Walden: foreshadowing the Front Porch

Far out! John Denver was singing 'Rocky Mountain High,' the campus Ecology Club was stacking newspapers, and our English teachers had us reading Thoreau's Walden. We were going to live the simple life, peace would dominate the world (peace dominate?), and the planet would be saved. And the boys among us were ecstatic that the draft was over.

I still have my high-school copy of Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Civil Disobedience. In the early '70s, it was kind of like the bible for . . . well, for all those things I mentioned in the first paragraph.

I buy almost all of my books at Half-Price Books, usually 2-3 at a time; and if I run out before another shopping trip, I scrounge something around the house for something else to read. At least three times, I've resorted to Walden between Half-Price sprees, and I've gotten all the way to page 10 (Chapter 1 begins on page 7).

Thoreau's much more self-absorbed than I remember (my friend Laurie would call him a 'diva,' like she did me in my last blog), and I find the passages that our English teachers didn't have us underline to be much more interesting. Who really cares about most men leading lives of quiet desperation.

In the first LONG paragraph of Chapter 1 -- Economy, Thoreau anticipates blogging (at least my blogs):

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew so well . . . Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would sned to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must be a distant land to me.

Not sure exactly what he said, but I like the justification for writing about myself, because that's really about the only thing I know. And that's what I love about others' blogs.

Then later in another LONG paragraph about northern overseers being worse than southern overseers (damn yankees!), he wrote:

. . . a prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinions. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Then he throws in something about Wilberforce, and I'm still trying to figure out who he is.

I agree with both Laurie and Cath's comments on my last blog (Cath is one of those 'kindred from a distant land'), and I'm impressed at how appropriate Thoreau's comments are to that blog and their comments (I was desperate for another trip to Half-Price Books before I wrote the last blog).

A couple of addenda . . .

#1 -- I really didn't deserve my first true love. She was far more mature than I was and, fortunately, kind enough to not point that out to me. I was crushed when she left but grateful for the time we were together. And I regret some of the stupid, stupid jealousies that were such a waste of time.

She must've borrowed my copy of Walden. On the inside cover -- and I either missed it or didn't understand it at the time -- she wrote: Even love nods occasionally. If I would've noticed that at 17, she and I would be . . . well, probably on opposite ends of the state, carrying on our own lives and never having contact again . . . just like now. But at least I'd be smarter.

#2 -- My last blog, I wrote about wanting to tell old friends, 'You were important to me.' A long-ago friend sent me a note through the TJ Web site and sweetly wrote that she still has a gift -- an Instamatic, light-just-right photo of a Port Arthur landmark -- I gave her in high school.

There's nothing better than hearing, 'You were important to me.'

By the way, I still have the patch at the beginning of the blog . . . the jeans it was sewn on didn't make it. But I do have a T-shirt with it screened on the front.