"Incessant Tragedies": A Reading of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Abstract

There are studies of Henry Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers which begin to do justice to its structure, style, and import. Even the most astute and sympathetic critics1 have not, however, accounted, I think, for the power, the impression of the book, perhaps because they are generally preoccupied with its merits as a transcendental document. A Week is Thoreau's impressive attempt to confront the incessant tragedies (236)2 which he perceives and in which he participates; through his perceptions and participation, he fulfills his fate. In Walden, Thoreau works his way beyond fate and tragedy, but in his first book he is concerned with working his way into their phenomenal presence in nature, on the road, in history, in art, and in his personal experience. Of course A Week introduces us to the vitality and happiness of nature, to such facts as would lead to the conclusion Thoreau drew in Natural History of Massachusetts: Surely joy is the condition of life.3 Yet this conclusion is not without its ambiguity, if we consider the condition of joy. A rich sentence from the opening chapter of A Week, describing the scene at Bound Rock on the Sudbury River, engages us in such a consideration: