In the Place of Mourning: Questioning the Privations of the Private

Abstract

As constraint is regularly the formative cause of creative action, so we find – perhaps to our confusion, even dismay – that absence and lack is often, paradoxically, the condition for plenitude. Henry David Thoreau stimulates our thinking in this apparent, yet perhaps unintuitive, direction when his years at Walden yield hours of isolation and solitude that are nevertheless full, multifaceted, and coruscating. Among other lessons, Walden teaches how the vastness of time and space, and a self-imposed distance from the values and rhythms of workaday society, do not have to confirm privation, but rather may reveal to us new approaches for neighboring ourselves. Through a series of inquiries into Thoreau’s “morning work,” conducted in awareness of his mourning work, I consider his reflections after leaving the pond – what we call Walden – in community with thoughts by Emerson, Heidegger, and Cavell. In articulating the nature of this morning work, we may discover that the private is not the privation we are often disposed to believe it is.