Thoreau, Crystallography, and the Science of the Transparent

Abstract

IN AN 1842 LETTER, SOPHIA HAWTHORNE DESCRIBES AN AFTERNOON DURIing which her husband Nathaniel led Emerson and Thoreau down to a frozen Concord River for some ice-skating: (1) Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring Dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice--very remarkable, very ugly, methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately, and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air. (2) One wonders what possessed Emerson and Thoreau to accompany Hawthorne to the ice. While Hawthorne deports himself with classical decorum (playing the straight man), the formerly dignified Emerson flails against gravity, each instant threatening to thud on the grains, and Thoreau turns rambunctious adolescent, struggling to recover a grace he perhaps never enjoyed. But then we recall: Emerson and Thoreau, despite their skaterly forms, had long been interested ice. Six years before, Emerson while walking over a frozen Concord common had turned transparent eyeball--becoming nothing, to see all. This crystal vision later shimmered The SnowStorm, a poem on the vitality of ice. Likewise, Thoreau had already spent hours recording frozen phenomena: the rime on his morning window, the blue-gray bubbles a cake of Walden ice. Why would Thoreau, hungry for life, be concerned with frozen wastes? One answer: he was aware of a particular science that emerged the late eighteenth century: crystallography, the study of the qualities of crystals, especially their structure and growth. Beginning to understand with unprecedented precision the laws of crystal scientists of the age, such as Emanuel Swedenborg and Rene-Just Hauy, recognized the crystal not only an intrinsically interesting specimen also a special revelation of the secret virtues of matter. Staring into the transparent corridors of these minute prisms--frozen or otherwise these eighteenth-century observers were indeed searching for nothing less than the portal to the monads of the universe and the powers by which these primal patterns combine. Thoreau was interested ice crystals for precisely this reason--the hoar frost on the morning window could constitute a numinous disclosure of the laws of life. Envisioning the currents of life the crystal, Thoreau further embraced the bit of ice as a poetic model--a transparent prism troping unseen light into dazzling spectrums. Accordingly, I shall study Thoreau's representations of ice not only to shed fresh light on his general theories of seeing, nature, and language also to illuminate his particular obsessions Walden: transparency, formation, and extravagance. In 1842, his first published essay, Thoreau wonders why [v]egetation has been made the type of all growth since in crystals the law is more obvious. [W]ould it not be as philosophical as convenient to consider all growth, he continues, but a crystallization more or less rapid? (3) This remarkable suggestion--that ice is the primary form of organic development--could well be only the clever trope of a budding poet. However, when we are reading a writer who spent his days recording facts, we should always first take him literally. No doubt, his own close studies of the homologies between crystals and leaves inspired him to make such an assertion. Moreover, he knew that he was reinforcing with his own eyes what had already been conjectured by several European natural philosophers during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before he became the visionary who would profoundly influence New England transcendentalism, Swedenborg was a metallurgist, chemist, and mining engineer who possibly originated the science of crystallography. (4) Remarkably, the young Swedenborg discovered crystals what he would later find everything after his conversations with angels 1745: the invisible world revealed. …