JOHN THE
OBSCURE ™
©
2005
The
Fortean Thoreau
The practical value of science is arguably its “natural
laws,” those formulae that render reality usefully predictable, or at least
comfortably explicable.
The philosophical value of science
is arguably that all those laws are statistical, not absolute, certainties;
that matters are always open to question and revision, and in fact demand such
scrutiny.
In a world of academic tenure and
prestige, these values certainly do not always coexist happily. But in the
broad sweep of things, science has historically and philosophically been driven
by anomalies. In a system that rejects the concept of the supernatural and yet
acknowledges the limits of observation, exceptions prove science’s rules—and sometimes
find them lacking.
It follows that anyone who compiles
anomalies is doing science a huge favor, whether it likes it or not. In this
vein, one of the greatest popular scientists—though he would have bristled at
the term—was the eccentric Charles Fort (1874-1932), a journalist who gathered
an enormous collection of anomalous reports in virtually every field of
science, but especially meteorology and astronomy. Strange lights, rains of
ants and frogs, unidentified flying objects and unidentified stalking
animals—all were grist for Fort.
He presented his findings in wild,
raving books, spinning his own partly tongue-in-cheek philosophies of the
universe and making caustic, insightful potshots at science at the same time.
Fort was a reactionary who overly relied on newspaper reports (even less
reliable then than now). But his books such as “The Book of the Damned”—so
named for the anomalous data “damned” from mainstream science simply because
they don’t fit—constitute some of the earliest modern critique of science (and
especially of the mythos of positivist progress that often comes attached)
while adding immensely to it.
Fort’s more rational modern
successor, and an unsung hero of modern popular science, is William Corliss, a
Samplings from Corliss’ latest “Science Frontiers”
newsletter include the “Plain of Jars” in Laos; supernovas resetting atomic
clocks; a wild bear that reportedly learned to knock on doors so people would
be tricked into letting it indoors; and the unreliability of the gravitational
constant. (I follow Corliss in using “anomalous” to refer to the rare as well
as to the unexplained.) Corliss gave ink to
catastrophists before catastrophism was cool (again);
and I read about the thunderstorm-related luminous phenomena known as jets and
sprites in his books years before they were welcomed into the fold of orthodox
meteorology.
The value and power of Fort’s and Corliss’
works lie in science’s own findings being thrown back at it. But literature is
rich with references to natural anomalies—Emily Brontë,
Poe and Byron are just a few anomaly-heavy authors who spring to mind—that are uncatalogued and too easily forgotten as fiction or
dismissed as tropes. Such allusions bolster and illustrate the drier work of Corliss
and Fort.
A classic overlooked example is an
author who was somewhat of a living anomaly himself, Henry David Thoreau
(1817-62). The author of “Walden” and “Civil Disobedience” is known today
predominantly as a natural philosopher, with the emphasis on “philosopher,” and
even more emphasis on his role as one of the anti-materialist New England
Transcendentalists. Widely overlooked is his Enlightenment-era interest in and
skill at scientific observation—which led to a goldmine of anomalistic reports.
Combing his books for such reports not only adds to anomaly lore, it offers a
sharper understanding of Thoreau.
We may as well start with “Walden,”
which, like all great books, is wildly misunderstood. The misconceptions about
Thoreau’s pondside living experiment and related
social critique are well-addressed by many others. What interests me is the
focus on Thoreau as a Transcendentalist, when “Walden” also shows him to be a
devoted empiricist and sharp skeptic—contradictions that show what depths his mind
held, as well as provoking his fascination with the anomalous.
In the book, Thoreau recounts how he
heard endless rumors that
“While men believe in the infinite
some ponds will be thought to be bottomless,” he concludes.
A truism of Thoreau’s work is that wilderness can always be found
nearby, and scientific anomalies bear the postscript message that mystery and
wonder are right out there with it.
“Shams and delusions are esteemed
for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous,” says Thoreau the skeptic in “Walden.”
“If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be
deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy
tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.”
It’s no wonder anomalies attracted
Thoreau, because they offer exactly that. What could be more fairy-tale than,
say, a winged cat?
“A few years before I lived in the
woods there was what was called a ‘winged cat’ in one of the farm-houses in
Lincoln [Massachusetts] nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Baker’s,”
Thoreau writes in “Walden.” He recounts his failed attempt to see this cat in
1842 and his conversation with its owner, who informed him “that in the winter
the [cat’s] fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming strips ten
or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff,
the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these
appendages dropped off.”
