In late August, Thoreau would go a-berrying. Sometimes his journals show just a few lines about whether he went with the Emersons or alone and notes about the weather. His entry for August 28th, age 39, is more substantial. He went alone to gather some cranberries, Vaccinium oxycoccus. Vaccinium oxycoccus is a smaller species than the cranberries commonly harvested in New England, the Vaccinium macrocarpon. Thoreau had found this petite strain growing wild in nearby Gowing’s Swamp, and he had the the bog all to himself because the small size of the patch meant they were not profitable to sell. No one else could muster interest in these berries when the other berries in the region provided more sustenance, both directly as food and indirectly as a commodity. Thus Thoreau found himself alone, knee deep in bog, tasting berries and, as Thoreau does, contemplating life.
He hesitated about making the trip out to the bog, a hesitancy that is at odds with our vision of Thoreau as a constantly solitary, hill-traipsing individual. “I could hardly make up my mind to come this way, it seemed so poor an object to spend the afternoon on.” Out he went anyway, expecting this to be his last opportunity before the frost took the choice away from him. His choice to go is slightly perverse--the fact that a walk through a bog seems invaluable, he thinks, means that it will instead be rewarding. He says it passed his mind that because he had low expectations “it would turn out well, as also the advantage of having some purpose, however small, to be accomplished [...] I have always reaped unexpected and incalculable advantages from carrying out at last, however tardily, any little enterprise which my genius suggested to me long ago as a thing to be done,--some step to be taken, however slight, out of the usual course.”
Repeatedly in this journal entry he insists that this trip to the bog has value, but the effort he puts into convincing himself shows his internal struggle. His delight in the bog is tempered with bitterness. He is bitter about the owner who has dismissed the value of the bog, and the townspeople as a whole for not appreciating it as he does. Then there is bitterness about how all value is reduced to commerce. An editor’s note in my NRYB Classics edition points out a deliberate slight on Hawthrone who was serving as a US Consulate in England at the time: “Better for me, says my genius, to go cranberrying this afternoon for the Vaccinium oxycoccus in Gowing’s Swamp to get but a pocketful and learn its peculiar flavor, aye, and the flavor of Gowing’s Swamp and of life in New England, than to go consul to Liverpool and get I don’t know how many thousand dollars for it, with no such flavor.” He also mentions how one might instead be “setting up your neighbor’s stove, and be paid for it,” another example that seems to be an arrow shot at a known target. Thoreau knows in his heart that going out and tasting a berry has value, but his brain is full of examples of that show that society thinks otherwise, and he has to argue with these examples one by one. He needs to reassure himself that things can have value even if no one recognizes it, and indeed, even more so because no one else recognizes it. “If you would really take a position outside the street and daily life of men,” she says, “you must have business which is not your neighbors’ business, which they cannot understand.”
There is a tautology at the heart of all productivity culture. Productivity culture tries to prove that life has value by cramming it full of activities that have value. We in turn prove those activities have value by allocating them some of our precious time. We use the systems themselves as justification for our lives, and the need to give our lives meaning as justification for the systems. Thoreau worried as much as anyone about if his life had meaning and if his activities had value, but he learned to put his faith in the external world. He trusted that if he were attentive to the world, he would find things of value there. If he chose to open himself up to the world by rebuking the expectations of man, his experiences would be of value if for no other reason than their rareness.
