Hey, Henry.
I know you probably don't think much of birthdays, but 200 years is...it's special. Significant, somehow. Of course it's easy when you're dead--but you just can't seem to die, can you? At the pond I'd guess they've come out in droves; reading from your books, looking into that little cabin they've built for you, taking pictures with your statue, and throwing stones onto your cairn. Out here in this little corner of Iowa, it's just me. No pond, no cabin, no bronze statue. You didn't think much of statues, though, eh? No cairn, either. That's alright--this is my stone.
I first read Walden in about 2008, and I'll tell you, I've never quite put it down. Oh, at first I carried the book in my pocket, the way young men do when they've got more ideas than sense; a tattered old paperback from the seventies that my aunt gave me. You can't blame her, though--she hardly knew what it would do to me. That copy's gone. "Nearly reduced to it's primitive elements," as you might say. Worn out. And my new copy is wearing. I didn't bring it today--somehow you're words never wear, and I carry quite a lot of them in my heart.
After Walden I read everything else you ever wrote, saving only your lifelong journal, and I've read a good bit of that, too. I don't read you as much now, but...its strange, some days I think I know you better than many of the living.
The natural thing today was go for a walk. I don't walk as much as I did in college, but there are a few groves in my neighborhood where a man can still find a little quiet, a little space to grow and stretch and contemplate. Almost any little bit of woods will serve this purpose, as I think you know;
I'll see you in the woods, old friend.
I know you probably don't think much of birthdays, but 200 years is...it's special. Significant, somehow. Of course it's easy when you're dead--but you just can't seem to die, can you? At the pond I'd guess they've come out in droves; reading from your books, looking into that little cabin they've built for you, taking pictures with your statue, and throwing stones onto your cairn. Out here in this little corner of Iowa, it's just me. No pond, no cabin, no bronze statue. You didn't think much of statues, though, eh? No cairn, either. That's alright--this is my stone.
I first read Walden in about 2008, and I'll tell you, I've never quite put it down. Oh, at first I carried the book in my pocket, the way young men do when they've got more ideas than sense; a tattered old paperback from the seventies that my aunt gave me. You can't blame her, though--she hardly knew what it would do to me. That copy's gone. "Nearly reduced to it's primitive elements," as you might say. Worn out. And my new copy is wearing. I didn't bring it today--somehow you're words never wear, and I carry quite a lot of them in my heart.
After Walden I read everything else you ever wrote, saving only your lifelong journal, and I've read a good bit of that, too. I don't read you as much now, but...its strange, some days I think I know you better than many of the living.
The natural thing today was go for a walk. I don't walk as much as I did in college, but there are a few groves in my neighborhood where a man can still find a little quiet, a little space to grow and stretch and contemplate. Almost any little bit of woods will serve this purpose, as I think you know;
I found one at the edge of a park, where the laughter of children was the only sound falling into the glade, and I settled in for a smoke. These woods aren't wide enough to walk in, Henry, but I can tell you they're wide enough to smoke in, for I've made the test. I sat and watched the smoke curl up from my pipe, catching the sunlight as it filtered through the cottonwoods, and the sailing clouds above. I sat, and I thought. I thought about you. I thought of this silly old century of ours, and wondered what you'd say about it. I thought about the detritus littering the woodland floor, and about the people who come and leave it here. I used to curse them, you know, littering the woods with beer cans and cigarette packs and condom wrappers, but now I just think about them. About how silly they are, and how silly I am, and how silly this whole nervous, crazy, awesome world is. I am on the point of forgiving us all our anodynes. They come with each other and leave beer cans and condom wrappers, and I come with my pipe and leave smoke and ash, and maybe that's how we get through it all. Possibly you wouldn't understand that part. Then again, maybe you would;Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places.
On my way home I see a man riding a penny-farthing, and I smile. "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer." Sometimes 'silly' just works, you know?Light-winged Smoke! Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight;
...
Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
I'll see you in the woods, old friend.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.