Solitude
These morning I luckily woke up early and read a few lines of Waldon; I felt that I had to take some words down here.
“Men frequently say to me, ‘I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially.’”
“I am tempted to reply to such, – this whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely?…What sort of space is that which seperates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?”
“I have found that no exertion of the the legs can bring two minds nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to?”
… “We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our gossip a little while under these circumstances, – have our own thoughts to cheer us? Confucius says truly – Virtue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors.”
“With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent.”
… “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater time of time. To be in company. even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the company that was so companionable as solitude.”
“We are for the most part lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.”
“The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert.”
“The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he come home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can ‘see the folks’. and, as he thinks, remunerate himself for his day’s solitude, and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and ‘’the blues’; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the recreation and society the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.”
… “I am no more lonely than the loon in the ponds that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray?”
“I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumble bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.”
… “What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contended?”
my first words here.:)
@yeti 笨野人^^
Interesting, I`ll quote it on my site later.
Have a nice day
Joker