SOURCE: Garber, Frederick. “A Space for Saddleback.” In Thoreau's Fable of Inscribing, pp. 116‐41. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Garber argues that Thoreau inserted the Saddleback Mountain climbing episode in order to show the insufficiency of textual and temporal closures.

The logic of this study derives, in part, from the logic of Thoreau's thought on some very basic questions about being at home in the world. From language, to writing, to the field of inscribings of which writing is a part, to the functions of autography as a mode of self‐inscribing—each of these actions or consequences implies and implicates the others, all of them together creating a tight and rigorous complex. The complex is remarkable in part because, after some hesitant sputtering that sometimes slips into sentimentality (seen as late as in several sections of “Natural History of Massachusetts”), it quickly matures...