"seeds of simplicity"
"A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth
again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from
the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots
again."
- From “Return” by Robinson Jeffers
While reading the chapter of Walden
entitled “The Bean-Field” my memories of summer days long ago that I spent in
southern Wisconsin interrupted my reading. My personal experience
with the slight cornucopia that our backyard garden produced came to
mind. Specifically, it was the image of sitting in the back porch of our home with my
grandmother that appeared to me; a pail of just-picked string beans ripe from the garden
between us as we snapped the ends off those beans. They would soon
be part of dinner along with the leaf lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini and more from the garden.
Fresh light fare that was our delight on a summer evening as the day began to cool. This
is not a scene that I had thought of for many years but the image is
in my mind as clear as if it happened last week – yet last week, and again yesterday, and today I was reading the thoughts of Thoreau
about his bean-field and their meaning in his life. “I came to
love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They
attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.” (p
155)
I was in the pre-Antaeus stage of my life as I snapped beans
with my grandmother, but the memories of field, family, and community
from those days are part of my inner being to this day.
Thoreau's bean-field and other crops
were of more import as he describes them becoming “the connecting
link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are
civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous,
so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field.”
(p 156)
Again, living where I did when I was too young to appreciate
such things our flourishing vegetable garden, situated as it was in
our backyard, that was the last vestige of civilization (little though we
had in our small town) before the lines of trees and acres upon acres
of country fields, sometimes ripe with corn, sometimes not.
Thoreau was determined to “know”
his beans, I must confess I shared neither his desire nor his
determination regarding the beans of my youth, and in knowing his
beans Thoreau celebrates them as he does so much of his life at
Walden Pond. Beyond the “Pythagorean” experience of cultivating
and selling his surplus beans Thoreau expounds on the further,
deeper, more lasting experience that he gained:
“I said to myself, I will not plant
beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds,
if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith,
innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil,
even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has
not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to myself ; but
now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am
obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if
indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were
wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up.
Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or
timid." (pp 163-64)
"This rain which is now watering my beans and keeping me in the house waters me too. I needed it as much. And what if most are not hoed! Those who send the rain, whom I chiefly respect, will pardon me." (Journal, July 6, 1845)
The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. by Tim Hunt. Stanford University Press, 2001
Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Princeton University Press, 2004 (1971)
The Journal, 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau, ed. by Damion Searls. New York Review Books. 2009
The Journal, 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau, ed. by Damion Searls. New York Review Books. 2009
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