Rather, the prophet speaks of things that will be true in the future because they are true in all time. In 1963, when Martin Luther King, Jr., said that if the “repressed emotions [of African-Americans] are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence,” he was not predicting the race riots of the later 1960s; he was describing the nature of things no matter the decade. Sometimes a prophet’s words do come true, of course, but that may have more to do with whether or not people are paying attention than with any prescience on the prophet’s part.

 

 

The prophetic essay has several distinguishing marks. To begin with, it always has a person in it. The mock-modest demand that Thoreau makes at the beginning of Walden states the case well:


In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained … . [I]t is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life … ; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land.


In the prophetic essay, a person comes forward and addresses us.1 This person is not, however, the self-involved, moody, or obsessed first person who carries on in the journals we keep or the letters we address to estranged lovers. The prophetic first person speaks at the point where the personal touches what is in no way personal. When Dante says, “In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood,” the shift in pronoun lets us know, if we needed the hint, that he is talking both about himself and about every human being. “In Dostoevsky,” says Forster, “the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves; infinity attends them … . Mitya is—all of us. So is Alyosha, so is Smerdyakov.” Similarly, in Walden and in the essays Thoreau implicitly claims he’s writing not about his life but about the life, the life each of us would lead were we communicants in the church of Nature. The prophetic voice may give a “simple and sincere account” of its story, but it does so in a way that makes us feel we are reading the story of the race, not the story of one man or woman.

The second thing about the prophetic voice is that it asks us to imagine being free of the usual bonds of time and space. In regard to time, the rhetoric of prophecy typically invokes daily and seasonal cycles rather than the straight arrow of chronology. “We had a remarkable sunset one day last November,” Thoreau tells us toward the end of “Walking”:


It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and … [w]hen we rejected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, … it was more glorious still.


The conceit is typical: the prophet pushes off with a particular day and a particular year, only to swamp them both in eternity, wiping out large sections of history; one November is all Novembers, each evening all evenings.

The prophetic voice alters space as well as time, though here the technique is slightly different. An unobtrusive description at the beginning of Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa sets a tone for the whole book: “The farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun.” Dinesen has a touch of the prophet, and these phrases should alert us to that fact, for the prophetic voice is spoken from high ground. Nothing in Concord stands at six thousand feet, but in “Walking” we find Thoreau climbing up whenever he can. He climbs a tall white pine and finds a flower his townsmen never saw. He climbs a hill and looks down on civilization in miniature:


The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, … I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field … . I pass from it as from a bean-field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.


Spoken from on high, the prophetic voice strips the lowlands of their detail. Democrat and Whig, Sunday and Monday, Concord and Charleston—distinctions that preoccupy us in the valley are flattened out as if drawn on a commemorative plate. From Thoreau’s hill the woodchuck and the first selectman may as well occupy the same lodgings.

This does not mean, however, that the prophet is above it all. He may not be constrained by the place of his birth, but the high altitudes have their own, subtler constraints. Thoreau always liked to include a little fantasy about the solar system in his work (“the sun is but a morning star”), and “Walking” is no exception, for at one point he imagines himself higher even than that hill: “The outline which would bound my walks,” he says, “would be … one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, … in which my house occupies the place of the sun.” We are so high up now that Earth’s gravity itself has been canceled.