Fluvial Excursions: Water as Epistemic and Aesthetic Reservoir in Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

1 Navigating A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Henry David Thoreau’s first book can be a tough and difficult read because of its many digressions, e.g. on friendship, religion, world-mythology, or the heroic, that apparently have nothing to do with the trip down river. In these intellectual excursions, Thoreau connects the local Concord and Merrimack rivers to ancient rivers and their mythologies, to planetary water systems, ethics, and universal truths as rivers turn into emblems for the stream of life itself. For readers, it is hard to determine what this text is – an elegy, nature writing, a travelogue, a philosophical treatise, regional history – so that often, they feel like they are all alone at sea.

The text becomes a lot more accessible if you consider its history of production.^[1] It took Thoreau almost 10 years to complete A Week, an account of a 2-week boating and hiking trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire with his older brother John in 1839. John and Henry embarked on their voyage on August 31st in a fifteen-foot boat they had built themselves, which they paddled and sailed both up and down the rivers. After six days, they left the boat at the banks of the Merrimack River, walked and stage-coached to the White Mountains and back, and retrieved their boat for a 2-day return trip to Concord on September 12 (Johnson 1986, xi). After they finished their journey, Thoreau had no intention of writing about it and had kept sparse notes in his notebooks. This all changed when his brother John, to whom Henry was very close, in 1842 suddenly died of lockjaw as the consequence of a rather trivial cut with a razor blade.

When in 1845 Henry David Thoreau finally began transcribing his meager notes of the trip from his 1837 to 1844 journals into what he called the Long Book, he had already moved to Walden Pond (Johnson 1986, 44). It was there that he completed the first draft of A Week in 1847 while working on several other literary projects, taking various trips, and briefly being imprisoned for not paying his poll taxes. The latter experience would result in his text “Resistance to Civil Government,” better known as “Civil Disobedience,” which was published in 1849, the same year as A Week. As Rebecca Solnit has pointed out, Thoreau’s nature writing is inextricably connected to his political writings and cannot be read in isolation (2007). In addition, his nature writing – for example in its critique of private property, of city council representation, of market economy – is also decisively political. For an analysis of the epistemic qualities of water, it is significant that while drafting A Week, Thoreau wrote what would become Walden’s first chapter, a lecture he delivered as “A History of Myself” at the Concord Lyceum in 1847. Thoreau shifted materials back and forth between the two manuscripts so that Walden can be seen as a sequel or companion text to A Week (Johnson 1986, 22; 54). The two books certainly share themes and methods as well as a focus on the lessons that can be learned from water.

Thoreau’s first book was a complete commercial failure and also not popular with critics because it defied the expectations of a travelogue raised by its title. As a contemporary of Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, put it, “we were bid to a river-party – not to be preached at” (qtd. in Conron 1980, 145). With the help of Emerson, Thoreau adamantly searched for publishers for A Week after 1847. He kept working on and revising the manuscript until 1849 when he finally decided to publish it at his own expense. When Walden appeared in 1854, to Thoreau’s utter frustration, only 200 hundred copies of A Week had sold, and he asked his publisher to return the 706 unsold copies to him. Critics doubted that Thoreau was an original talent and saw him as an imitator of Emerson, and readers in Thoreau’s days were as frustrated as readers today for all the lengthy digressions – as McPhee puts it in his introduction to A Week, a wordcount shows that the book is 90 % digression and 10 % river travel narrative (2004, 28). When Thoreau prematurely died in 1862 at the age of only 44, he had worked on A Week for half of his adult life. The bulky material, which accumulated over the years to a text primarily intended to mourn his brother and secondly establish Thoreau as a writer, resembles the sediments a river carries and the flotsam and jetsam it collects in its notches and on its banks.^[2]

