Faith in a Seed

AUTHOR: Thoreau, Henry David

KEYWORDS: animals, land usage, environmentalism, Transcendentalism

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

In Faith in a Seed  Thoreau emphasizes the generative power, interconnectedness, and agency of nature, particularly with respect to plants and plant-animal assemblages. This volume comprises his unfinished manuscript,“The Dispersion of Seeds,” along with a handful of other short pieces. Amassing a remarkable amount of detail about a variety of plants, particularly the dispersion of their seeds, in the Concord area, the aim of the former is “to show how, according to my observation, our forest trees and other vegetables are planted by Nature” (24). Overall, Thoreau is interested in “the agency of the wind, water, and animals. The lighter seeds, as those of pines and maples, are transported chiefly by wind and water; the heavier, as acorns and nuts, by animals” (24). To foreground the agency operative in the generative and distributive powers of nature, Thoreau tends to use language that anthropomorphizes nature and sometimes the inverse, when Thoreau binds human activities to natural processes, as when he likens farmers to squirrels: “While the farmer is digging his potatoes and gathering his corn, he little thinks of this harvest of pine cones which the squirrel is gathering in the neighboring woods still more sedulously than himself” (29). When he notes the perfection with which squirrels get at pine seeds, he draws a parallel between animal instinct and human reason, implying that the latter is an offshoot of the former: “I doubt if you could suggest any improvement. After ages of experiment perhaps, their instinct has settled on the same method that our reason would, finally, if we had to open a pine cone with our teeth; and they were thus accomplished long before our race had discovered that the pine cone contained an almond” (31). Thoreau ends “The Dispersion of Seeds” on the note that “[f]orest wardens should be appointed by the town—overseers of poor husbandmen” (173), suggesting that what needs overseeing is not so much nature as humans interfering with natural processes in detrimental ways, simply because they fail to see how they themselves are but part and parcel of spatially and temporally much, much larger processes.

In “Wild Fruits,” one of the short pieces following “The Dispersion of Seeds,” Thoreau emphasizes the small scale – a scale which humans tend to overlook – at which major natural changes are instigated. Like his Transcendentalist peers, Thoreau singles out education as the key to undoing this oversight. For Thoreau, the fruits of New England “educate us and fit us to live here in New England. Better for us is the wild strawberry than the pine-apple, the wild apple than the orange, the chestnut and pignut than the cocoa-nut and almond, and not on account of their flavor merely, but the part they play in our education” (183). Market fruits basically have no value, only wild fruits do, and their real value lies elsewhere, as he makes clear: “The value of these wild fruits is not in the mere possession or eating of them, but in the sight and enjoyment of them. The very derivation of the word 'fruit' would suggest this. It is from the Latin fructus, meaning 'that which is used or enjoyed.' If it were not so, then going a-berrying and going to market would be nearly synonymous experiences” (180). For Thoreau, they are clearly not, for only the former is an educational experience. Hence his reference to the most obnoxious form of economy, the slave trade, in a remark on market fruits: “It is a grand fact that you cannot make the fairer fruits or parts of fruits matter of commerce, that is, you cannot buy the highest use and enjoyment of them. You cannot buy that pleasure which it yields to him who truly plucks it. You cannot buy a good appetite even. In short, you may buy a servant or slave, but you cannot buy a friend” (182). In other words, humans need to befriend nature, not enslave it. In fact, they need to realize that being inscribed into all kinds of natural processes, they are already part and parcel of a friendly network. To think oneself master rather than friend amounts to being inhuman, in all senses of the word.

Last updated on April 19th, 2024

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