SOURCE: Hutchinson, Jamie. “‘The Lapse of the Current’: Thoreau's Historical Vision in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 25, no. 4 (fourth quarter 1979): 211‐22.

In the following essay, Hutchinson contends that A Week documents Thoreau's belief in historical progress and that he sought inspiration, not eternity, in his river voyage.

A people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments.

—T. S. Eliot

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

—William Blake

Beginning with Sherman Paul in The Shores of America, critics of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) have generally agreed that Thoreau's journey may be interpreted symbolically as a spiritual quest on the river of time. What has been largely overlooked, however, is the connection of this quest with his implicitly teleological view of the nature and meaning of...