And yet the sun’s remains. Solar gravity may be thinner or more delicate, but it still exerts its pull. “There is a subtle magnetism in Nature,” Thoreau says, and we cannot feel it until we get up high. There we drop the accidents of time and place and feel only the constraints of what it is to be human. From high up, everything seems less personal and therefore less of a burden. To achieve the voice he wants, Thoreau ignores or erases his own particular sufferings. The sentence “Surely joy is the condition of life” was written three months after Thoreau’s brother, John, had died of tetanus, and that death had thrown Thoreau into a depression, during which he suffered a full hysterical psychosomatic imitation of the symptoms of tetanus. No “sincere account” with details such as these is ever reported in the work, however; Thoreau pitches his voice above it. He had his familial losses and his disappointments in love, as we all do, but the house he offers in the work is a dwelling for those who wish to live deliberately, and serves to focus cometary orbits.

 

 

Extended thus in space and time, the prophetic voice speaks in declarative sentences. It does not debate or analyze. It does not say “several options face us” or “studies must be done.” The prophetic voice dwells in the verb “to be,” from which it draws the simple syntax of belief. “This is the case,” it declares, or “I am I,” or “I am the Way.” Thoreau’s sentences are long and shapely, but they are grounded in such simplicity. “Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.” “Every walk is a sort of crusade.” “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.”

In the prophetic essay, declarations of belief appear in the foreground, and this alone makes it different from most essays we now read in magazines. The television show Dragnet used to feature a cop named Joe Friday, whose interrogations were punctuated with the phrase “Just the facts, ma’am; just the facts.” Joe Friday is the ghostwriter of most of the essays written in my lifetime. The prophetic essay would never make it through the fact-checking departments of our finer magazines. “In Wildness is the preservation of the World”: There is no way to check that. It certainly does not follow from evidence the way conclusions in an analytic essay do. And yet that does not mean it is not true. Students are often disappointed to discover that when he lived at Walden Pond, Thoreau would go into town to eat meals with his family or the Emersons. It’s a fact: Thoreau was not a hermit. But the facts of the case are not the spirit of the case, and sometimes the spirit is primary. Thoreau did not need pure isolation to describe the solitude of our lives.

 

 

The prophet does not stoop to argue or to concede belief to the so-called facts, and these refusals bring us to the dangers, or at least the limitations, of this voice. All the marks of prophecy that I have touched on so far—the extended first person, the lifting of the particular into the eternal, the declarations of simple belief—imply that the divisions, confusions, and ambiguities marking our lives are illusory. Under the spell of the prophetic voice, we are led to believe that there is a simple unity toward which each of us might travel. But there are times we cannot or should not make the move toward unity, either in the self or in society.

To begin with the social example: to the degree that the prophetic voice flattens out diversity, it is at odds with pluralist politics, for it has no model of contention. Or, to say this another way, it has its politics, but they are not presented as such. “Walking” is a political essay (most patently in the way it endorses the westward expansion of the American empire), but Thoreau claims that is not so (the woodland dwellers he eulogizes “are of no politics”). And he seals his claim with a self-protecting rhetoric, saying that he is describing nature, not culture (thus Columbus discovered America with an instinct “akin to the migratory instinct in birds”), asserting that the territory under review is sacred (“the backwoodsman” in America is better situated than “Adam in paradise”), and subordinating all empirical evidence to the insights of sympathy and sempiternal memory. In these and other ways the prophetic voice puts the opposition beyond the pale of speech, or, should oppositional voices arise, it makes it seem as if they were opposed to nature, the sacred, and the wisdom of the ages.

To recast all this in terms of the self: the prophetic voice has little to say about those parts of our lives that are messy or prone to depression. At home on the mountaintop, it is silent about those valleys that are, by definition, “long depressions.” A Thoreauvian prophetic essay leads us on a redemptive journey—about which I shall say more below—but there is a redemption of the valley as well, one that comes from abandoning all hope of getting it together. If you need to come apart, you do not need to listen to the prophetic voice.