Valentine’s Day, 1979. My parents gave me a beautiful leather-bound edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden that year as a gift. My father, who has an amazing talent for calligraphy and my mother, a musician, are proud to have given me the book. You can tell from the care given to the inscription on the flyleaf, my name in my father’s modernist hand-drawn font and the date written in my mother’s languid, angular script. And while I’ve had this book for forty years, it’s not a sentimental possession. Its passages and insights are what I refer back to on the occasions that I find myself in a singular state of mind or need an infusion of spirit.
I keep my copy of Walden on a shelf above my writing desk; it’s a literary talisman. It’s a book that is useful and enjoyable for me because, when something moves me to, I can open it to almost any passage on any page and find something of value in it. There is something similar to be had when one reflects on the day, were you to think of the experience of each day as a chapter in a book of memories. Each day I try to find my own placid corner of Walden Pond, so to speak. Some short passage on a page in this living journal of thought and experience that I can choose to turn to. I know it will be familiar, I experienced it after all, but I’m never entirely sure on what page I might land. But I know, like within the text of Walden, I will see some value in it. Out of habit (recently formed I admit) I will include something of it in my personal diary, usually reformed as gratitude. I do this with intent, mostly out of an interest in positive psychology that helps me broadly to maintain a generally recognizable sense of happiness. Perhaps that interest is the appeal of the book. It takes me there. Thoreau would probably have a different point of view—I will admit I have a bastardized view of the shape and form of his self-reliance—but given his anarchical tendencies I’m sure he would find allowance for it.
If there are any books or stories that inspire you, lift you or fuel your thinking, I hope that you have the opportunity to share with me and with others. Your thoughts and criticisms are welcome.
So what do I recall when taking the proverbial walk at the edge of my pond? Perhaps it was a text from a friend, a laugh between the children, something I made in the kitchen or a petty annoyance like coffee spilled. The beauty of it is that it can be any sort of thing you recall, good or not—even tragic. My experience most often is it is some feeling or emotion or state of mind that is induced by that moment, not when it happened or something resulting from the act itself. It morphs into something more powerfully felt in this moment, in the ever-present now. And that anything can be transcendental. Not in a politicized sense of supremacy of individuality, but that recollection and reflection is yours by design, whether by the design of Nature or G-d. No one can make your soul manifest in their own, or vice versa, although we attempt to do so in the expression of art, literature and music—it’s what gives art its power. So while we can explain what a spontaneous recollection is rationally, it is another thing to feel something of it, without specific attribution to an experience. It is rather a sense of that experience that lingers and which, taken across the sum of our days, informs us of our purpose. None of those sensual moments have to be of great importance to lead us to meaning and simplicity of purpose. They just need the recognition they, and you, deserve.
Simplicity of purpose is why Walden resonates with me still, after forty years, having remained in my possession for the duration, both physically and mentally. I don’t want to imply that I found a religion in it. It is of a different time and an unfamiliar (and outdated) vernacular. It teeters dangerously toward misogyny. Sometimes I loathe how sanctimonious it reads. That may be true of what you read here, but what is perfect in art? What is perfect in ourselves? What I celebrate about it for myself I can see revealed in the celebrations of others for whom other works of literature are powerful inspirations. That can be the Bible or Koran, a Shel Silverstein poem, a Toni Morrison novel or the writings of Karl Marx. I run the danger in my desire to be expansive to bleed into being culturally limiting in the works just mentioned, but the point is that the work is of your choosing. I am sharing mine because it is something I hope is worthy to be shared. For others, though, this is a quieter and solitary habit. But I evangelize it, even to a fault.
Here is a short passage from Walden I turned to after writing this post. Note: I’m a morning person!
That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in the morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.” Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable actions of men, date from such an hour.
Henry David Thoreau. Walden. “Where I Lived, And What I Lived For.”
