"Walden Vision Quest
and other poems"
by andy levesque
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From "Walden, or Life in the Woods"
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| Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper, fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always regretted that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
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| To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is always at morning. It matters not what the clock says, or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me...To be awake is to be alive. I have never met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?...We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour.
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| This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, one with herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bull-frogs trump to usher in the night, and the note from the whipporwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled, but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the wood. The waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never complete.
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| The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings?"
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| Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of--as if I had a warranty and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it be possible they flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to forsee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and benificent society in Nature, in the very patterning of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy, and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.
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| With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a concious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us in a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by any actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It is a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.
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| I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economised the room by standing up. It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another...One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim, and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion, and fallen into its last and steady course, before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the interval. Individuals, like nations, must have broad and natural boundaries, even a neutral ground, between them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were so near that we could not begin to hear--we could not speak low enough to be heard, as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that they break each other's undulations...As the conversation began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs further apart till they touched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room enough...My "best" room, however--my withdrawing room--always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine woods behind my house.
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From Thoreau's Journals
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| Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live and begin to be. A boatman stretched on the deck of his craft and dallying with the noon would be as apt an emblem of eternity for me as the serpent with his tail in his mouth. I am never as prone to lose my identity. I am lost in the haze.
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| Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment, and childike mirthfulness.
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| By the last breath of the May air I inhale I am reminded that the ages never got so far down before. The wood thrush is a more modern philosopher than Plato or Aristotle. They are now a dogma, but he preaches the doctrine of this hour.
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| There is all the romance of my youthfulest moment in music. Heaven lies about us, as in our infancy. There is nothing so wild and extravagant that it does not make true. It makes a dream my only real experience, and prompts faith to such elasticity that only the incredible can satisfy it. All that I have imagined of heroism, it reminds me of and assures me of. It is a life unlived, a life beyond life, where at length my years will pass. I look under the lids of time.
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I was born upon thy bank, river,
My blood flows in thy stream,
And thou meanderest forever
At the bottom of my dream.
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| What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
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| My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.
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| He approaches the study of mankind with great advantages who is accustomed to the study of nature.
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| We do not commonly live our life out and full; we do not fill all our pores with our blood; we do not inspire and expire fully and entirely enough , so that the wave, the comber, of each inspiration shall break on our extremest shores, rolling 'til it meets the sand which bounds us, and the sound of the surf comes back to us. Might not a bellows assist us to breathe? That our breathing should create a wind on a calm day! We live but a fraction of our life. Why do we not let on the flood, raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion? He that has ears to hear, let him hear.
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| My thoughts are my company. They have a certain individuality, aye, personality. Having recorded a few disconnected thoughts and then brought them into juxtaposition, they suggest a whole new field in which is was possible to labor and to think. Thought begat thought.
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| If thou art a writer, write as if time were short, for it is indeed short at the longest. Improve each occasion when thy soul is reached. Drain the cup of inspiration to its last dregs.
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| To be calm, to be serene! There is the calmness of the lake when there is not a breath of wind; there is the calmness of a stagnant ditch. So it is with us. Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but by some unconscious obedience to the all-just laws so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves. All the world goes by us and is reflected in our deeps. Such clarity! obtained by such pure means! by simple living, by honesty of purpose.
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| To the sane man, the world is a musical instrument. The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure.
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| The entertaining of a single thought of a certain elevation makes all men of one religion. It is always some base alloy that creates the distinction of sects.
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| There is no remedy for love but to love more.
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| Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again it is remembereed like in a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. How happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening; reminiscences of our sanest hours? The voice of nature is always encouraging.
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| Ah, those youthful days! Are they never to return? when the walker does not too curiously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself--the phenomena that show themselves in him--his expanding body, his intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quadruped or bird, confined his view, but the unbounded universe was his. A bird is now become a mote in his eye.
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| He is richest who has the most use for nature as raw material of tropes and symbols with which to describe his life. If these gates of golden willows affect me, they correspond to the beauty and promise of some experience on which I am entering. If I am overflowing with life, am rich in experience for which I lack expression, then nature will be my language full of poetry--all nature will fable, and every natural phenomenon be a myth. The man of science, who is not seeking for expression but for a fact to be expressed merely, studies nature as a dead language. I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant.
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Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation. this aimless life. This life in the present. Let a man have thought what he will of Nature in the house, she will still be novel outdoors. I keep out of doors for the sake of the mineral, vegetable and animal in me.
My thought is a part of the meaning of the world, and hence I use a part of the world as a symbol to express my thought.
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| After whatever revolutions in my moods and experience, when I come forth at evening, as from years of confineemnt to the house, I see the few stars which make the constellation of the Lesser Bear in the same relative position--the everlasting geometry of the stars. How incredible to be described are these bright points which appear in the blue sky as the darkness increases, said to be other worlds, like the berries on the hill when the summer is ripe! Even the ocean of birds, even the regions of the ether, are studded with isles. Far in this etherial sea lie the Hesperian isles, unseen by day, but when the darkness comes their fires are seen from this shore, as Columbus saw the fires of San Salvador.
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| It is worth the while to apply what wisdom one has to the conduct of his life, surely, I find myself oftenest wise in little things and foolish in great ones. That I may accomplish some particular pretty affair well, I live my whole life coarsely. A broad margin of liesure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe? We live too fast and coarsely, just as we eat too fast and do not know the true savor savor of our food. We consult our will and our understanding and the expectations of men, not our genius. I can impose upon myself tasks which will crush me for life and prevent all expansion, and this I am but too inclined to do.
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| One moment of life costs many hours, hours not of business but of preparation and invitation. Yet the man who does not betake himself at once and and desperatelly to sawing is called a loafer, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while, which shall surely be opened to him. That aim in life is highest which requires the highest and finest discipline. How much, what infinite, leisure it requires, as of a lifetime, to appreciate a single phenomenon? You must camp down beside it as for life, having reached your land of promise, and give yourself wholly to it. It must stand for the whole world to you, symbolical of all things. The least partialness is your own defect of sight and cheapens the experience fatally. Unless the humming of a gnat is as the music of the spheres, they are naught to me. It is not communications to serve for a history--which are sciences--but the great story itself, that cheers and satisfies us.
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