A Week derives its very narrative structure, language, and ideas from wet matter. It is the river which makes the diverse materials confluent; as McPhee puts it succinctly, “Thoreau’s structure would be almost pure free association were it not for the river reeling him back in” (2004, 27). In other words, it is the river that has narrative agency in the text and actively shapes its aesthetic means and manner of representation. Thoreau does not want to merely observe, but holistically experience the river and entrust himself to its flow and watery perspectives. As he says in the introductory chapter: “I had often stood on the banks of the Concord […] and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom, and float whither it would bear me” (Thoreau 1983, 12-3). Land-based epistemologies and ontologies gradually give way to thinking through and being on water while syntax and semantics capture the vibrant vitality of river life. Thoreau draws on what the editors of Thinking with Water call “the reservoir of unknowability carried within all waters” and puts himself in a position from which to “challenge land-based preconceptions of fixity” (Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis 2013, 8). He uses buoyancy as an epistemological tool: It is the river’s motion, flow, and perennial rhythms; its universality and atemporality that Thoreau derives lessons from on seeing and being in nature differently.

“Rivers,” however, as McMillan puts it in her introduction to The Meaning of Rivers, “do not cede their meanings easily” (2011, xii). They have “paradoxical qualities” (2011, xii) and are many things at once. This is what makes A Week sometimes perplexing and often rewarding: Thoreau embeds the local rivers, and the lessons he derives from them, in global and universal systems while also introducing us to the rivers’ bio- or rather hydroregional complexities. He studies water’s material qualities but also explores the river with all his senses, by listening to its soundscapes, by floating on it, and by studying it as a metaphor for the currents and interrelations of life.

In the twenty-first century, Thoreau is increasingly perceived as a proto-ecologist for his detailed study of the flora and fauna of his hometown, most notably in his last unfinished project, a phenological calendar of Concord’s surroundings, modelled on Humboldt’s cosmos, in which he noted annually recurring natural phenomena such as the migration of birds or the fruiting and flowering of plants (Nabhan 1993, xiv). The detailed records span more than a decade so that scientists working on biodiversity and climate change rely on his data today.^[3] Due to his early death, Thoreau’s project was to remain unfinished. Apart from a few nature essays, most of the notes remained unpublished until the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century when the time was ripe for Thoreau’s ecological insights (Dean 1993).^[4]

While Thoreau the botanist has received much acclaim in recent years, Thoreau the limnologist has largely been overlooked. This is surprising because Thoreau spent his life by, on, and in rivers and “probably knew more about the hydrology of river systems than anyone else working in the United States at the time” (Sattelmeyer 2021, 37). The most comprehensive account of Thoreau’s extensive hydrological studies to date is geologist Robert Thorson’s The Boatman, published in 2017, who claims that Thoreau “had correctly interpreted many of the key ideas of fluvial geomorphology a half century before the subject was invented” (242).^[5] Unlike his contemporaries, Thoreau saw the river not just as flowing water but as “a volume of matter” (Thoreau 1983, 11) and, according to Thorson, already understood that in carrying sediments, rivers literally create landscapes (2017, 42). Observing fluvial systems made Thoreau aware of the agentive qualities of rivers and of their cyclical interconnectedness.

2 Floating Epistemologies

A Week is introduced by the chapter “Concord River,” which acts like a preface and introduces readers to the book’s main protagonist. Afterwards, the trip is subdivided into seven days; it starts with a Saturday and ends with a Friday. Similar to the structure of Walden, Thoreau collapses a 2-week trip into one archetypal week – a first indication that the book is not intended as a travel narrative but rather uses the river journey in exemplary ways. A Week opens with a passage which represents a paradigm shift in Thoreau’s approach to the river and its surroundings:

The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of New England in 1635, when it received the other kindred name of CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks. (Thoreau 1983, 5)

By mentioning the Nile and the Euphrates, two ancient mythological rivers with rich cultural and literary contexts, and by placing the Concord within this geohydrological time range, Thoreau justifies the subject matter of his book. The Concord has a place in geological history and, as Thoreau continues in a gesture of self-indigenization, it has a history and mythology that reaches back way before settler-colonialism. In all his works, Thoreau shows a keen interest in Native American knowledge – not Native American people – which he wanted to record and save because he regarded it as much closer to nature and indigenous to the land which the settlers only came to later.^[6] He admired Native knowledge and practices in various areas, especially for its ability to determine and make use of indigenous plants and local fruits. Thoreau studied these practices and made them known because, a child of his time, he regarded the decline of Native Americans as inevitable while at the same time their knowledge was indispensable to get to know the land in an indigenous way. As Kucich poignantly puts it, Thoreau’s fascination with indigenous knowledge and land-based cultural practices, in the end, did not lead to a deeper interest in their culture or fate but to a determination to understand the indigenous landscape itself (2021).

