The Journey Inward
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is the record of Thoreau's journey inward toward an understanding of the universal and absolute. The actual journey described in the book provides a framework for Thoreau's many approaches to higher truth. The theme of inward journey is suggested by the book's structure, through imagery — particularly the image of the river as a stream of thought, by numerous passages throughout focusing on thought, the inner life, and the nature of exploration and discovery, and through reference to specific authors and books. Thoreau intimates the metaphorical nature of his journey at the beginning of A Week, in the chapter "Concord River":
[Rivers] are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents.
Concord is Thoreau's own "port of entry and departure," both literally and spiritually. Throughout the book, he argues for the seeking of broad significance, of underlying principles as opposed to more limited worldly wisdom and particulate knowledge. His repeated praise of Oriental thought is based upon its focus on all-encompassing truth and on contemplation as well, in contrast with the western tendency toward busy, unexamined activity. Thoreau criticizes literature, religion, history, biography, medicine, and science as they exist because none is directed toward broad, transcendent vision. He emphasizes that the course of the journey inward is uncharted and unpredictable. The route is revealed along the way.
Thoreau affirms the reality and importance of the life of the mind in A Week. He writes in "Wednesday":
This world is but canvass to our imaginations. I see men with infinite pains endeavoring to realize to their bodies, what I, with at least equal pains, would realize to my imagination, — its capacities. . . .
The inward journey through nature to higher understanding is serious and demanding. He writes in "Friday":
It is easier to discover another such a new world as Columbus did, than to go within one fold of this which we appear to know so well; the land is lost sight of, the compass varies, and mankind mutiny; and still history accumulates like rubbish before the portals of nature.
He contrasts the disappearance of actual frontiers in his time with the persistence of the unexplored inner regions:
But we found that the frontiers were not this way any longer. This generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us. . . . But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever. . . . The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, further still, between him and it.
Thoreau's ultimate optimism about the possibility of finding meaning through inward exploration is indicated by the two travelers' successful completion of their trip, literal and figurative, in A Week.
