Hoeing Beans

America and apocalypse in Thoreau's Walden

“What was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not.” Thoreau, Walden 

I am writing a long form essay on gardens: why we build them, why we tend them, and what they say about us as human beings. Currently, the essay sprawls. I’m going in lots of directions that don’t add up to a single, well defined itinerary. But for now, I’m ok with that. My hope is that this piece will serve as the first chapter in a book I am writing about nature and agriculture. Sometimes writing feels like solving a jigsaw puzzle. You need to have all the bits out on the table so you can see where each piece should go. Taking my time with a piece has its own advantages. It’s given me an excuse to explore different pockets of writing about gardening, land use, subsistence, and sustainability that I didn’t know much about beforehand. It’s been fun.

Today I am writing about a famous garden, or a would-be garden. In the surprisingly vast literature on gardens in England and the Americas, one of the most frequently discussed passages comes from Thoreau’s Walden. It’s a short chapter, ten or so pages long, that describes the two-and-a-half acres that Thoreau planted in beans near his home at Walden Pond. In the course of planting his field, Thoreau discovers that if he isn’t careful, the simple chore of tending vegetables can acquire a surprisingly violent aspect. Protecting his beans means annihilating things like weeds and woodchucks. At various points in planting, Thoreau wonders about the propriety of planting domesticated vegetables instead of letting uncultivated nature take over: “but what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient herb garden?”¹  

The dilemma Thoreau finds himself in is something like this: Thoreau plants a garden full of beans. To his delight, he finds that the garden keeps him busy with work that is meaningful; it plants his feet firmly in the soil (“like Anteus” “they attached me to the earth”).² But it turns out that keeping a garden is more like fighting a war than gently persuading the soil to “say beans instead of weeds.”³ It’s exhausting to fight all the time. By the time the woodchucks arrive on the scene, he doesn’t have much heart left.  By what right should he take up arms? More than once he invokes the Iliad in recounting his struggles. Here is a row of weeds gone to seed, falling helplessly before his scythe: “Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.”⁴ 

For some, Thoreau’s self-satire provokes a question: what is a garden, after all, compared to the eternal cycles of nature? Why would anyone want to exert dominion on the land, especially when the land is perfectly capable of taking care of itself? One of the most common ways of approaching Walden begins by taking these questions at face value. It suggests that Thoreau is in the business of articulating a new myth of the self (and therefore the nation) that is founded not on the conquest of a western frontier but on the idea of a “domesticated sublime.”⁵ The quiet certainties of nature lie just beyond the border of a well-kept garden. Wildness is everywhere; you need not travel with Wordsworth to the Alps (or with Thoreau to Mt. Katahdin) to find it. “We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction…In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden.”⁶ Why should we not celebrate the store of seeds the birds find in the field–perhaps even more than our own store of crops? The “true husbandman,” the true farmer, will relinquish “all claim to the produce to his fields,” “sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.”⁷ 

This is a path well trodden in the (equally vast) reception on Walden. It tends to see the man’s experiment in the woods as a search for a place outside of time and history, an anachoresis or flight from society that blurs the line between self and world. Consider one recent example: Douglas Christie’s reading of Walden in his The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (OUP, 2012).⁸ Christie begins by pointing out how Thoreau spends his first summer “not reading books but hoeing beans.” In doing so, Christie writes, Thoreau chose to “[give] himself over to the place without prejudice, without expectation. To drift, to float, to feel.” (209). The point of the experiment is “sustained attention” to the language of the natural world—in the first case, anyway, through laboring in the field. When Thoreau is pulled in to the work, “self and world can no longer be easily distinguished from one another; there is a feeling of immersion, of disappearing into a world of boundless immensity” (235). The garden is a means to achieving this feat of self-transcendence. Walden thus becomes the record of “an ever-more encompassing exchange” between the mind and nature (235). This, Christie argues, is the promise of the contemplative-ecological approach to nature: the crumbling away of the boundaries between self, society, and creation that have reinforced predatory and extractive industry.