The different names for the river pinpoint diametrically opposed perspectives on both nature and culture. While “Grass-ground” focuses on the conditions of the river and captures its morphology and navigability, “Concord” spells out a settler-colonialist heterotopia, the hope for a place of peace and harmony. Ironically, as Thoreau well knew, the Concord would become the site of both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The name Concord, as Thoreau emphasizes at the end of the quote, hinges on a human condition – living in peace – while “Grass-ground river” is bound to natural conditions, the green grass and running water – an ironic jab at a phrase in many treaties between settlers and Natives which dispossessed the latter of their land. The indigenous name, which Thoreau claims for the remainder of the text, acknowledges the qualities of the river without appropriating them to human terms and is based on nature rather than civilization. Thoreau positions himself to the river he is about to embark on, because “[w]ater does not exist in the abstract. […] All water is situated. Moreover, we are all situated in relation to water” (Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis 2013, 8).

In A Week, two different kinds of “story-ing” water (Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis 2013, 9) overlap. Thoreau relates many settler-colonialist pioneering stories (Hannah Dunstan’s captivity tale, the stories of homesteaders and farmers) and embellishes them with excursions and digressions. He also gives a detailed account of how the burgeoning industrialization of New England – the mills and canal boats, and especially the Billerica dam, built to feed a local mill – has had devastating effects on water and farmlands. Besides these stories of civilization, however, he wants to sensually capture the sounds and motions of the river itself and directly learn from nature’s signifying systems:

The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely? (Thoreau 1983, 382)

As a transcendentalist Thoreau believed in the divinity of nature. Natural forms were a direct expression of spiritual facts. In addition, they held a knowledge, wisdom, and power for Thoreau that was not to be found in civilization. By reading nature and its formations not as allegories and metaphors but as immediate expressions of divine nature, to Thoreau they became important counter-narratives and -forces to civil codes and traditions. The universal quality Thoreau ultimately detects in rivers is their ability to embody the essence of wildness, of unruly and unpredictable forces that can invigorate culture as an “Urstoff” of life (Wilson 2000, 98–100).

Even the oldest rivers, Thoreau observes, are replenished by youthful springs (Thoreau 1983, 193); they are perpetually renewed and are connected to all planetary water. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers does not only focus on the water in the rivers and streams but also on dew, mist, fog, and rain, especially in its “Friday” chapter. Although Thoreau mentions the settler-colonialist history of the Concord, this is exactly what he is trying to float away from:

While we sailed fleetly before the wind, with the river gurgling under our stern […] we observed less what was passing on the shore, than the dateless associations and impressions which the season awakened, anticipating in some measure the progress of the year. (Thoreau 1983, 348-9; emphasis added)

More than anything, A Week is a journey towards the realization that civilization alienates mankind from natural rhythms:

It is easier to discover another such a new world as Columbus did, than to go within one fold of this which we appear to know so well; the land is lost sight of, the compass varies, and mankind mutiny; and still history accumulates like rubbish before the portals of nature. (Thoreau 1983, 383; emphasis added)

To Thoreau, settler-colonialist practices and understandings of time litter the landscape and obscure a way of being closer to and in nature. As Luccarelli argues, in A Week Thoreau practices a “desynchronization of time,” a project that runs counter to synchronized understandings of time in the name of progress while “the possibility of cultural rebirth requires temporal desynchronization” (2021, 92-3). In running counter to civil orders, wild nature renews culture.

One thing Thoreau realizes floating down the river is that water has its own temporality which lies outside of civilization so that A Week turns into an “extended meditation on the flux of time and the ever-flowing rivers” (Johnson 1983, xvi). What is truly important in and for life are “not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date” (Thoreau 1983, 219; original emphasis). The river becomes a teacher for a different temporality as the life that is in nature is “outside of time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die” (Thoreau 1983, 8). Realizing this difference between chronological, historical time and nature’s yearly repeated events and cycles should become essential for both Walden and Wild Fruits.

