Happy Birthday, Old Boy.

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;

Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places.

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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;

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.

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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?
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.

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When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally or accidentally. One has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. I could always tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by some slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or by the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified of the passage of a traveller along the highway sixty rods off by the scent of his pipe.

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-Walden

Thanks for the kind words.
Orley, I can't read Thoreau without slowing down, and putting everything right back into perspective. As he says in Walden's conclusion, "I delight to come to my bearings." That's what happens when I read him, still ten years on. E.B. White wrote that he carried Walden "in much the same way one carries a handkerchief - for relief in moments of defluxion or despair." I understand that feeling.
The only book of his I can really recommend is his masterpiece, Hobie. The other three books are...well, they're different. They all have the same spirit as Walden, but they don't find the right balance in expressing it. They're travelogues, so the narrative takes hold a little too much, and Thoreau is at heart an essayist, not a story-teller. His essays (speeches, actually) are iconic, though. Nowadays they teach Resistance to Civil Government in high schools, in the U.S. at least.
Some people find Walden a little dry. Others find it a mite "preachy". Going by the quotes in your sig, I'd say you might like him. All of his works are well out of copyright and available cheaply, or online.


Accidentally resized this picture above for my new Avatar...

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

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