It’s not my intention to overturn this way of reading Walden, even though I think it flattens out the multiple voices of the text. In the end, this may be a matter of register and readerly sensibility. I find that Walden can be a bitterly ironic book; not everyone does. Also, it’s not yet obvious to me what we lose when we cannot hear the voice of Thoreau’s own skepticism. As Stanley Cavell has shown, to try and hold Walden’s multitude of voices together is a Herculean labor. However, as I read and re-read Thoreau’s book, I find myself getting stuck on passages that seem to jostle and push against a romantic or contemplative approach to the text. Another way to put this is to say that there are passages in the book that strive against each other, or seek to silence or traduce the text’s other voices. In this essay, I want to focus on one such passage in particular that (I am surprised to say) echoes, or rhymes, with my own concerns about labor, place, and belonging. 

The place I want to begin is with Thoreau’s first scratchings in the soil of his garden when he decides to plant beans. One of the first things that Thoreau tells us is that this land has lain fallow for many generations. No one has been there or used it for decades. Surprisingly, when he gets to work, Thoreau tells us that the first thing his hoe turns up is evidence of “an extinct nation [that] had anciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very crop.”⁹ Turning over soil turns up the remnants of previous civilizations. Even more surprising, Thoreau tells us that “to some extent” these previous inhabitants “exhausted” the soil long before Thoreau came to it. Even so, Thoreau also tells us (twice, actually) that he has chosen not to improve the soil with manuring. Instead, he uses the soil as it is to dress his beans. Passersby are incredulous: “the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin to inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, and recommends a little cheap dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster.”¹⁰ By means of such unsolicited advice Thoreau learns where his garden stands in the agricultural world, which is to say that he doesn’t really have anywhere to stand at all. His field is neither “improved” and productive, nor fully wild and “waste”: “mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field.”¹¹ 

I will come back to the idea of the half-cultivated, half-civilized field. But as Thoreau continues to work the ground, the evidence he turns up becomes overwhelming. Put plainly, the lives of indigenous people–the true “native[s] of the soil”--are lost to Thoreau’s time, or the time of Thoreau’s people, which is to say white people, who arrived several hundred years ago prior to Thoreau and cleared the land of its inhabitants for “this my [that is, Thoreau’s] native town”:¹²

As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. They lay mingled with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been burned by Indian fires, and some by the sun, and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators of the soil. When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop.¹³

Such is the “inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers.”¹⁴ It may take some time to catch the mounting irony, but soon enough the “music” of Thoreau’s fretting hoe mingles with the guns and “martial music” the town nearby fires up on the “gala days.”  I’m not sure what exactly these “gala days” are, but they are evidently an entertainment program meant to fire up patriotism for the American military. It would appear that Thoreau has planted his beans during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). In the course of this war, the United States seized some 529,000 square miles of territory from Mexico–in addition of course to the state of Texas, whose annexation by the U.S. prompted the War in the first place. In time, Thoreau’s chivalric defense of bean plants–in concurrent parallel to the nation’s grasping after the western frontier–spills over into what are probably the ugliest lines in Walden: 

When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all the village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with good relish,--for why should we always stand for trifles?¹⁵

Military bombast transforms Thoreau’s quaint hometown into a “vast bellows” that swells and contracts on the horizon. The buildings of Concord alternately expand and then collapse in a phantasmagoria of destruction. If this isn’t the end of the world, then it is certainly an image of it. “I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease on the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon […],” Thoreau writes.¹⁶ What is this “itching,” this disease of the nation? Is it its patriotism and the military? Or is the enslavement of black people? In any case, to adapt a phrase of Thomas Carlisle’s, Thoreau’s apocalyptic vision figures America as a nation that preys on itself, that feeds in equal measure upon its people and its own land. I take this to be in part the meaning of Thoreau’s cannibalistic desire to “spit a Mexican with good relish.” 