Thoreau didn’t see the cat, but he
took home some kitty wings. “They gave me a pair of her ‘wings,’ which I keep
still. There is no appearance of a membrane about them.” He then bizarrely
speculates the cat could be the hybrid offspring of a flying squirrel.
Thoreau came across another natural
curiosity at
Later in “Walden,” he describes his
experiences with what sound like phenomena known as “
“Once it chanced that I stood in the
very abutment of a rainbow’s arch, which filled the lower stratum of the
atmosphere, tingeing the grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I
looked through colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a
short while, I lived like a dolphin….As I walked on the railroad causeway, I
used to wonder at the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain fancy
myself one of the elect.” He goes on to say the phenomenon “is especially
observed in the morning, but also at other times, and even by moonlight.”
The unusual acoustic properties of
frozen bodies of water drew Thoreau’s attention. He writes that he once hit the
frozen surface of
The odd and anomalous turn up in
other Thoreau books as well. In “
While climbing a hill a quarter-mile
from shore, he recounts, “I was startled by a sudden, loud sound from the sea,
as if a large steamer were letting off steam by the shore, so that I caught my
breath and felt my blood run cold for an instant….There was a low bank at the
entrance of the Hollow, between me and the ocean, and suspecting that I might
have risen into another stratum of air in ascending the hill,—which had wafted to me only the ordinary roar of the sea,—I
immediately descended again, to see if I lost hearing of it; but, without
regard to my ascending or descending, it died away in a minute or two, and yet
there was scarcely any wind all the while.”
Musing on the rut, he suggests it
involves wind-blown water piling up in one area, then crashing ashore just
prior to the wind that drove it arriving. He recounts an anecdote a ship
captain told him about occasionally meeting waves at sea that moved against the
wind, presumably from a similar cause.
Elsewhere in “
In “The Maine Woods,” Thoreau
describes hearing an anomalous echo of the cry of a loon on a lake. The echo
was louder than the original sound—“probably because, the loon being in a
regularly curving bay under the mountain, we were exactly in the focus of many
echoes, the sound being reflected like light from a concave mirror.”
He was also driven into
nature-worshipping ecstasy by his discovery of the common, but striking and
remarkable, phenomenon of phosphorescent wood.
As some of the above examples
indicate, Thoreau collected anecdotes of other people’s anomalous experiences,
too. In “
He also quotes from Francis Buckland’s
“Curiosities of Natural History” (1837), which mentions many supposed anomalies
(such as mermaids and mermen) with a dryly skeptical eye.
In “The Maine Woods,” he mentions
his Native American guide’s knowledge of will-o’-wisp electrical phenomena.
In “Walden,” Thoreau alludes to
reports of rains of flesh and blood—some of the wilder stuff later catalogued
by Fort.
And for the penultimate metaphor in
his grand summation at the end of his greatest book, he relies on yet another
bizarrely anomalous anecdote.
“Every one
has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and
beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree
wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut,
and afterward in Massachusetts,—from an egg deposited in the living tree many
years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which
was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an
urn.”
Thoreau elaborates on the obvious Christian resurrection
theme of this urban legend. Similar tales—most frequently, and even less
believably, about toads somehow surviving entombment within stones cracked open
by miners—were part of the anomaly lore of the day. (It should go without
saying that not all reported anomalies are true.)
Indeed, it must be noted that
Thoreau was by no means unusual in his love of the odd; natural history of the
day was driven by the collection of curiosities, as much for romantic reasons as
for scientific ones.
But Thoreau remains significant for
his devotion to the anomalous, his wealth of first-hand experience with it, and
its obviously profound influence on his natural philosophy—one that saw great
value in wondering why, and even greater value in simply wondering.
Anomalies are key
to his vision—and arguably, to ours, as a scientific generation. They tell us
that what is really strange about the anomalous is our inability to see the
complexities that connect it into the matrix of the natural.
“If we knew all the laws of Nature,
we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to
infer all the particular results at that point,” Thoreau muses in “Walden.”
“Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by
any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential
elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly
confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from
a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws,
which we have not detected, is still more wonderful.”
Or, as Fort put it simply, “One
measures a circle, beginning anywhere.”
Even from the wing of a cat, or the
halo of a shadow.
The Thoreau
editions used and quoted in this column are the Penguin Nature Classics edition
of “