THOREAU'S CONCHOLOGY
Riverdave's Journal
November 2006
“What a place it must be to bring up children!” exclaimed
Henry Thoreau to himself after passing through Prescot Gate in the old
walled city of Quebec in 1850. These words echoed my own thoughts that
I spoke to myself as I walked through the Damascus Gate in the old cIty
of Jerusalem in 1974.
Thoreau stated that the walls of Quebec “carry us back to the
Middle Ages, the siege of Jerusalem and St. Jean d’Acre”, (p.72, see
below*) but there remained one basic difference between his experience
and mine. Thoreau was a single man with no children whereas I was
married and carrying a ten month old baby girl in my arms. Although
Jerusalem was far from being a secure city in 1974, as a foreigner
entering that walled microcosm of habitation, commerce, and
pilgrimage, I felt a sense of comfort and community embrace me. Later
I returned to Jerusalem with my family of three children to live within
those walls for a period of five formative years.
Three years after reading Thoreau’s travelogue, A Yankee in
Canada, I entered St. Louis’s Gate of old Quebec for the first time in
November 2006. I came to try to understand the reasoning behind
Thoreau’s remarkable entry way comment about a place to raise
children. I felt that for a Concord bachelor, naturalist and lover of
wild places to give an old walled city such high praise was quite
extraordinary.
During my extended stay within the walled city of old
Jerusalem and for many years afterwards, I both struggled with and
carefully examined my own reasons for wanting to raise my children
there. Dream analysis was particularly helpful in this endeavor. I came
to the conclusion that a desire to be nurtured by old medieval walls
sprang from a subconscious personal need to heal myself from deeply
embedded psychological birth trauma. The labyrinth of tight
cobblestone streets, arches and tunnels leading the pilgrim to the
vortex of the ancient temple site, which was encircled by yet another
set of inner walls, evoked for me a return to the safety of a mother’s
womb. After reading his narrative A Yankee in Canada, I sensed that
Thoreau may also have been drawn to a medieval walled city by similar
subconscious yearnings. From my study of Thoreau’s text, I have found
five feminine birth metaphors and one masculine metaphor that I believe
reveal his attempt to heal himself from some kind of birth trauma.
In November 2006 I had reservations to stay at Chateau de
Lery, in front of the Parc des Gouverneurs in old Quebec. The
building, which once was a dwelling for government officials in the
nineteenth century when Thoreau made his visit, is now a modest hotel.
From my second story window I commanded a fine view of the park and
beyond the old city walls to the St. Lawrence River.
The setting felt familiar. Dwellings in the old city of
Jerusalem are usually second story flats as the lower floors of
buildings are often reserved for street front businesses. The weather
that day in quebec was cold, rainy and windy, actually not unlike a
winter day in Jerusalem. I bundled up with a jacket and scarf and
headed out for what would be three days of exploring Quebec’s labyrinth
of cobblestone streets and alleys, seeking to confirm what I suspected
to be Thoreau’s six birth metaphors.
#1 - Conch
Thoreau provides a particularly apropos feminine metaphor to
describe the walled city of Quebec. He notes that “Quebec is chiefly
famous for the thickness of its parietal bones. The technical terms of
its conchology may stagger a beginner at first, such as banlieue,
esplanade, glacis, ravelin, cavalier”. (p.69) He likened the old
city’s founding hospitals and convents to “pearls, and the wall the
only mother of pearl for me.” (p.69) By extension, those children
fortunate enough to be “brought up” in such a place might be thought of
as pearIs nourished and mothered by the hermaphroditic shellfish. Although this is the only incidence where Thoreau actually
uses the word “mother” in his narrative, it comes at a central point
in his actuaI description of the old city walls. I therefore see the
conch as the chief and overriding of Thoreau’s five feminine metaphors
and establishes the theme of “conchology” for his entire journey to
Canada.
#2 - Waterfall
A second metaphor that expresses a perinatal concern was
Thoreau’s fascination with the abundance of waterfalls that tumbled
into the St. Lawrence River. Around Quebec City he visited at least
four, the closest and largest one being the Montmorenci Falls just
seven miles east and downstream from the city. He claims that the St.
