Henry,
I am afraid that the world has
become a much noisier place than when you were living on Walden Pond. We have
not listened to your words. I visited your old stomping grounds yesterday. It
was a cool muggy day, overcast and threatening rain. I teach your work to my students. We plant
beans in your memory.
I stopped at Emerson’s house
first as you would as well, where they talked far more about the portraits on
the walls than about Emerson’s ideas, which is a shame, because I don’t think
anyone really reads the man any longer. No time. As you
know, one was of Sumner, the friend who was beaten on the Senate floor for his
positions on slavery. “Beaten, like yelled at?” someone asked. “No,” the guide
replied, “beaten like hit. I think with a bat.” It was a cane, but that’s a
small detail. APUSH students love the
story—who doesn’t like the story of a good fight for what you believe? APUSH is all about memorizing dates and facts
for attest at the end of the year; Alcott would not approve. There is no recess in APUSH, no experiential
learning. They read, listen, take notes. In some ways, things have not changed
much since you were in school, Henry.
After lunch, I went to your
grave. There was Emerson’s huge rock, dominating the ridge as he dominated the
transcendental scene. And Louisa May, tucked in with her family. Yours was buried in flowers and blocked by
three people arguing over the national political scene. It’s bad, Henry. No one
was been caned on the Senate floor—yet—but it’s ugly. In some ways, I think you
all would feel right at home reading the national news. But you would never
argue over tactics in the cemetery! Between the discussion and the road repair
that was happening down the hill, I fled.
There’s now a trail over to your
cabin. I know you came in and out of town via the railroad, but walking on or
near the tracks isn’t legal any longer—someone might be hit and sue the
railroad. We have become even more litigious than we were in early New England!
So they put in a trail that wanders through the local wetland and by a bean
field. The bean rows were straight and free of weeds. Someone had gone in with
a tractor to cultivate that field, rather than using a hand hoe. Why? Time
spent cultivating beans, knowing beans, is time well spent in philosophical
thought. But there it is, a perfect bean
field. Well, almost. It had been flooded by rain last week. Your personal field
has been taken over by third growth and returned to the woodlot.
Dog walkers like your trail,
Henry. And women with phones do, too. This is the strangest thing. People now
walk down a trail talking to someone miles away—this woman was talking to someone
on another continent!—rather than watching for the wintergreen blossoms by the
side of the path. You may even see two friends together, both looking at their
phones, not at each other. We are a distracted society. We need your simplicity
more now than ever.
People love your cabin. There is
a broad path to the door—or the eight posts that mark the location in the
woods. They write comments in the guest book like “the perfect house” and then
head for the gift shop. A ranger was
lecturing a bunch of pre-college kids about your relationship with Louis
Agassiz when I was there. Loudly. They wanted to add rocks to the pile by your
door. That pile has grown since E B White was there; it is no longer a small
ugly pile, but a large ugly pile.
But then they all left and I was
able, for the first time all day, to hear the forest around you. There are
still mid-summer birds and insects, the rustle of the leaves in the trees, the
sound of pencil on paper in your little clearing, Henry. The pond is still
there—no loons today—with a path down to where you gathered your water. In the
near distance, the train still calls as it leaves town, but I think it is going
faster now. And it is, still, just far enough away to block the sounds of
humanity rushing about their lives, but close enough to walk into town to talk
with a friend, one on one and face to face.
No comments:
Post a Comment