Thoreau firmly believed in the power of the wild, by which he understood everything that eludes civilizing orders and norms and precisely because of this holds a regenerative power that enables cultures to renew themselves. The wild is not the opposite of culture, but an indispensable part of it; it infuses culture with necessary chaos and keeps it alive:

Living in water – meandering down the Merrimack River […] Thoreau turns […] in a polarized kosmos, where order is not superior to turbulence but its complementary opposite, where enduring shapes, rivers and ponds, are created by transient currents […]. (Wilson 2000, 95; original emphasis)

Nature’s alternative order, its ability to create complex ecosystems, is another central insight of A Week. Thoreau keenly observes what happens if civil order is imposed on nature’s turbulences and rivers are treated as mere energy resources by writing about the effects of the Billerica dam. Built to feed the Lowell mills, the Billerica dam and ensuing canal had devastating consequences on farmlands and led to one of the first major water controversies in US history for which Thoreau was commissioned to produce a survey.^[7] Depictions of Billerica in A Week constitute a sharp contrast to the sublime and pastoral forces of nature Thoreau evokes in the rest of the text (Conron 1980) and portray

European settlement […] in terms of invasion, violation, and destruction, as the white man ‘rudely bridged the stream, and drove his team afield into the river meadows, cut the wild grass, and laid bare the homes of beaver, otter, muskrat, and with the whetting of his scythe scared off the deer and bear.’ (Johnson 1995, 49; Thoreau 1983, 52)

As this passage occurs in the “Sunday” chapter, in which Thoreau is most concerned with nature as the locus of religion, mankind’s destruction of ecosystems becomes a sacrilege against divine order.

Yet, Thoreau also looks at the actual ecological consequences of damming rivers and depriving them of their cycles of life and renewal:

Salmon, shad and alewives were formerly abundant here and taken in weirs by the Indians, who taught this method to the whites […] until the dam and afterwards the canal at Billerica, and the factories at Lowell, put an end to their migrations hitherward […]. (Thoreau 1983, 34)

In what one could call an early instance of eco-grief, Thoreau sympathizes with the fishes’ impediment and suffering – “Poor shad! Where is thy redress!”; “Who hears the fishes when they cry?” (1983, 37) – but also realizes that by destroying their habitat, mankind will most of all harm itself because fish and men share one ecosystem. “After a few thousands of years,” he writes in recognition of the river’s deep time, “nature will have levelled the Billerica dam, and the Lowell factories, and the Grass-ground River run clear again, to be explored by new migratory shoals […]” (Thoreau 1983, 34). The alleged edifices of progress will give way to natural order eventually, he predicts, and insinuates that nature can do very well without humans and rivers can find their natural course, but not vice versa. In a gesture of proto-eco-activism, Thoreau even suggests to speed-up the process and take a “crow-bar against that Billerica dam” and level it to the ground to restore natural flow to the ecosystem (1983, 37).

Buoyancy (or floating) as one fundamental quality of water (Mentz 2023, xii) guides A Week as an epistemic principle which runs counter to being grounded, fixed, and controlled. As Thoreau observes in “Thursday”:

All the world reposes in beauty to him who preserves equipoise in his life, and moves serenely on his path without secret violence; as he who sails down a stream, he has only to steer, keeping his bark in the middle, and carry it round the falls. (Thoreau 1983, 317)

Navigating a river successfully becomes a metaphor for an attitude towards life in which

to swim or sail efficiently – one must negotiate between control and insecurity. […] The trick is to move with the water, slightly redirecting its flow – with a rudder, with the breast stroke – to gain a modicum of control over direction and velocity. (Wilson 2000, 106)

Land-based epistemologies, at least those of the settlers, for Thoreau eventually root mankind in lifeless conventions, traditions, and unquestioned norms. An attitude towards life modelled on the unique qualities of water, in contrast, produces “a buoyant ethos – elastic, flexible, fluxional, able to float, to wiggle in the muck” (Wilson 2000, 95). Floating down the river in A Week produces new knowledge by shifting the focus from progressive to desynchronized time, from settler-colonialist perspectives to indigenous knowledges and practices, and from anthropocentrism to ecological systems in which beings interact and interdepend on each other.

