Map Is Not Territory

"For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well--that is, to read true books in a true spirit--is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object."



"Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory--a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that: if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak." --H. D. Thoreau, Walden, "Reading," Everyman's Library edition, 89-90.

I first encountered these sentences four decades ago; immediately, upon reading them, they became burned into my consciousness (with much else in Walden). When Emerson asked (rhetorically) in Nature "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of theirs?" Thoreau and Whitman stood at the ready to provide the sacred texts.

Thoreau offered to show us not only where the gold may be found but also how to extract it in such a way as to avoid doing violence to the small plot of earth where we have staked our claim. Walden is the philologist's Scripture, guide-book, instruction manual, compass and map. If we lose it, we lose what hope we have in words--as opposed to, say, the Word. For while it is quite possibly true that the only balm and salve that could heal the immortal wound is what Walter Benjamin pointed us towards in "The Task of the Translator"--that "pure language formed in the linguistic flux...which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages"--the Word (that which is meant in all languages) is, unfortunately, the ever-elusive thing-in-itself: the Holy Grail of meaning that, like Augustine's sense of time, defies all wording.

Such is the human, all-too-human, predicament: We apprehend ourselves existing in a world, but that world, in order to be fully articulated, requires a criterion of meaning that stands outside it. The tragedy of our situation lies in the fact that there is no Punctum Archimedis upon which to stand and observe that world. Furthermore, there is no way, as Kant taught us, to penetrate the world of appearances and grasp hold of the thing-in-itself. The result is that we are never able to say exactly what we mean. Language, the one tool we possess designed to express what we mean, is inadequate to the task. Even the most eloquent among us is, ultimately, as tongue-tied as Shakespeare's Cleopatra upon Mark Antony's departure:

Courteous lord, one word.
Sir, you and I must part, but that's not it;
Sir, you and I have loved, but there's not it;
That you know well. Something it is I would--
O, my oblivion is a very Antony,
And I am all forgotten. (1.3.87-91)

The task then, as Thoreau understood, is not to read in order to grasp the ungraspable "essence," the "pure language." The task is not to heal the unhealable wound. The task is "to read well--that is, to read true books in a true spirit." In order to accomplish this task, we must first cultivate that spirit. But what is that "spirit"? Nothing more and nothing less than the "truth" of ourselves--those small, yet, unrepeatable aspects of each individual that distinguish (and, therefore, constitute) him or her as an individual. In coming to terms with this task we must acknowledge as master one who suffered perhaps more than any other over it:



Kierkegaard.