Stop trying to be a hero. There is a time to fall to pieces, to identify with the confusion of your life as it is, confined absolutely to the present November sunset and your present apartment.

Finally, the prophetic voice lacks humor. Things in the valley may be more confusing than prophecy allows, but they are also funnier. E. M. Forster contrasts prophecy with fantasy, and the novel that is his prime example, Tristram Shandy, reminds us that the comedy of the valley includes digression, coincidence, and muddle. Thoreau has humor to be sure. (I have always wanted to hear the opening of Walden read with a laugh track, especially the bit about how his neighbors torture themselves as if they were penitential Brahmins “measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires.”) But Thoreau’s jokes typically have an upward thrust. We laugh at the mundane so as to move toward the eternal. We’re not talking about Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor here. Thoreau never jokes about sex, or about race relations, or about Christians and Jews. He lacks, in short, the humor of pluralism, of the particular, ambiguous, and tattered world—all those jokes that help us live our inexorable divisions in this body, time, and place.

 

 

Be this as it may, I listen up sharply when I hear the prophetic voice, for it offers something we cannot get from humor, analysis, or party politics. As I said above, there is a sort of redemptive journey in “Walking,” an “excursion” Thoreau would call it, and it has several stages. At the beginning, as in fairy tales that open with a wicked king and a famine in the land, all is not well in Concord. “Every walk is a sort of crusade,” Thoreau says, “to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.” Evil days are upon us. A saunterer’s requisite leisure “comes only by the grace of God,” and few now have such grace. “Some of my townsmen … have described to me … walks which they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods; but I know, very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since.” Thoreau himself sometimes “walk[s] a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit … , [t]he thought of some work” running constantly through his head.

The essay begins, then, reminding us of our “quiet desperation” in the fallen present. Thoreau wakes our dissatisfaction and uses it to lever us out of the present and into the heights, the second stage of this journey. Here, we see the world below with new eyes. The historian of religion Mircea Eliade once suggested that when evil days are upon us, the sacred survives by camouflaging itself within the profane. To recover it, we must develop the eyes—some sort of night vision or hunter’s attentiveness—that can discover the shapes of the sacred despite its camouflage. Prophets speak to us at the intersection of time and eternity, and if we join them there, we are given that vision, that sight. “It is much easier to discover than to see when the cover is off,” says Thoreau, but that is the job at hand. He means, I think, that it is one thing to disclose the world, quite another to see what it means. The prophetic voice is apocalyptic: it doesn’t just uncover the world; it uncovers the eyes. Then, as we walk, we see blossoms that we never saw before, though they were always there.

I have suggested that the prophetic voice is spoken in the extended first person. When we identify with such a speaker, we are led to imagine our lives differently. We have, for a moment, two lives, the one we actually lead and a concurrent imaginary one. The second is not imaginary in the sense of “invented,” however. If the prophet is speaking of things that will be true tomorrow because they are true in all time, then that second life is real even if it isn’t realized.