By Stuart Mitchner

I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.

—Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

Late the other night, I saw an insect moving with difficulty across the damp white surface of the kitchen sink. A closer look revealed that it was a firefly, laboring, going nowhere, disoriented, too weak to blink its light, so I offered it a ride on a brand-new green scouring pad, opened the door to the deck, and watched it blink its light and take flight. Only when it met an answering light and the two were in orbit did I read the news of the day into the moment. And since this rendezvous occurred on the night of July 4, a week after the debacle of the debate and the subsequent media feeding frenzy, a pair of innocent fireflies became Biden and Harris.

What can I say? Such things happen when nature intrudes on an Independence Day column about two heroes of the holiday, Henry David Thoreau, who began his two-year-long stay at Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, and Walt Whitman, who published Leaves of Grass on July 4, 1855.

Washington’s Bells

Flash forward to July 4, 1863 and Whitman is in Washington. It’s the day after the Battle of Gettysburg, and the weather’s “very fine, warm, but from a smart rain last night, fresh enough, and no dust, which is a great relief for this city.” As Walt walks down Pennsylvania Avenue, he sees “a big flaring placard on the bulletin board of a newspaper office” announcing the Union Army’s “Glorious Victory!” Armed with “several bottles of blackberry and cherry syrup, good and strong, but innocent,” he visits the Armory Hospital, telling the soldiers the news and giving them all “a good drink of the syrups with ice water, quite refreshing — prepar’d it all myself, and serv’d it around.” Meanwhile Washington’s bells are ringing “their sun-down peals for Fourth of July,” with “the usual fusilades of boys’ pistols, crackers, and guns.”

Before Walden

On July 4, 1840, two decades before the outbreak of the Civil War and five years before he moved into the cabin at Walden Pond, Thoreau wakes up at 4 a.m. to find a light infantry unit encamped nearby, the band playing “an old Scotch air with bugle and drum and fife” that “seems like the morning hymn of creation.”

On July 4, 1852, two years before the publication of Walden; or Life in the Woods, Thoreau is up at 3 a. m. to “see the lilies open.” He hears “an occasional crowing of cocks in distant barns, as has been their habit for how many thousand years. It was so when I was young, and it will be so when I am old.” In the epigraph under the image of a cabin on Walden’s title page, Thoreau proposes to “brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”

This pre-dawn outing with Thoreau rouses thoughts of Princeton professor Will Howarth, who died last June 6 after spending a lifetime with Thoreau, tracking down his papers, walking his trails, and reading the full journal from which these passages are taken — a journal that “runs longer than two million words (many still unpublished),” and that Howarth says is “the great untold secret of American letters.” Seven years ago Howarth was our “chanticleer in the morning” sounding the wake-up call that “Our times have never needed the shock of Thoreau more,” with a government “eager to kill all measures of natural protection in the name of corporate profit,” and “civil liberties and free speech under attack,” including Thoreau himself, when “the barriers to reading him as a voice of resistance — or reading him at all — are multiplying swiftly.”

A Meeting in Brooklyn

When Thoreau and Whitman met in November 1856, Whitman was living with his mother on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn. According to a March 21, 2018 posting on historynet.com, the only time the two men seriously disagreed was when Whitman announced that his poems “spoke for America” and Thoreau said that he didn’t think much of America or of politics, touching off “a debate about the common man.”

Nevertheless, the two parted as friends, Whitman giving Thoreau a copy of the second edition of Leaves of Grass, which contained 20 new poems. While Thoreau found “two or three” of the new poems disturbingly “sensual” (“It is as if the beasts spoke”), he was impressed with the rest of the book — and its author. “Since I have seen him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egoism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident. He is a great fellow.”

In 1888, 26 years after Thoreau died, Whitman told a friend, “Thoreau belongs to America, to the transcendental, to the protesters. He was a force…. His dying does not seem to have hurt him a bit: every year has added to his fame. One thing about Thoreau keeps him very near to me. I refer to his lawlessness, his dissent, his going his own road.”

Calling D.H. Lawrence

I can’t help it. I tried to keep him out of the column. He has no right to be here. You want lawlessness, dissent, going your own road? Then bring on Thoreau’s kindred spirit from across the pond. Glowworms won’t cut it this election year. We need some Lawrentian fireworks, not fireflies.

“What a funny world that fellow sees!” Lawrence says of Walt Whitman in the last chapter of his mad masterpiece, Studies in Classic American Literature. Although few can equal Lawrence when it comes to mooning about nature, no way is he mooning about luminous insects as he dances merrily and savagely all around and up and down on the greatness of Whitman (“a great moralist” and “a very great poet”), at one point even putting Walt behind the wheel of “an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of a fixed idea, through the darkness of this world. And he saw everything that way. Just as a motorist does in the night.”

“ONE DIRECTION! toots Walt in the car … ONE DIRECTION! whoops America, and sets off also in an automobile.” “ONE IDENTITY! chants democratic En Masse, pelting behind in motor-cars, oblivious of the corpses under the wheels.” Has anyone had more sheer fun with America than the red fox of Nottingham? “God save me,” he says, “I feel like creeping down a rabbit-hole, to get away from all these automobiles rushing down the ONE IDENTITY track to the goal of ALLNESS.”

Down the rabbit-hole indeed, for it was on July 4, 1862, a year before the Battle of Gettysburg, that Lewis Carroll told Alice Liddell the story that became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

And the great thing about being down the rabbit-hole is you can let your fancy free, as Thoreau did in his journal for June 14, 1851, when he watched a firefly crawl “up to the top of a grasshead,” exhibiting “its light,” as “instantly another sailed in to it, showing its light also,” except that Thoreau’s presence “made them extinguish their lights. The latter retreated, and the former crawled slowly down the stem. It appeared to me that the first was a female who thus revealed her place to the male, who was also making known his neighborhood as he hovered about, both showing their lights that they might come together.” Then this firefly flight: “It was like a mistress who had climbed to the turrets of her castle and exhibited there a blazing taper for a signal, while her lover had displayed his light on the plain.”

The last word goes to Nathaniel Hawthorne, born 220 years ago on July 4, 1804: “A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.”