Active Romanticism

p.31
What a recipe for preserving wood, perchance—to keep it from rotting—to fill its
pores with music!” (Rothenberg and Robinson 723–24). Thoreau hears inside the
vibrating wood the accumulating “pro- phetic fury”—a prophecy not of words, nor in
words, but a harmonious rage whose meaning eludes interpretation. One cannot know
if one is damned or saved, being forewarned or being welcomed into the next new
world— there is only the fact of the perception itself, a hearing that is also a
feeling, and the thoughts there born that find no cure in knowing.