It's the birthday of Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). He's the author of Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) and the essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849). He went off to Harvard when he was just sixteen. He was twenty-seven when he built a small cabin on the edge of Walden Pond, a small lake near Concord, and wrote about his time there.
Thoreau said, "Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."
It's the birthday of poet and politician Pablo Neruda, born in Parral, Chile (1904). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. In his Nobel lecture he said, "All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are."
This makes me want to go home and read Neruda's love poems, and read Walden once and for all. And probably read Civil Disobedience for the first time since high school.
Instead, I will read and write and think about Mary Magdalene and Caravaggio; and some Rothko. I'm brewing some new poems for tomorrow's meeting with Diane, and maybe a little future grad work as well.
1 comment:
It must've been a lot easier to get into college early in Thorough's time. Yeah, I know how I spelled it. I'm not fixing it, either. I'm not saying he wasn't smart enough to legitimately get into Harvard early, just that there is a lot more regulation now. You can just send Harvard a bitchin' essay you wrote and get in at 16 nowadays.
Why did he go by Henry David, when his name was David Henry? It's just as easy to introduce oneself as Henry and, if it comes up, explain later that your first name is David, but you prefer Henry. What a weirdo.
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