Samantha- Ice
Ice has a history at Walden Pond. It is a form of industry for the residents surrounding the pond, an element that permeates transience in its embodiment, and a configuration that Thoreau documents in his physical and mental landscape. Far from a singular component of Walden, ice pervades the melt of seasons, time, and the boundary between physical reality and Thoreau’s mental reimaginings of his environment. In this compilation of close readings of ice in Walden.
“Spring” begins with Thoreau’s meticulous accounting of his environment, which entails management of time through ice. He opens the chapter in describing an intrusion of a thermometer in the ice of Walden:
“A thermometer thrust into the middle of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847, stood at 32°, or freezing point; near the shore at 33°; in the middle of Flint’s Pond, the same day, at 321⁄2°; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow water, under ice a foot thick, at 36°. This difference of three and a half degrees between the temperature of the deep water and the shallow in the latter pond, and the fact that a great proportion of it is comparatively shallow, show why it should break up so much sooner than Walden” (289-290).
The passage opens with a human instrument to understand the natural environment. Thoreau is conscious of the date in relation to the temperature. He also documents the ice, and temperature as differences in the depths of the pond. Cartographically, the depths in the pond and the layers of ice present a topography in each pond. This topography extends to Thoreau’s text, where the differences between Flint’s Pond and Walden Pond’s temperatures, depths, and melt on March 16, 1847 are inscribed for readers beyond Thoreau’s time period. As such, the temporal code and topographic code of Thoreau’s measurements convey an intersection as text and physical geography. This temporal code bounds Thoreau’s measurements within his text, yet unbinds them from his singular point of contact.
While Thoreau presents ice as an element of temporal documentation, he traces his ontological viewpoint with a perspective of ice as tracer of organic matter. The beginnings of ice are recorded as leaves, or crystals, that branch into the geosphere of Walden:
“Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils” (296).
The formation of ice is framed as “delicate crystal leaves,” so Thoreau connects crystallization to nature imagery. The simile of water flowing into moulds, where plants “impressed on the watery mirror” portrays the reflectivity of ice as recording bodies, or elements, in the natural landscape. The tree described as “one leaf” shows that these bodies of nature are connected as one element. The rivers as leaves present a description of the earth from the indentation of leaves and ice as a paste, a mash, of material. Thus, the body of ice creates a boundary in the landscape, which demonstrates that the impressions of leaves in ice are temporal markers of the environment. Thoreau’s philosophy of crystallization, then, extends beyond the lattice structure of ice, and inhabits an intertwining between ice and plant life. The interconnections between ice and organic elements also frames how ice intersects with their poetic moments. Ice, described as poetry, conveys ontological value through a lattice structure, or intertwined aspects, of the environment.
Thoreau portrays ice in conjunction with varying states of being, which emphasizes the metamorphosis of crystallization in his text. In “Spring,” he describes the absence of ice in relation to the pond’s intellect:
“I looked out the window, and lo! where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as on a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon” (301).
Thoreau begins with observation, and thus records his encounters with ice. The terms “gray” and “transparent” describe the ice and pond, so the silvery, ashy qualities of ice are placed in conversation with the crystalline pond. The dialogue between the pond and ice is connected to the calm and hope of a summer evening, where the pond reflects the sky. As such, the repetition of reflection is a theme in Thoreau’s account of ice. The complexity of reflection is portrayed through the notion that ice is compared to other states of being, such as water. The body of ice imprints itself also on the natural environment, so it captures its particulate matter within its form. Similarly, the pond holds plant and animal life, where the visibility of intelligence is tangential to the “remote horizon” of its depths. The pond’s depths are literal and figurative, so the ontological position of ice is through varying forms of the same molecular structure. The term “remote” implies distance, and unlikely to occur, whereas the term “horizon” is where the earth meets the sky, or the limits of a person’s perception. Each of these definitions caters to the melt of ice and water, which entails the limits of perception in recording the natural environment. Ice is transitory as ice, and water is a liminal space for Thoreau’s reimagining of ice through the lattice of his poetic crystallization of thought.
Far from an element confined to “Spring,” ice is also present in many other chapters of Walden. Curiously, ice is not present in the chapters “Sounds,” “Brute Neighbors,” “The Bean Field,” “Reading,” Solitude,” “Baker Far,” or “The Village. In this sense, the absence of ice is conspicuous, especially in chapters such as “Solitude,” which would adhere to a normative understanding of isolation and the cold. Rather, Thoreau presents ice at the melt of “Spring,” or as points of contact with the dissolution of boundaries, in Walden. “The Pond in Winter”portrays ice in back between light, air, and time. The color of ice is repeatedly described in Thoreau’s account of its position at Walden:
“Perhaps the blue color of water and ice is due to the light and air they contain, and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation. They told me that they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect” (287).
