Thursday, March 8, 2012
Heavenly Apples?
I found the different ways Thoreau described apples as beings to be interesting. First, he personifies them (in a rather creepy way, actually). He says of the apples that in July "the little ones... fall stillborn." Not only is he giving the apples human traits, but he is explaining how their existence is similar the human life span. A couple pages later he says that apples give off a "stream of their evanescent and celestial qualities" (296). So now they are at higher level of beings. I guess they are god-like now? Which I suppose could connect to the Fruit of Knowledge, which Thoreau mentions briefly in the beginning of his essay. Still, I am not sure why he sees apples as being celestial. What makes them above the level of people? Any ideas?
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I think one can understand Thoreau's personification/deification of apples in a number of ways. Sometimes (as in the passage beginning "Every wild apple shrub excites our expectation thus" on p 307), it seems a fairly simple transcendentalist equation: "every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact," as Emerson says, so these apples are here to teach us specific spiritual lessons. On the other had, it is interesting that, as you point out, the apples are often represented as existing on a higher plane than humans. One of the things that interests me most about this essay is the way that Thoreau compares human history to the history of the apple, and shows us the complexity of that relationship. One the one hand, the first line seems to reflect the belief that apples and humans mirror each other -- on the other, they often seem to be at odds, and as you say, the question of which species is "superior" seems an open one. Quite different, again, from Emerson, for whom the human mind is always the locus of meaning and spirit.
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