"I heard a very loud sound": Thoreau processes the spectacle of sudden, violent death.(Henry David Thoreau)

Publication: ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly)

Publication Date: 01-JUN-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 University of Rhode Island

This essay originates in a presentation given at the 2002 convention of the American Literature Association, just nine months after the fall of the World Trade Center Towers. Thoreau Society panelists had been asked to consider how (or whether) the Transcendentalists' philosophy can help twenty-first-century citizens cope with a disaster of the magnitude of September 11, 2001. Seeking some equivalent in Thoreau's experience, I decided to examine the following journal passage for 7 January 1853, in which the thirty-five-year-old philosopher writes of viewing burnt, scattered human remains, the fresh result of a powdermill explosion.



About 10 minutes before 10 Am I heard a very loud sound & felt a violent jar which made the house rock and the loose articles on my table rattle--which I knew must be either a powdermill blown up or an earth quake--Not knowing but another & more violent might take place I immediately ran down stairs, but I saw from the door a vast expanding column of whitish smoke rising in the west directly over the Powder mills 4 miles distant. It was unfolding its volumes above which made it widest there. In 3 or 4 minutes it had all risen & spread it self into a lengthening somewhat copper colored cloud parallel with the horizon from N to S--and in about 10 minutes after the explosion it passed over my head being several miles long from north to south & distinctly dark & smoky toward the north not nearly so high as the few cirrhi in the sky. I jumped into a man's wagon & road [sic] toward the mills. In a few minutes more I saw behind me far in the east a faint salmon colored cloud carrying the news of the explosion to the sea--& perchance over [the] head of the absent proprietor. Arrived probably before half past 10. There were perhaps 30 or 40 wagons there. The Kernel mill had blown up first & killed 3 men who were in it said to be turning a roller with a chisel--in 3 seconds after one of the mixing houses exploded. The Kernel house was swept away & fragments mostly but a foot or 2 in length were strewn over the hills & meadows as if sown for 30 rods--& the slight snow then on the ground was for the most part melted around. The mixing house about 10 rods W was not so completely dispersed for most of the machinery remained a total [w]reck--The press house about 12 rods east had 2/3 [of] its boards off. & a mixing house next westward from that which blew up had lost some boards on the E side. The boards fell out--(ie of those buildings which did not blow up) the air within apparently rushing out to fill up the vacuum occasioned by the explosions--& so the powder being bared to the fiery particles in the air another building explodes, The powder on the floor of the bared Press house was 6 inches deep in some places--and the crowd were thoughtlessly going into it. A few windows were broken 30 or 40 rods off. Timber 6 inches square & 18 feet long was thrown over a hill 80 feet high at least--a dozen rods--30 rods was about the limit of fragments--The Drying house in which was a fire was perhaps 25 rods dist. & escaped. Every timber & piece of wood which was blown up was as black as if it had been dyed except where it had broken on falling other breakages were completely concealed by the color--I mistook what had been iron hoops in the woods--for leather straps. Some of the clothes of the men were in the tops of the trees where undo[u]btedly their bodies had been & lefte them. The bodies were naked & black--Some limbs & bowels here & and there & a head at a distance from its trunk. The feet were bare--the hair singed to a crisp. I smelt the powder half a mile before I got there. Put the diff. buildings 30 rods apart and then but one will blow up--at a time. (1)

Thoreau depicts the scene unsentimentally and apparently mean-mindedly. In a detached style highlighted with flashes of irony, he marshals observed details, some horrid, in order to deduce the sequential phases of the conflagration--and then, wasting no breath lamenting the tragedy, suggests a better design for future factories. To any reader with an animus against the hermit of Walden, these six hundred words can only confirm the stereotypical curmudgeon and misanthrope (Bridgeman xii). Any champion of Thoreau, on the other hand, will assume that the acid social satirist who wrote Walden's "Economy" chapter had to be aware of the irony in a gunpowder worker's death by explosion--the ultimate wage of "driving for Squire Make-a-Stir." Thus Laura Dassow Walls, in a rich discussion of chance and necessity in Thoreau's philosophy, stretches toward social consciousness by interpreting Thoreau's punch line ("Put the different buildings ...") as a criticism of the reification introduced into society by "the factory system" (250).

Actually Thoreau's narrative does not primarily express either misanthropy or progressive social criticism. In this essay I examine its themes and imagery in relation to several related journal entries during 1853 as well as related lectures, essays, and correspondence by Thoreau around this time. I establish that the horrifying vision continued to haunt Thoreau's imagination for months, perturbing his dreams and waking meditations, and unsettling his vital sense of oneness with nature--a state which brought him to the brink of despair. Consciously or not, Thoreau set himself the project of "working through" (as we now say) this emotionally painful experience: he would mediate the intolerable horror through his...

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