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"To your health, Uncle Nat," Tom said, raising his glass.
"To yours, Tom," I answered. "And to 'Imaginary Edens: The Life of the
Mind in Pre–Civil War America.' "
"A pretentious title, I'm sorry to say. But I couldn't think of
anything better."
"Pretentious is good. It makes the professors sit up and take
notice. You got an A plus, didn't you?"
Modest as always, Tom made a sweeping gesture with his hand, as
if to discount the importance of the grade. I continued, "Partly on Poe, you
say. And partly on what else?"
"Thoreau."
"Poe and Thoreau."
"Edgar Allan Poe and Henry David Thoreau. An unfortunate rhyme,
don't you think? All those o's filling up the mouth. I keep thinking of someone
shocked into a state of eternal surprise. Oh! Oh no! Oh Poe! Oh Thoreau!"
"A minor inconvenience, Tom. But woe to the man who reads Poe
and forgets Thoreau. Not so?"
Tom smiled broadly, then raised his glass again. "To your
health, Uncle Nat."
"And to yours, Dr. Thumb," I said. We each took another sip of
the Bordeaux. As I lowered my glass to the table, I asked him to outline his
argument for me.
"It's about nonexistent worlds," my nephew said. "A study of the
inner refuge, a map of the place a man goes to when life in the real world is no
longer possible."
"The mind."
"I've never read those pieces. I don't think I've even heard of them."
"What they give is a description of the ideal room, the ideal
house, and the ideal landscape. After that, I jump to Thoreau and examine the
room, the house, and the landscape as presented in Walden."
"What we call a comparative study."
"No one ever talks about Poe and Thoreau in the same breath.
They stand at opposite ends of American thought. But that's the beauty of it. A
drunk from the South—reactionary in his politics, aristocratic in his bearing,
spectral in his imagination. And a teetotaler from the North—radical in his
views, puritanical in his behavior, clear-sighted in his work. Poe was artifice
and the gloom of midnight chambers. Thoreau was simplicity and the radiance of
the outdoors. In spite of their differences, they were born just eight years
apart, which made them almost exact contemporaries. And they both died young—at
forty and forty-five. Together, they barely managed to live the life of a single
old man, and neither one left behind any children. In all probability, Thoreau
went to his grave a virgin. Poe married his teenage cousin, but whether that
marriage was consummated before Virginia Clemm's death is still open to
question. Call them parallels, call them coincidences, but these external facts
are less important than the inner truth of each man's life. In their own wildly
idiosyncratic ways, each took it upon himself to reinvent America. In his
reviews and critical articles, Poe battled for a new kind of native literature,
an American literature free of English and European influences. Thoreau's work
represents an unending assault on the status quo, a battle to find a new way to
live here. Both men believed in America, and both men believed that America had
gone to hell, that it was being crushed to death by an ever-growing mountain of
machines and money. How was a man to think in the midst of all that clamor? They
both wanted out. Thoreau removed himself to the outskirts of Concord, pretending
to exile himself in the woods—for no other reason than to prove that it could be
done. As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he
could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end?
To read books, to write books, to think. To be free to write a book like Walden.
Poe, on the other hand, withdrew into a dream of perfection. Take a look at 'The
Philosophy of Furniture,' and you'll discover that his imaginary room was
designed for exactly the same purpose. As a place to read, write, and think.
It's a vault of contemplation, a noiseless sanctuary where the soul can at last
find a measure of peace. Impossibly utopian? Yes. But also a sensible
alternative to the conditions of the time. For the fact was, America had indeed
gone to hell. The country was split in two, and we all know what happened just a
decade later. Four years of death and destruction. A human bloodbath generated
by the very machines that were supposed to make us all happy and rich."
From The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster. Copyright Paul Auster 2005. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Henry Holt.
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