Lawrence River “must be the most remarkable for its falls of any in the
world.” (p. 55} The breaking of the amniotic waters of birth just
downstream from the city could well have been another subconcious
notion that drove Thoreau to explore the falls so carefully. Waterfalls
were the goal of all his walks outside the old city and he summarized
his experiences with the statement “Falls there are a drug; and we
became quite dissipated in respect to them.”
Thoreau’s description of his descent into the “chasm”
surrounding the falls of St. Ann de Beaupre further downstream leaves
little room for the reader to doubt his feminine focus. After making
his way to the bottom of the falls, looking up he describes “the most
wild and rugged and stupendous chasm”, “a winding gorge”, “a cleft in
this precipice ... perfectly straight up and down from top to bottom”,
“cracked into vast cubical masses of gray rock shining with moisture”,
masses of birch and arborvitae trees “overhung this chasm on the very
verge of the cliff and in the crevices”. (p.51)
#3 - River
“Here we are, in the harbor of Quebec, still three hundred
and sixty miles from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, in a basin two
miles across, where the greatest depth is twenty-eight fathoms, and
though the water is fresh, the tide rises seventeen to twenty-four
feet”. (p.20) My pilgrimage to old Quebec also impressed me with this
geographical layout of the city. Being inland, next to a river that
stretches down to the sea, provides a remarkable third perinatal
metaphor of a birth canal extending from the womb. Its ebbing tides
emulated the cycles of a mother and further filled out Thoreau’s
conchological theme. Thoreau added to his admiration of the riparian
layout stating “The most interesting object in Canada to me was the
River St. Lawrence. (p. 82)
#4 - Wilderness
Thoreau frequently mentions in his travel narrative how there
exists to the north of Quebec and the St. Lawrence an unparalleled and
vast wild area. “We had only to go a quarter of a mile from the road
to the top of the bank to find ourselves on the verge of the
uninhabited, and, for the most part, unexplored wilderness stretching
toward Hudson’s Bay.” (p.39) I find this to be yet a fourth birth
metaphor, confirmed elsewhere in Thoreau’s writings in his essayWalking, where he describes nature as a “vast, savage, howling Mother
of ours” but that “we are so early weaned from her breasts to
society.” The uncharted, untamed and creative energy represented by
the Canadian wilderness extended northwards and seems to appear in this
narrative as the very body and context for the city of old Quebec and
the St. Lawrence River.
#5 - French Vortex
On the train ride up to Quebec, Thoreau’s thoughts quickly
orient the reader to his conchological theme. “The number of French
Canadian gentlemen and ladies among the passengers and the sound of the
French language, advertised us by this time that we were being whirled
towards some foreign vortex.” (p. 8) Although he does not explicitly
mention a need to experience his French roots as a reason for his
journey to Canada, it is hard not to conclude that there is a strong
hint in this passage and when he later stated that Canada “appeared as
old as Normandy itself and realized much that I had heard of Europe”.
(p.53) Normany was the region from which his grandfather immigrated.
The fact that he describes this French connection as a vortex adds yet
a fifth perinatal metaphor possibly revealing his drive to explore the
mystery of his own French origins. In addition, Thoreau aligns the
history of old Quebec with a French heroine. He stated that its walls
“carry us back to the Middle Ages, the siege of Jerusalem and St. Jean
d’Acre,” (p.72), avoiding what one would expect to be a credit to the
Ottoman caliph Sulayman the Magnificent, the builder of the present
walls of old Jerusalem.
#6 - Sapper
After first walking around the outside of Quebec’s walls and
then around their inner side, Thoreau concludes with “I think that I
deserve to be made a member of the Royal Sappers and Miners.” (p. 71)
A sapper was an engineer in the British Army that specialized in
tunneling to undermine an enemy fortification. As he takes upon
himself this personal masculine metaphor of a sapper, Thoreau candidly
reveals his own nature as a tunneler on a psychological level. His
fascination with medieval walls, waterfalls, rivers, wilderness, and
vortex, all of which are in a French context, indeed propels Thoreau
into the ranks of the royal sappers. And like myself, perhaps Thoreau,
by virtue of his methodical exploratory survey of a medieval walled
city and its surroundings, has even made himself a candidate for an
honorary Ch.D. - Doctor of Conchology.
* unless otherwise stated, quotations form Henry D. Thoreau, A Yankee in Canada with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers: Gordon Press NY, NY 1972.
Photo: from travel guide to old City of Quebec