The river, as I will explore in the next part, also is an aesthetic reservoir for Thoreau. Buoyancy can produce a shift in how we see and are in the world, but it also “enables art” (Mentz 2023, 138) and Thoreau’s “tropes, like fish, swim” (Wilson 2000, 27; original emphasis).

3 Rippling Aesthetics

Ripplings, both as sound and sight, abound in A Week, which in its imagery, syntax, and semantics imitates and transmits the vitality of the river. Thoreau was a brilliant stylist who never just captured the impressions of a moment but worked through them over and over and over again until he felt he had found the right expression – until language transcended itself and became what it described:

Many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving; ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and now going off with a clatter and a whistling like riggers straight for Labrador, flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings, or else circling round first, with all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to reconnoiter you before they leave these parts; gulls wheeling overhead, muskrats swimming for dear life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm them by that you know of, their labored homes rising here and there like heystacks; and countless mice and moles and winged titmice along the sunny, windy shore, cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up on the beach, their little red skiffs beating about among the alders; such healthy natural tumult as proves the last day is not yet at hand. (Thoreau 1983, 7; emphasis added)

Thoreau’s language is saturated with the bristling vitality of the river’s nature. Brimming with life, the river becomes a material substance with metaphorical potential that, as Opperman puts it, has a “lively power of expression” (2023, 40). “Using water-based imaginaries,” she claims, makes us “more attentive to the meaningfully articulate aquatic habitats and their inhabitants […] recognizing water as a densely storied signifying subject and a site of narrativity” (Oppermann 2023, 40). Thoreau paints a picture of vibrant movement where the elements of wind and water – spray, surf, waves, gale – interact with the animals living on, above, in, and by the water – ducks, gulls, titmice, muskrats, mice, and moles – as well as with the riparian flora – the waving reeds and rushes, the cranberries tossed on the waves. This “healthy natural tumult” is the opposite to civil order; it is characterized by movement, by an essence of wildness. Whoever exposes him or herself to these elements – letting the spray blow in their face – is resuscitated and filled with hope that “the last day is not yet at hand.” The chaos of nature, the endless movement and agitation, the interconnectedness of flora, fauna, and elements is syntactically rendered by putting it all into one breathless run-on sentence.

Thoreau looks at how wet matter tells its own stories and examines the means and manner of representation in those watery tales to create a powerful poetic image. As Bachelard put it in his essay Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, the material imagination of water is a special type of imagination because we are made of and surrounded by water so that there always is an ontological correspondence. Water is a part of us and, as Bachelard continues, can be expressed in “poetic emotions” only if it is experienced through our sensual, not sensory faculties. It is then that water imagery finds a poetic expression which is dense and has depth (Bachelard 1983, 20). For Bachelard, reveries, or daydreams, produce poetic images that augment reality. A Week abounds with such dream-like images which become as real for understanding the river as its detailed lists of species of fishes.

One way to create reveries is sound, which structures both inward and outward journey in A Week. When night falls, the distant sounds of civilization – the barking house dogs and the bells (Thoreau 1983, 41) – subside until there is “no recognition of human life in the night […] only the breathing of the wind” (Thoreau 1983, 40). It is then that the sounds of nature nearby, the gurgling of the river itself, and the stillness of nature attain a dreamlike quality:

we heard at intervals foxes […] we were serenaded by the song of a dreaming sparrow or the throttled cry of an owl; but after each sound which near at hand broke the stillness of the night, each crackling of the twigs, or rustling among the leaves, there was a sudden pause, and deeper and more conscious silence […]. (Thoreau 1983, 40)

