The Naming of Them

I have always been particularly in love with the section of this essay called "The Naming of Them," in which Thoreau invites "the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild- flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveler and the truant boy" to join "us" (author and reader, presumably) in the act of naming the wild apples. On the one hand, he's clearly invoking Genesis, and Adam's naming of plants and animals ("And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name" Genesis 2:19), but he's complicating it in a few ways - first by turning this naming ritual into a christening, which makes the apples human, and second, by granting to non-human entities the ("quintessentially human")  power to name. I won't get into the names themselves, except to note that they are a wonderful blend of irony and sincerity, caught between a parody of science and its rage for nomenclature and an earnest desire to honor the wild apples with right-naming. This opening, though, suggests the reflexivity of the human/apple relationship as traced in the essay, as well as the complexity of Thoreau's view of language.