WALDEN POND AND TRANSCENDENTALISM: THE GEOLOGIC CONNECTION

The role of geology in the formation of New England culture is underappreciated by most scholars of the humanities. New England Transcendentalism, for example, did not emerge from majestic elements of the landscape, but from a random collection of inauspicious kettle ponds within patches of scrubby pine-oak woodlots in Concord, Lincoln, and Sudbury Massachusetts. Why? Because the topography, soils, hydrology, bathymetry, and physical limnology of kettles like Walden Pond purified the water relative to shallower ponds in finer-grained materials, and created optical and acoustic effects that amplified the resonance between land, air, and water. When Henry David Thoreau described Walden as “Earth's eye,” and as “a lower heaven unto itself,” he was referring to a soft-rimmed kettle not to some jagged bedrock lake. And the small size, random geography, isolated occurrence, and mundane character of these kettle ponds created a psychological setting conducive to inward reflection and self-reliance, rather than outward adventure and romance.

Thoreau's mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, intellectually modeled his lake district after that of the English romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth. But geologically, the English Lake district could hardly be more different from that near Concord, being a collection of large, narrow, glacier-gouged bedrock valleys radiating away from a central massif.

NOTE: This abstract is less a presentation of ideas than an invitation to join me in a conversation about the largely hidden connection between geology and American culture.