When the brothers awake on the morning of the voyage’s final day, “listening to the rippling of the river, and the rustling of the leaves” for signs of “a change in the weather,” they suddenly recognize what has happened: “That night was the turning-point in the season. We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn.” Yet the movement into autumn in A Week does not portend withering or decline. Rather, it expresses fullness of experience, or “ripeness,” as Thoreau calls it in Walden. Autumn, as Thoreau writes later in “Friday,” brings “the true harvest of the year,” a harvest of thought and understanding.

The brothers’ movement through the locks that return them from the Merrimack to the Concord coincides with a “change in the weather [that] was most favorable to our contemplative mood, and disposed us to dream yet deeper at our oars, while we floated in imagination farther down the stream of time.” “Floating” finally brings them home to Concord, where they “leaped gladly on shore,” their journey completed.

The deepest understanding earned by that journey is eloquently expressed earlier in the book’s final chapter: “When my thoughts are sensible of change, I love to see and sit on rocks which I have known, and pry into their moss, and see unchangeableness so established. I not yet gray on rocks forever gray, I no longer green under the evergreens. There is something even in the lapse of time by which time recovers itself.”

Thoreau’s awareness of time’s capacity to recover itself was made possible, in part, through his immersion in the new geology of his day, particularly the theories of Charles Lyell. Lyell, opposing earlier theories of rapid, catastrophic geologic change (and biblical accounts that underlay such theories), had posited an infinitesimally slow, gradual, and cyclical evolution of the earth’s surface. In characterizing geologic time in this way, Lyell found a restorative (or, in Thoreau’s terms, redemptive) dimension in the process of change.

Placing himself within the continuum of geologic time, Thoreau has found solace in the long view that the rocks’ “unchangeableness” and their familiarity (“rocks which I have known”) have established. Seen from such a view, more continuous and integrated than that afforded by “history”—with all its short-term dislocations and perturbations—human change and even the most painful of losses could be assimilated and understood. Yet how short is Thoreau’s “week” in comparison with these rocks’ vast age! And how arbitrary too. Unlike the seasons that structure Walden, a week is a purely human measure of time. But for Thoreau it has provided an opening into the mystery of time itself. Its very arbitrariness suggests the human desire to penetrate that mystery, and come to terms with the paradox of change.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers can be read profitably for many themes and from many perspectives. It serves, for instance, as a quintessential example of the meditative prose of self-exploration that Emerson urged on his colleagues in the Transcendentalist movement. (The book’s discursive form and the complexity of its rhetorical movements have led some recent scholars to find in it anticipations of modernist and postmodernist thought.) A Week also illustrates Emerson’s uses of the past toward present purposes, and in doing so reveals Thoreau’s great classical learning.

From A Week, we can learn something about the genre of travel writing so popular in mid-nineteenth-century America, and come to understand better how such writing—in the hands of a Thoreau or a Melville—could transcend the genre. Furthermore, recent scholarship has shown how A Week expresses Thoreau’s fascination with, and integral use of, the principles of the natural sciences, especially geology, in his day. And, among Thoreau’s major published works, it is the most revealing of his attitudes toward Native Americans. All of these elements, and many others as well, are present in this meandering and complex book. But, as modern readers have begun to understand, the most compelling aspect of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers may be the way it draws its diverse elements into a richly composite view of human experience.

—H. Daniel Peck

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Adams, Stephen, and Donald Ross, Jr. Revising Mythologies: The Composition of Thoreau’s Major Works. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1988.

Bishop, Jonathan. “The Experience of the Sacred in Thoreau’s Week,” ELH 33 (1966): 66-91.

Brennan, William. “An Index to Quotations in Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” Studies in the American Renaissance 1980: 259-90.

Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.

—. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Burbick, Joan. Thoreau’s Alternative History: Changing Perspectives on Nature, Culture, and Language. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.

Conron, John. “Bright American Rivers: The Luminist Landscapes of Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” American Quarterly 32 (1980): 143-66.

Fink, Steven. Prophet in the Marketplace: Thoreau’s Development as a Professional Writer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

—. “Variations on the Self: Thoreau’s Personae in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” Emerson Society Quarterly 28 (1982): 24-35.

Garber, Frederick. Thoreau’s Fable of Inscribing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Golemba, Henry. Thoreau’s Wild Rhetoric. New York: New York University Press, 1990.

Grusin, Richard.