In this “conscious silence,” where civil intrusions are absent, the natural elements of wind and water speak for themselves: “Whenever we awoke in the night, still eking out our dreams with half-awakened thoughts,” Thoreau relates at the end of “Thursday,” the wind would flap “the curtains of the tent” and they would hear

the river whirling and sucking, and lapsing downward, kissing the shore as it went, sometimes rippling louder than usual, and again its mighty current making only a slight limpid trickling sound […]. And then the wind would lull and die away, and we like it fell asleep again. (Thoreau 1983, 332)

The river, in A Week, becomes a dense poetic image in the sense of Bachelard as it is a material reality as well as a reverie that deeply flows through both intellect and being. Experiencing the river with all his senses, exposing and immersing himself in wet matter, Thoreau starts thinking like a river: “our thoughts made as sudden bends as the river […] opening new prospects” (Thoreau 1983, 339) – he claims in A Week’s final chapter.

Thoreau not only captures the poetic qualities of the river through sound but through sight:

The afternoon is now far advanced, and a fresh and leisurely wind is blowing over the river, making long reaches of bright ripples. The river has done its stint, and appears not to flow, but lie at its length reflecting the light, and the haze over the woods is like the inaudible panting, or rather the gentle perspiration of resting nature, rising from a myriad of pores into the attenuated atmosphere. (Thoreau 1983, 320; emphasis added)

Thoreau portrays what Conron calls “luminist landscapes” (1980), reminiscent of the paintings of the Hudson River school, evoking sometimes the pastoral, as above, and sometimes the sublime as in passages that capture the river’s vibrancy. The bright ripples in the above quoted passage result from a still river. As Conron points out in recourse to the American art historian Barbara Novak: “The visual corollary of silence […] is stillness. Stillness and silence are the antipodes of the progressive noise and action of civilization” (1980, 166).

Civilization in A Week is the opposite of the resuscitating natural quality of wildness, but culture is not the opposite of nature. On the contrary, nature and culture, to Thoreau, have a reciprocal relationship. In “Thursday” he writes: “In the wildest nature, there is not only the material of the most cultivated life […] but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by man” (Thoreau 1983, 316). Nature has a symbolic system which goes beyond and before language: “There is papyrus by the river-side, and rushes for light, and the goose only flies overhead, ages before the studious are born or letters invented” (Thoreau 1983, 316). Man’s artistic expression and nature’s narratives ideally inspire and revive each other: “Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild […]. A perfect work of man’s art would also be wild or natural in a good sense” (Thoreau 1983, 316). In this spirit of wildness, which always also signifies the divine, in A Week, Thoreau imitates the river’s acoustic, visual, and oneiric qualities.

4 The Reassurance of Rippling Rivers

“Friday,” the last chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River, paints an autumnal atmosphere of partings and endings. It begins as follows:

As we lay awake long before day-break, listening to the rippling of the river and the rustling of the leaves, in suspense whether the wind blew up or down the stream, was favorable or unfavorable to our voyage, we already suspected that there was a change in the weather, from a freshness as of autumn in these sounds. The wind in the woods sounded like an incessant waterfall dashing and roaring amid rocks, and we even felt encouraged by the unusual activity of the elements. He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair. That night was the turning point in the season. We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn; for summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf. (Thoreau 1983, 334; emphasis added)

While the passage speaks of changing tides and seasons as well as of decay and degeneration, the rippling of the river becomes a stronghold of reassurance. There is hope in being surrounded by and immersed in the eternal elements because they always promise a new spring – an idea Thoreau would explore in more detail in Walden. The river becomes emblematic for how humans are interconnected with all living beings and elements and how they can thus partake in nature’s rhythms of renewal, restoration, and resurrection. Commemorating and mourning his beloved brother, who is not once mentioned by name in the text but omnipresent as a “we,” Thoreau wants “to place his brother’s death within the context of nature’s seasonal cycle of death and rebirth” (Johnson 1986, 13). Originally intended to give solace for his brother’s death, A Week, however, gives consolation and reassurance in a much broader sense. Nature becomes a teacher for healing the ills of civilization and for instilling culture with new sap. Her perennial rhythms and agentive powers beyond human control are the reassurance that life will continue as long as the rivers run.