I noted earlier that the music of Thoreau’s garden tool mingles with the military music of the town gala. This seems to be a way of asking: how deeply is Thoreau’s labor in the soil bound up with the conquests and genocides of Jacksonian America? What can his retreat to a quiet piece of land mean if the material basis of this retreat, the human need for food, turns up “the ashes of unchronicled nations”? Thoreau’s own “native town” is built upon these ruins. So is his bean field; so is his home at Walden Pond. Recall the “hard-featured farmer” who implores Thoreau to dress his beans with ashes if he has no access to manure. With a little digging, Thoreau finds that his gardens are full of ashes. In fact, the soils are already “exhausted” with ash. And so he is left to dress the soil with itself. It yields a crop that grants him an extremely modest “pecuniary profit” of eight dollars and seventy-one cents.¹⁷

It’s perhaps easy enough to see with Thoreau’s eyes that American prosperity cannot be separated from its military conquests and the genocide of indigenous peoples. The gluttony of the nation will always demand more land, more settlement, more improvement, more surplus, more capital. But where exactly, Thoreau insists, does his own improvident labor in the field fit into the unfolding story of America? (Where, you could add, does any of our labor?) The answer is unclear: “what was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not.” Elsewhere, as we’ve already seen, the same: “mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field.” What he does know is that the yield of one’s labor cannot be pure profit; the object cannot be “to have large farms and large crops merely.”¹⁸ To live like this is to commit yourself to a nihilism of potentially apocalyptic proportions; it is to succumb to the disease that erupts on the horizon. I find Thoreau’s words haunting: “by avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.”¹⁹

There are times when it seems fair to ask whether there is any other realistic option. After all, Thoreau’s refusal to improve his land and increase its economic value yields a modest crop that the man doesn’t even like, that he’d rather trade for rice or for something (anything?) else.²⁰ Even so, it seems to me that Thoreau does retain something else at the end of his labor: a “field” “half-cultivated,” “though not in a bad sense.” Perhaps we can read the half cultivated field as metonym for a household half cultivated or half-civilized, in other words, a life half-way in the economy (or half-way complicit in the economy, if you prefer) but also half-way out, which is to say that it is a life that belongs to him and to no one else, a life dearly paid for but nonetheless inalienable. Call it an agrarian life, or a life of subsistence, if you like. In any case, it is neither fully immersed in the economies of the world nor totally removed from them. Somehow, it is a life that cannot be lost even after Thoreau abandons Walden Pond. “At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again,” Thoreau muses, years after he has left.²¹

In her book, Men in Dark Times, the philosopher Hannah Arendt argues that retreat from the public sphere can be politically meaningful so long as you are clear on what exactly you are retreating from. As Walden shows, however, the problem with retreat is that it must continually seek the forms of violence (social, political, ecological) that it is retreating from. How else can it avoid the plague advancing on the horizon? Another way to put this is to say that it is impossible to remove yourself completely from what you are getting away from, although we can all understand the appeal of doing so. What Walden shows is that the furthest we may go is to a garden half tilled, half broken, a field halfway in and halfway out. The consolation of such a life is that in constantly seeking new boundaries between our homes, our work, and what is truly ours, we may yet find new possibilities for belonging. 

1. Walden and Civil Disobedience, (Penguin, 2017), 125.

2. 125.

3. 126.

4. 130.

5. I borrow the phrase from William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69-90.

6. Walden, 134.

7. 134.

8. For Christie’s reflections on Walden, see Blue Sapphire of the Mind, 190-1; 193-9; 209-213; 235-9; 341-7. Also relevant is Allan Hodder’s Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

9. 126.

10. 127.

11. 127.

12. 127, 125.

13. 128.

14. 129.

15. 129-30.

16

129. For more on Thoreau’s apocalypticism, see the lectures on Walden by Stanley Cavell in Senses of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

17. 132.

18. 133.

19. 134.

20. 130.

21. 3.