“The Pond in Winter” depicts ice as the entanglement of light and air. The physical form of water is thus a container for its gaseous form and for photon particles. The “They” in the passage refers to the residents of Thoreau’s locality, so he is self-aware of the significance of listening for referents in parsing out his geographic position. In this sense, the conception of “ice-houses” at Fresh Pond multiplies peoples’ interaction with ice in the text, because there is an expansion beyond Walden Pond. Furthermore, the putridness of a bucket of water is transitory, as the solid form of ice can maintain a sweetness forever. As such, the eternity of pleasantness is framed as the difference between emotions and intellect. At the same time, Thoreau complicates his dichotomy by introducing an image of ice as interlocked with particles of light and air. Thus, affections and intellectual understanding are at once differentiated and interconnected as crystalized aspects of a poet’s thought. It is the crystallization of his thought that entails the complexity of ice as a lattice of multiple representations and understandings.
From “The Pond in Winter” to “Winter Animals,” winter is associated with differing representations of ice. “Winter Animals” introduces ice with sound:
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide” (263-264).
The ice in “Winter Animals” is introduced with sound, and the sound of ice and its physical embodiment breach the boundary between Thoreau’s home and the environment surrounding it. This passage portrays the intimacy between the speaker and the ice in the pond through the phrase “great bed-fellow,” which enables the writer to reimagine his mental configuration of ice as it pervades his physical environment. The term “flatulency” refers to excessive gas, and this excess can also be defined as a bodily function, which troubles the speaker’s sleep with plague-like dreams. From his turbulent sleep, the speaker conveys that he is awoken by the cracking sound of ice and frost, which conveys the poetic tension between physical reality and one’s mental embodiment of their environment. The simile “as if some one had driven a team against my door” portrays this tension as a physical intrusion of ice in the writer’s home, so the boundaries of the speaker’s mental state is articulated through ice in the landscape. Ice is portrayed as a point of contact between the lattice of the speaker’s mental-scape and physical landscape. Thus, the precise measurement of the crack in the earth alludes to the conciseness in recognizing the cracks in one’s internal rendering of their position in their ontological and physical reality.
Bookending the beginning and ending of Walden, ice is introduced in relation to Thoreau’s considerations to an Irish worker. Thoreau explains that providing this Irish worker with money will only entail him to buy more rags to replace his ragged clothes as he toils with ice:
“If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him, and I saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered him, he had so many intra ones” (72).
Thoreau portrays ice as a form of labor in relation to Irish workers. The ragged clothing of the workers is contracted to Thoreau’s “somewhat more fashionable garments,” so the speaker qualifies the quality of his clothing. Furthermore, the notion that the worker would buy rags with a donation conveys the differentiation between Thoreau and the Irish worker. The ice cutting is labor, so clothing entails the conditions for this labor. Thoreau’s labor is thus as a poet, or observer, of the realities of these workers’ livelihoods. The irony of Thoreau’s documentation is in the Irish laborer’s refusal of outer garments for inner ones, because the possibility of charitable intervention is circumvented by their varying subject positions as ice-cutter and poet. At the same time, Thoreau cuts metaphysical isolation in his deliberation of the physical, or material, boundaries to ice in the form of clothing. His philosophical consideration of layers and boundaries underlies the paradox that engaging with others in the environment isolates him as both a recorder of phenomena and as a poet.
Finally, and perhaps surprisingly, the ontological value and physical locality of ice is present in the “Conclusion” of Walden. Thoreau begins his consideration with the temporality of perchance, not fading into obscurity:
“I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score than was found with the Walden ice. Southern customers objected to its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead weeds. The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond” (316).
In the conclusion to Walden, Thoreau makes a surprising critical move and compares the possible reception of his document to the criticisms of “the Walden ice.” The objections of individuals are spatially located, as people from the South critique the ice for its blue color as muddiness, and white ice as purer than Walden’s blue ice. The comparison of colors speaks to a discussion about ontological emplacement, where the white color of Cambridge ice is superior to the blue clarity of Walden ice. Thoreau thus provides a cultural critique of an imagined power hierarchy in his depiction of Southerners’ objections to the ice at Walden. His cultural critique expands to a view of Americans, in which there is the possibility that American intellectuals are “dwarfs,” or offensive and small, in comparison to Elizabethan and ancient historical counterparts. The term “dwarfs” also presents a mythological connotation, where Thoreau repudiates these comparisons by drawing attention to their mythological existence. The purpose of these comparisons creates boundaries from ice, where constructs, such as intellectual grandeur, are also mythologized. The phrase “A living dog is better than a dead weeds” portrays the plurality of weeds as a singular construct. Hence, the “living dog,” a subject with vibrancy in experience and emotions, is better than the compilation of mythological corpses. Thoreau then observes that the myth of purity is a mist, or small cloud of suspended droplets, inhabiting the earth; in this sense, it is the ‘azure beyond,” or a vibrant blue in a depthless cloudless sky, where he presupposes his temporal and spatial position. The maintenance of his subject position is articulated through the physical manifestation and mythological crystallization of ice in Walden. Thoreau sets boundaries and troubles these limitations through his deliberation of non-organic, particulate matter of ice.
Thoreau’s interactions with ice are points of suspending a moment in time, as well as acknowledging the realities of change. Crystallization is a process of organizing components in Thoreau’s mental and physical geography, which solidifies his subject position in his ecosystem. Ice records the lattice of Walden, and intertwining elements to collapse ontological boundaries of possibilities. This breakdown of boundaries demonstrates the gaps and intersections between points of solidification, or crystallization, in Thoreau’s poetic record of ice as ontological and physical apparatus.
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