It also executes a strange yet meticulously documented philosophy of the vegetal as a kind of life that disavows predication. As early as January 1841, when he began keeping his journal, Thoreau defines the process of writing as “journalizing”: a “confused heap” of ideas in which nothing is qualified (”predicated”) as good or bad as such, wherein “a festoon of dried apples” may eventually prove to be “a string of Brazilian diamonds.” In thus allowing the apples to become diamonds-to run wild from predication-Thoreau’s conception of writing, enacted in his own Journal and elsewhere, reveals a unique aesthetics that defies form and definition. In charting this fascination, my essay uncovers an essentially vegetal quality to Thoreau’s writerly aesthetics.

It is their strange capacity to “run wild,” to “commemorate” through they appearance what they have “witnessed,” and in doing so to “acquire a new character” (in October, for example, they look “like pictures of banian-trees”) that fueled Thoreau’s life-long fascination with apples.

The paradoxical nobility of wild apples stems, as Thoreau explains in Wild Apples,from their having reversed the standard trajectory of cultivation: instead of having its wild nature subjected to domestication, apple had “migrated to this New World” fully cultivated, only to eventually “run wild … amid the aboriginal trees,” where it appears as “a natural growth, like the pines and oaks,” no longer dependent “on our care.” “The noblest of fruits is the apple,” Thoreau says in his journal, in which references to apples, specifically to wild ones, by far outnumber any other botanical entry. Wild Apple Journalizing: Thoreau’s Vegetal Aesthetics

Wild apples thoreau