Don Juan in Paradise

I'm in Hawaii for the next week and have already managed to make the most of my vacation. I spent countless hours - I really can't remember how many, exactly - on a hammock listening through various works of my classical childhood (and adulthood), sipping a modified French 75, and rocking to and fro as a listless, aimless, constant breeze ran over and under me. It's been a while since my last post and too much has happened for me to include in one post.

So I'll start, as usual, with a book. This latest is "The Accidental Connoisseur" by Lawrence Osborne. I ran into Osborne reading a passage from his latest book, "The Wet and the Dry" through one of the links at The Daily Beast. His is now the third book I've impulsively bought after a highlight on Andrew Sullivan's self-indulgent bullhorn of a blog (the first is "From the Spanish," a collection of poems by obscure Latin American and Spanish authors which Wallace Stevens, equally self-indulgently, translated and published; the second is a remarkably self-indulgent series of vignettes about Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell which make up an excuse of an memoir of one of the classmates in that graduate seminar; the common thread here is...?).

"The Wet and the Dry" will not make itself available to me until midsummer, I unbelievably regret to say. It is a travelogue recounting the Cambridge- and Harvard-educated serial articlist and alcoholic Osborne's adventures through the "dry" part of the world. He decides, as a way to cure him of his alcoholism, to travel through the majority of the Muslim world, assuming that the Quran's strict prohibition of alcohol will force him into a dry lifestyle; he is incredibly wrong and ends up finding out that alcohol is an incredibly important part of the culture with even more of the wink-wink-nudge-nudge societal acceptance in Pakistan today than whiskey had in Prohibition-era Chicago. Or so I imagine from reading the excerpts and book jacket. I still don't have the damn book since it won't be published until July 23th.

Anyways, to slake my thirst, so to speak, I picked up a similar sounding Osborne book, "The Accidental Connoisseur." It's a chronicling of Osborne's attempt to become a serious wine connoisseur from the very basics on; it instead leaves him off exactly where he started: a wine enjoyer who can tell awful from good and good from great and absolutely nothing in between, but with the conviction seconded (and thirded, etc.) by many serious producers and importers that great wine is as much a product of the company and scenarios in which it's drunk as the pulverized grapes which yield their lifeblood to make the drink itself. It's hard to disagree with Osborne on that count, and I'm not saying that simply because Osborne is a seductive writer.  He seduces by preterition - at various dinners, lunches, and happenstance wine tastings, he provides a few conversational highlights and then nothing for the remaining hours of his meeting until the valedictory "as I stumbled to my car clutching a case of the Montepulciano '95, I realized that Apulian wines were perfectly suited to the cuisine of its peasant folk, although I still couldn't detect the hint of marshmallows and candied ginger root that Count Ludovico so clearly scented himself, etc. etc" (a parody, I hope it is obvious). One can't help but wonder what happened in the few hours that passed between Osborne's initial terroir discussion and his coaxing out multiple bottles of the rarest vintages and some deeply personal confessions from his always gracious hosts. Here are some highlights:

"I grew up in Britain in the 1970s, before wine became fashionable. Drinking it has therefore never been second nature to me. Like most Catholic children, my first memory of wine is on the altar, and it was always a game to see how much of the sacrament you could gulp down when it was your turn to taste Our Lord's hemoglobin. It was sour, its dim taste mixed up with sickly sensations: the greasy fingers of our priests, cheap pewter goblets, and chewy, bready polystyrenelike wafers.

"I now think this sacred wine was a cheaper Sainsbury's Beaujolais, an economical option in the 1970s retailing for about three dollars a bottle, because with its taste of sour raspberries came also a ghostly scent of ripe bananas, which I have ever after associated with Our Lord's unfortunate decomposition on the Cross." (1 - these are literally the opening words of the book). To my Catholic reader(s), I ask - have you ever wondered what wine is deemed worthy enough to be served as a pre-transubstantiated version of Jesus' blood? This is an observation that is incredibly Joycean in nature, albeit more clearly expressed.

"Magalotti also theorized that light poured into grapes and shattered inside them to form a kind of powder. These powders were released when fermentation occurred, eventually making themselves felt "upon the tongue and palate by the charming prickle of their many corners and twists.

"It was a beautiful explanation. And probably not much more mystical than many explanations of terroir...The wine seemed to me tasty, but without a definable character. I drank half the glass and looked up at a painting on the facing wall, a kind of composite portrait of famous figures, among whom I instantly recognized Henry VIII, Che Guevara, and Errol Flynn, not to mention Merlin" (17). A rather poetic description which in a lot of ways does capture the sensation of drinking a glass of wine.

