Strange things happen in Thoreau: sand starts moving like water, stones vibrate with life; extinct species return; pine trees cry; fish become trees; men grow grass out of their brains; men, not gods, walk on water; like animals and with them, men also walk on four legs; they talk to fish and birds; birds migrate back to life after they have been seen dead; humans migrate into birds; birds migrate into other birds; humans migrate into other humans; two persons come to inhabit one body; two bodies come to be inhabited by one person.

How are we to understand such strangeness? We can’t treat it as fiction for, strictly speaking, Thoreau is not a fiction writer. The generic characteristics of all of his writings—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is a memoir, Walden is autobiography, the Journal is a record of perceptions and thoughts, while the natural history essays are structured according to the logic of scientific writing of the day—require that we treat their content not as fiction but as truth, and their utterances not figuratively but declaratively, as testimonies. Yet, his declarations are sometimes so eccentric, they so radically blur the distinction between what is possible and what is not, between miraculous and natural, that one must raise the question of whether to take them seriously.

Reported in newspapers as events observed by reliable witnesses, examples of the miraculous—vibrant and nebulous matter observed in the moment of creating new life, toads raining down from populated clouds—assume the status of the factual. More generally, the articles demonstrate that to an antebellum American the divide between fantastic and real was less distinct that it is to us postmoderns, which imposes the requirement that the faithful historian of ideas respect this blur. More specifically, to Thoreau, who collected them systematically, these reports were perhaps proof of his lifelong belief that far from being something surreal, which could at best function as a metaphor of something real, the fictional or even irrational is part and parcel of the real.

But if the fantastic is so embedded in the common as to constitute it, how is it that we, so many ordinary people, can’t see what Thoreau sees? What have we done to alter the real into what is coherent, explicable, and knowable, expelling the wondrous into an elsewhere that is only imagined?

Thoreau is less an ecologist than a thinker obsessed with the problem of life in a properly ontological sense. By this I mean not only that everything in his world—from stones to humans—is alive, but also that in his philosophy life is afforded the status of a force that precedes and generates all individuations and into which individual forms dissolve. Consequently, death is considered a process of deformation but not of cessation. Differently put, in Thoreau’s world death does not have the power to interrupt life but instead functions as the force of its transformation, enabling us to experience finitude while ushering us into what remains animated.