Prey
Presently he heard a note which he called that of the night-warbler, a bird he had never identified, had been in search of twelve years, which always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving down into a tree or bush, and which it was vain to seek; the only bird that sings indifferently by night and by day. I told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show him. He said, “What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoreau”, in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August 1862, pp. 239–249.
The final reported remark by Thoreau appears in The Recognitions (p. 265), and was later used by Gaddis as the epigraph for A Frolic of His Own (there’s an essay on this lineage—J. M. Tyree, “Henry Thoreau, William Gaddis, and the Buried History of an Epigraph”, New England Review, Vol. 25, No. 4, Fall 2004, pp. 148-162). It isn’t hard to see why Gaddis was obsessed with this remark, which itself seems to immediately make you its prey.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:47 am
I love it!
Makes me think about the way video games appear to offer you some kind of agency but at the same time configure you into a preferred performance, in some cases literally making you their prey. In another respect this is a simplification of the negotiation that takes place between player and game, which I’m using in my dissertation with reference to Michel de Certeau’s concept of tactical appropriation of space – in the sense that the player uses tactics to undermine the strategy of the game in order to make the play session their own.
Also interesting because I cited RWE in one of my earliest video game essays, via Marshall McLuhan’s work on tools as extension of human capabilities, with the idea of mediating one’s senses during embodied game play.
July 26th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Isn’t there a Borges essay about the nightingale as a metaphor for the inescapable and impossible quests in various moments of literary history? Is this episode about Emerson’s night-warbler included in the essay?
July 28th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
Gareth,
This all sounds really interesting.
JM,
I’m flattered to be visited by the author of an article I referred to, and would love to have the Borges reference if anyone can find it—a cursory glance doesn’t turn up anything but half-leads, and I don’t know Borges’ work well enough to be able to say whether this essay exists or not. Do let me know if you track down the reference. On Borges, I recently listened to his Harvard Lectures as I was commuting in and around New York, and noticed just now browsing around that I couldn’t read even the smallest fragments of his work without hearing it read to me in his beautifully distinctive, slow lilting voice.