"I explained to Giorgio that drinking Leopardi's wine alone was, at this very moment, the best way of getting to know both Count Leopardi and his stony wine. For there is a mood for drinking wine alone: a tender, solipsistically pleasurable mood which has nothing at all to do with misery. I told him that the ancient Greeks thought of drinking parties as voyages in a little ship, and the drinkers as sailors lost on a lonely sea." (21).

At a wine tasting at a Mondavi winery: 
"The meal began. Aside from a wine class being conducted at a nearby table, we were alone. I glanced over. A long line of somber faces sniffed at huge glasses of white wine.
"'Do you feel this is grassy?' the instructor was saying.
"'I do think it's grassy,' a weak voice piped up from the back.
"'How grassy is it?'
"'Pretty grassy,' a thin woman in glasses whispered doubtfully. 'I think there's some grassiness in it.'
"The instructor nodded, satisfied. 'It's definitely grassy. I don't think we can say it isn't grassy.'" (31)

"Our own version of the Spurrier tasting now got under way. We all swirled, nose-dipped, and gurgled. Then Bob [Mondavi] smiled fiendishly and sat back, looking at me with that Tiberius gaze.
"'So. Mondavi or Corton-Charlemagne?'
"With a slight panic, I bought some time by sticking my nose back into the glass.
"'Well,' I burbled, 'they both have their qualities...'" (33)

On contemplating the change that technology has brought to the wine industry: "As we descended the grand staircase like three Atlantean priests, I had a sudden feeling of exhilaration which had nothing to do with the thought of writing enormous checks [he just found out the former President of Nicaragua, Aleman, bought $28,000 worth of wine....on the Nicaraguan national budget]. It was just the sense of space, a distant field of mustard slowly switching off for the night. A man-made extravagance set among those same ochre mustard flowers, with all its sleek buried machinery, its inbuilt austerity, its priestly superiority, its artificial silence. One could call it the severe poetry of the technological dream." (64)

"There is nothing I like more than dull provincial French towns, because their very dullness (which is no different from the dullness of any other country's provincial towns) seems to be the outward expression of a touching, fragile sense of respectability. But one day as I was out walking I found myself in a sudden whirlwind of violence, an eruption of irrational fury which I at first mistook for a soccer riot. Cars burned, sirens wailed, enraged men in heavy beards lunged about with bricks and pipes in their hands. Stones flew everywhere, ricocheting off walls and posts, cracking windows wide open and bouncing off cars. The streets were soon thick with smoke. Down them charged the usual suspects of French riots: activists with bleeding noses, CRS riot police with truncheons and tear-gas guns. Were these activists the usual mob? Enraged school-teachers, unionized garbage men, administrators demanding an increase in pensions? Or perhaps a few soldiers of the trade unions demanding a timely end to global capitalism? A cheese strike gone sour could not be ruled out.
"Then I saw a revolutionary pennant hanging from a lamppost. It read: Au debout, les viticulteurs! (Stand up, wine makers!) I asked a cop. Yes, he confirmed, it's a wine riot. A wine riot?" (156)

"It then occurred to me that perhaps what I was searching for in my own quest for taste was some sort of adulthood. It was a startling idea. The quest for taste might be nothing other than a voyage out of childhood. In the case of wine, it was surely a pilgrimage away from the sweetness of mother's milk and toward the "unnatural" tastes of perverted (but sublime) old age! From sweetness to dryness; from simplicity to complexity; from certainty to ambiguity." (197.) This is a really interesting idea and one that I'm close to accepting: "taste" in adulthood is heavily determined by a subconscious (or conscious) desire to run away from the simplistic, jejune tastes of children. 

