Henry David Thoreau on theoria and “the highest of arts”
“...to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do”
It is perhaps unsurprising that one of the most eloquent expressions of theoria should appear in a passage that doesn’t contain the word. After all, “a rose by any other name, would smell as sweet.” In the excerpt below from Walden, “What I Lived For,” Thoreau touches the very heart of this theme through the promise offered by the potentiality latent in each of us to transcend our benighted condition together with the injunction that the realization of this potentiality is a task whose perfection depends on the moral initiative of each soul. Through the simultaneous invocation of the subjunctive and imperative moods, Thoreau’s words attain a transformative power to function as a sort of prayer.
To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.