`Dream of No Heaven But That Which Lies About Me'

Thoreau, an enthusiastic consumer of travel literature, dryly noted, “I have traveled a great deal in Concord.” In fact, he probably traveled farther than most middle-class Americans of his day, visiting Cape Cod, Maine, Niagara Falls, Quebec and Minnesota. Even on his final, desperate journey to the upper Midwest, hoping for relief from the tuberculosis that soon would kill him, Thoreau deemed travel a form of exploration, internal and external, not recreation. On March 11, 1856, six years before his death at age 44, he had written in his journal:

“I fear the dissipation that traveling, going into society, even the best, the enjoyment of intellectual luxuries, imply. If Paris is much in your mind, if it is more and more to you, Concord is less and less, and yet it would be a wretched bargain to accept the proudest Paris in exchange for my native village. At best, Paris could only be a school in which to learn to live here, a stepping-stone to Concord, as school in which to fit for this university. I wish so to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations from the commonest events, every-day phenomena, so that my senses hourly perceive, my daily walk, the conversation of my neighbors, may inspire me, and I may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me.”

Temperamentally, I’m inclined to follow Thoreau’s example. One can’t imagine him in Paris but he would have seen more and seen it more intensely than most visitors to the French capital. That’s how I’ve tried to live for the last four years in Houston and how I intend to live in Seattle, our next stop and a place I’ve never visited.

My wife has accepted a job as a senior writer/editor with MSNBC.com, and will fly to Seattle in less than two weeks. My younger sons and I will remain in Houston at least through the end of the school year, and until we can sell our house. Washington will be the fifth state in which I’ve lived, and the third in less than four years. This seems satisfactory because most of my essential belongings are packed in my skull.

The point of Thoreau’s journal entry above is that we ought to live deliberately, as he wrote elsewhere, regardless of geography. I’ll need a job in Seattle, probably as a writer, and I’m confident I’ll find one. I look forward to exploring the city’s libraries and bookstores, and perhaps I’ll meet some of its readers and writers. I met none in Houston but I met them, nevertheless, thanks to the Internet. In the chapter titled “Civilization” in Society and Solitude (1870), a collection of lectures reworked as essays, Emerson, whose land Thoreau lived on at Walden, writes:

“But when I look over this constellation of cities which animate and illustrate the land, and see how little the government has to do with their daily life, how self-helped and self-directed all families are, -- knots of men in purely natural societies, societies of trade, of kindred blood, of habitual hospitality, house and house, man acting on man by weight of opinion, of longer or better-directed industry…when I see how much each virtuous and gifted person, whom all men consider, lives affectionately with scores of excellent people who are not known far from home, and perhaps with great reason reckons these people his superiors in virtue and in the symmetry and force of their qualities, -- I see what cubic values America has, and in these a better certificate of civilization than great cities or enormous wealth.”

Hugh Kenner, in Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller (1973), quotes portions of Emerson’s passage and glosses them like this:

“Communities, so structured, are metaphysical, not geographical. If I can get to Munich in the time it once took a man on foot to reach the horizon, there is no reason why the people with whom I feel community should not be distributed world-wide…The nuclear neighborhood was natural when place defined community of interest: on the frontier, on the waterfront, in the village where men use one another’s produce. But, `The world,’ Bucky says today, `is my backyard.’”

In other words, “I may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me.”