"The story of Sassicaia, in fact, is one of the better known fairy tales of Italian wine. The father of the present owner, who is Nicolo Incisa della Rochetta, was originally from Piedmont, and like his nineteenth-century predecessors had become interested in importing French varietals to improve the quality of his estate's wine. In 1940 he moved to Bolgheri, a small town on the Tuscan coast, and planted some plots of Cabernet Sauvignon there in 1944. It was never his intention to make a commercial wine; the Cabernet was purely for his own private and Francophilic consumption. The provincial aristocracy of the impoverished Maremma drank imported Bordeaux, partly from social affectation, and partly, no doubt, because the local wines were so bad. The first private bottles of Sassicaia appeared in 1948, and were drunk the the Marchese Mario Incisa della Rochetta, and his guests on his estate. It was not until 1968 that the family decided to sell it using their cousin Antinori's distribution Network.
"The wine's rise to preeminence, however, was largely fortuitous. A London tasting in 1972 made its lofty international reputation, despite the fact that it was a relatively amateurish garage wine of which only six thousand cases were made a year. The Incisa clan was astounded. It was unheard of for an Italian wine to make such a commotion at an international tasting, let alone an Italian Cabernet. Sassicaia, an unknown dark horse, had overnight become virtually the most expensive Italian wine in history." (224.) Included as an example of the anecdotes and the Economist-esque tone which Osborne moves into and out of with ease. There's a didacticism here which always conveys information but never feels heavy handed. Osborne treads lightly of foot.

"In other words, a wine is cheap enough or not cheap enough." (228.) I'd modify this observation to "a wine is cheap enough or expensive enough to be ordered."

Upon leaving a winery in Puglia where the owners, who had been there since the '30s, had glorified in a very natural, very peasant-like lifestyle (no electricity, etc.). However, two days ago, the couple's daughter and son-in-law (Nick) just finished installing basic electricity for the winery: "Outside, Nick was lighting a parafin lamp. Far out in the fields, the pajara glowed in the dark, the figs softly green as tropical fish, while a great velvet darkness seemed to pour down from the Milky Way. He had left the electricity off, and I was glad." (260)

Recent Reads

Not a ton of time to reflect on books these days, though I have been reading.  The first, in keeping with my long dormant, now raging, passion for cooking was Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations.

On a particularly racist professor at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA): "Another class, Oriental Cookery, as I believe it was then called, was pretty funny.  The instructor, a capable Chinese guy, was responsible for teaching us the fundamentals of both Chinese and Japanese cooking.  The Chinese portion of the class was terrific.  When it came time to fill us in on the tastes of Japan, however, our teacher was more interested in giving us an extended lecture on the Rape of Nanking.  His loathing of the Japanese was consuming.  In between describing the bayoneting of women, children and babies in World War II, he'd point at a poster of a sushi/sashimi presentation on the wall, and say in his broken, heavily accented English, 'That a raw a fish.  You wanna eat that?  Hah!  Japanese shit!' Then he'd go back into his dissertation on forced labor, mass executions and enslavement, hinting darkly that Japan would pay, sooner or later, for what it had done to his country." (p. 40.)

On Baltimore:

"Baltimore sucks.

"If you haven't been there, it's a fairly quaint excuse for a city.  (At the time I was there it was undergoing massive rehabilitation; an entire neighborhood by the water front was being 'restored' into a sort of red-brick and cobblestone theme park.)  Bars close at 1 AM; they start flashing the lights for last call at twelve-thirty.  The permanent residents speak of New York and DC with strangely wistful expressions on their faces, as if they can't understand how they ended up here, rather than a few miles north or south, where there's a real city.  There's an element of the South, an almost rural quality to Baltimore, an Ozark fatalism that's amusing in John Waters' films but not so much fun to live worth.  Worst of all, I had no idea where to score drugs." (p. 137.)

On the characters he met: "I came to know actors, loan sharks, enforcers, car thieves, guys who sold false ID, phone scammers, porno stars and a dope-fiend hostess who attended mortician school during the day.  She came up to me one night at the shellfish bar, a blissed-out look on her face, and said, 'We did a baby today in school...and it...like...aspirated in my arms, man.  You could hear it sigh when I picked it up!'  She looked happy about this.  She had a fetish for Con Ed workers - something about the uniforms, I guess.  And when they were doing electrical work or repairing a gas line in her neighborhood, she'd come in the next day singing the praises of the fine folks who kept our utilities running." (p. 150.)

Spider-man as a vessel for subconscious yearnings

I just finished watching The Amazing Spider-Man and I'm not displeased to find that it has evoked the same feelings in me that the 2002 movie did - an uncertain and unsteady optimism, a restlessness, a barely repressed desire to swing my hands as though they possessed web shooters, a skip in my step, and deep moments of introspection, bearing a flashlight ever further into my psyche.

I suppose Spider-man is truly the one superhero with whom I've most consistently identified.  A perpetual teenager - just the way I felt when first introduced to him - and the rare fly which manages not to be caught within the social web woven by his peers.

All that said, this movie wasn't great.  It fumbled just about every pivotal moment in the roman a clef that is the first movie of every trilogy: discovering his powers, Uncle Ben's death, and getting the girl (please - make the guy work for it somewhat).

