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T.S. McMillin

Document Type

Article

Abstract

In this hybrid essay, composed of literary theory, cultural history, and fieldwork, T.S. McMillin attempts to connect the humanities to other disciplines and to connect scholarly work to the land. In the first part of the essay, he briefly develops a theory of palindromes and palindromic reflection. Palindromes connect thinking to movement and to reflection, and in turn serve as a model for experiencing texts or terrain. Occurring in music, literature, film and video art, mathematics, painting, even genetic code, palindromes underscore the complexity of the nature of things and the necessarily complex thinking that understanding the nature of things requires. In the next section, McMillin tests the palindromic theory with his own experience traveling in the Netherlands. Next, he applies the theory to a fundamental text in American literature, Henry Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, considering some of the ways in which rivers and ideas of nature connect with writing and ideas of culture. The result is a new definition of Transcendence, one that owes as much to Thoreau as to Jacques Derrida. In The Post Card, the latter wrote that "It is bad, reader, no longer to like retracing one's steps"; palindromes, McMillin proposes, can assist us in a transcendental re-tracing of our interpretive encounters. The nature of texts and the nature of "nature" require diverse and versatile interpretation; interpretation requires not only depth and concentration but also imaginative thinking, broad-mindedness, and engaged connection-making. Palindromes, given their complex simplicity, can shake things up, turning the present inside-out and enabling us to retrace our steps. Because of this potential, Thoreau uses a structural palindrome in his book to deepen our riparian relations. Describing a journey in which he goes out and comes back by the same fluvial course, Thoreau's palindrome provides a different view of historical events and everyday occurrences, of place and perspective, of reading and rivers. Though streams usually flow in one general direction (physically down, from a higher elevation to a lower, and by metaphorical extension, forth, from the past to the future), Thoreau's Week reminds us that we can reverse our experience of flow by virtue of our own ways of moving and knowing. By taking us upstream as well as down, Thoreau draws attention to rivers' potential for improving our sense of place and time.

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