal history they illuminate,
who we are. Today when I revisit Walden
it is usually in the company of my students,
whose reactions remind me of my own

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early bafflement, resistance, and exhila-
配给. When they protest, as they often
做, that they have no taste for Thoreau’s
experiment in simple living, I draw their
attention to his disclaimer: “I would not
have any one adopt my mode of living on
any account; 为了, beside that before he
has fairly learned it I may have found out
another for myself, I desire that there
may be as many different persons in the
world as possible; but I would have each
one be very careful to ½nd out and pursue
his own way, and not his father’s or his
mother’s or his neighbor’s instead” (75).
Finding out and pursuing one’s own way,
while learning all one can about the ways
that others have found, is the essential task
not merely of education but of life.

Thoreau continued his search after
moving from the cabin back into town, A
search that would lead to his public de –
nunciation of slavery, to inventions that
improved the making of pencils and the
re½ning of graphite, to meticulous natural
history studies, to research on Native
美国人, to essays and journals and
travel accounts that would ½ll a shelf of
books published after his death. Wanting
my students to bear in mind that ongoing
生活, beyond the con½nes of Walden, I draw
their attention to another passage, this one
from the ½nal chapter: “I left the woods
for as good a reason as I went there. Per-
haps it seemed to me that I had several
more lives to live, and could not spare any
more time for that one. It is remarkable
how easily and insensibly we fall into a
particular route, and make a beaten track
for ourselves” (351). What he sought for
himself and urged for his readers was the
freedom to keep thinking, keep experi-
menting, keep striking out afresh.

We commonly imagine Thoreau out-
门, chasing loons on the pond, 手表-
ing frozen mud thaw, identifying wild-
花朵, plucking wild fruits. But those
excursions were informed and interpreted

during countless hours he spent indoors,
reading and writing. The chapter of Walden
called “Reading” is a hymn to books, 作为
eloquent as any of his tributes to nature.
“Books are the treasured wealth of the
world and the ½t inheritance of genera-
tions and nations,” he declares, 推荐-
mending to us not just any books, 但是
great ones, the classics, those “we have to
stand on tip-toe to read and devote our
most alert and wakeful hours to” (110, 112).
Such effort, he promises, will be abun-
dantly repaid:

There are probably words addressed to our
condition exactly, 哪个, if we could really
hear and understand, would be more salu-
tary than the morning or the spring to our
生活, and possibly put a new aspect on the
face of things for us. How many a man has
dated a new era in his life from the reading
of a book. The book exists for us perchance
which will explain our miracles and reveal
new ones. The at present unutterable things
we may ½nd somewhere uttered. These same
questions that disturb and puzzle and con-
found us have in their turn occurred to all the
wise men; not one has been omitted; 和
each has answered them, according to his
能力, by his words and his life. (115–116)

Besieged as we are by advertisements
and the cult of consumerism, racing to keep
up with our gadgets, rushing from one sen –
sation to the next, we need more than ever
to ask the questions posed in Walden:
What is life for? What are the necessities
of a good life? How much is enough? 做
we own our devices or do they own us?
What is our place in nature? How do we
balance individual freedom with social
responsibility? How should we spend our
天? Whether or not Walden speaks to
your condition, I tell my students, 有
other books that will do so, giving voice
to what you have felt but have not been
able to say, asking your deepest ques-
系统蒸发散, stirring you to more intense life.

斯科特
拉塞尔
Sanders

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143 (1) 冬天 2014

121

Hooks
Baited with
Darkness

尾注
1 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 编辑. Jeffrey S. Cramer (新天堂, 康涅狄格州: Yale University
按, 2004), 2. Originally published in 1854 under the title Walden; 或者, Life in the Woods,
Thoreau’s most famous book has gone through many editions. Cramer’s edition, with an
introduction by Denis Donoghue, is the most authoritative currently available; it has the
additional virtue of being inexpensive and well suited to classroom use. All subsequent quo-
tations from Walden will be taken from this edition, and the page numbers will be shown
within parentheses following the quotation. All italics within quotations are in the original.
2 The words experiment, 实验, and experimentalists appear seventeen times in Walden, A
sign of Thoreau’s respect for the methods and prestige of science. By calling his stay at Walden
Pond an experiment, he may also have wished to present it as a one-man alternative to the
communal experiments–most of them, like Brook Farm and Fruitlands, short-lived–that
were springing up across the United States and Europe in the 1840s and 1850s.

3 Such an encyclopedic ambition has resulted in many a bloated, shapeless tome, 当然,
but it also gave us Moby-Dick and Leaves of Grass, which were published, 分别, 三
years before and one year after Walden.

4 Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature, 反式. Patrick Creagh (纽约: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

1986), 127.

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122

代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & 科学
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