As it is the Fourth of July, I urge you all to listen to Copeland's "A Lincoln Portrait."  It's an amazing work of music.  Get the version narrated by Gregory Peck, if you can; he makes the best Lincoln that I've ever heard.

"There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

And thus begins my fully realized Walden quotations post.  The struggle for me while reading Walden was coming to terms with Thoreau's vehement anti-ambition.  Life isn't something to be bettered but simply lived and experienced.  There is an aimlessness in his worldview (as exemplified in Walden) that is so far from laziness and yet so purely an opposition to goal-setting or progress that it makes the book at times comical.  Thoreau spends significant time staring at a block of ice to judge the quality of Walden water vs. other waters.  He amuses himself by teasing and imitating squirrels for no purpose whatsoever.  Every action he takes which does not directly relate to providing him food, shelter, heat, or the occasional social interaction is done with no aim other than simply the completion of the action itself.  It's what I imagine retirement can be.

But he is a wonderful writer and while at time overwrought, has a refreshing, honest voice which, oddly enough, reminds me of the otherwise cosmopolitan Mario Vargas Llosa.

On the poverty of a family from whom he purchased materials: "One large bundle held their all—bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens—all but the cat; she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last." (39).

"As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance...Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." (46) - this is the remarkably disconcerting retreat for Thoreau.  Maybe there is no need for progress.  Well, Thoreau makes frequent use of books which existed for him mostly because of the printing press.  His farming knowledge is extensive, which suggests some understanding of modern farming technology and shared knowledge.  At what point does the human race decide that we have progressed enough?  We don't need a telegraph from Maine to Texas because they may have nothing to communicate.  Do we need a machine that can scan people's hearts for indications of health issues?  What if we did build that telegraph and it generated communication of great worth between Maine and Texas?  This is a remarkably anti-intellectual way of thinking which is completely at odds with a progressive view of the world.

"The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere." (75)

"Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him." (78)

"Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself...I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tchingthang to this effect: 'Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.'"(79) - I love this quote so much.

"Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air" (79) - amusing in that we all wake up to alarm clocks these days (and not "our Genius") which, according to Thoreau, should make us all expect little from each of these days.

"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." (80) - another brilliant quote and one of the many examples of Thoreau's humanism, a philosophical movement which is severely under-rated.

"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 practise 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. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.'" (80).  This is THE QUOTE from Thoreau which unfortunately sees itself being replicated not in its entirety.  His motivation allowing for both a mean or a sublime experience is wonderful to me.

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine."  (87).  Another wonderful quote.

"For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?" (89).  I think he can learn something about a fascination with a bygone age by watching Midnight in Paris.

"I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man; unless it were in the spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish for pouts—they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond of their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness—but they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left 'the world to darkness and to me,' and the black kernel of the night was never profaned by any human neighborhood." (116) - Baited their hooks with darkness - one of the many phrases which reminded me of the upcoming Pixar short film "La Luna" (www.youtube.com/watch?v=igqGdTQIX30).  The other phrases are those where he describes fishing on Walden Pond whose waters are so pure that I imagine the boat to be hovering over a vast chasm rather than merely floating.

"I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone—but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. 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 bumblebee. 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." (122) - Good quote

"One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again through the side of his head." (126) - Very, very clever metaphor.

"He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes." (130) - Another brilliant metaphor.

On Page 145 of my edition, I found a miscalcuation in his profit....not sure if I just didn't get his math right.  $23.46 of income.  $14.725 of costs.  Gets you to a profit of $8.735 and not $8.715 which he has.

"One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle, at the door of its senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society...However, I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill." (153) - Great explanation.  I particularly enjoyed how this incident showed that Thoreau has literally nothing to do.  He had to get a shoe from a cobbler, he gets arrested and it's no big deal.  His schedule is just set back by a day and that's it.

"I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough. The Pope's Homers would soon get properly distributed. 'Nec bella fuerunt,/ Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes.' 'Nor wars did men molest,/ When only beechen bowls were in request.'" (154) - this relates to a broader theme that Thoreau occasionally broaches.  Living an extravagant life brings about more hassles than it's worth.  My buying an expensive luxury car brings additional, unnecessary, costs like higher maintenance fees with more expensive parts and higher gas prices because it needs premium gas.  My living in a spacious and nice-looking apartment brings higher costs since I have to buy more and nicer furniture to fit in.  Nothing new, nothing brilliant, but writing Latin works for me.

"Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me—anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook." (156) - another La Luna quote.

"Flint's Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like...I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him" (172) - strangely, when Thoreau later sees a hundred men come by during the winter to saw off the ice on the pond and haul it away in huge amounts, he doesn't seem possessive at all; he simply observes.

"Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched." (193) - a thought that is simultaneously comforting in its universality and discomforting in the isolationist vein it strikes.

"Not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors; when that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us." (194) I'm going to try and think about this quote whenever I want to just do pizza for dinner and see what happens.

"In the winter of '46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many carloads of ungainly-looking farming tools—sleds, plows, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in the New-England Farmer or the Cultivator. I did not know whether they had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently introduced from Iceland." (261) - Thoreau's razor sharp wit cuts Iceland!

"Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect." (263) - Great analogy.

"Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names." (264) - the ports of which Alexander only heard the names - a worthy description.

"At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house, two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they only chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them. No, you don't—chickaree—chickaree. They were wholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a strain of invective that was irresistible." (274).  I love squirrels.

"A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors." (278) - elegy to Spring renewals.  I point you to the bathing quote towards the beginning.

" I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a nighthawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the under side of its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell. This sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport. The Merlin it seemed to me it might be called: but I care not for its name. It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe—sporting there alone—and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it. Where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the heavens? The tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the crevice of a crag;—or was its native nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its eyry now some cliffy cloud." (280) - not much to say here - this is a paragraph in which you can get lost over and over again.

"Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp—tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood!" (281) - an elegy to nature.  It's hard to find an equal to Thoreau in terms of writing.

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now." (286) - The parallel passage to his initial account of why he went to the woods in the first place. "And so with the paths which the mind travels." The observation is nonpareil.

"What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator." (292) - I had to include this Dartmouth shoutout.  Webster got a lot - a LOT - of respect from his contemporaries.  I'd love to have seen him speak in real life.

"As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and bide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me the human insect." (293) - I think of this in terms of willful blindness as well as comfortable ignorance.  Without getting very political here, I think there's a large number of people out there who turn away from the teachings of their religion - whether or not their religion is correct is an entirely separate issue - and who, at a subconscious level, have to understand the singular hypocrisy of their actions with respect to their faith.  Those are the human insects.

Walden ends on a very optimistic note, sharing the story of a farmer who discovered suddenly a vibrant bug burrowing its way out of his table which he had had for almost 80 years.  This bug's mother had laid an egg in the tree which provided the wood for this table a long while ago and the bug eventually hatched and out of sheer determination and single-minded purpose tunneled its way out.  "Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society...may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!"

Who, indeed, Henry....

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' gleams that untravelled world

It's been a while.

I won't say much on that quote except for the love I have for operational logistics.  I had resigned myself to living a life of comfort but job hatred in finance and feel very happy that there is a field close to what I've chosen where I can actually be incredibly happy.  That's worth pursuing, and every second that I'm not pursuing it makes the arch gleam that much brighter.

More in keeping with the purpose of this blog though, here are some initial musings on Walden.

"Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." - apparently the quote on the Asian ruler King Tchingthang's bathtub.  It's an incredible sentiment, and one too universal to be applied simply while bathing.

"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 practise 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."

(It's unfortunate that only the first sentence of this quote gets reproduced.)  Herein lies my huge conflict with Walden.  It's a book with an entirely admirable, and laudable, sentiment.  Go to nature.  Build your home and build your life to the lowest common denominator of survival (which for Thoreau means food, shelter, clothing, and fire).  Life self-sufficiently and bravely and you will be the better for it. 

I think that's right; I think that we would all be better, more stable men if we built our own homes log by log, if we farmed what we ate (incidentally, this is an almost purely vegetarian diet), and if we discarded frivolity for function.  Society, nay, technology is the process of breaking down our brains. Every new app that makes things "more convenient" (as opposed to "easier") simply offers our brains one more opportunity to circumvent a thought process and thus weakens our ability to concentrate and string together a lengthy, disciplined series of related thoughts.  (I'm experiencing this as I write this post which explains why I despise the writing in it from start to finish.)  Alzheimer's patients are recommended to try certain basic mental exercises like remembering what they had for breakfast the previous day; that's been proven to have a positive effect on their brains.  That's no different from when I want to go online and search for how to make peanut sauce.  There wouldn't be a direct way for me to make it so I would have to plan out the steps - go downstairs, find my mom's cookbooks, look through them all to find the recipe, compare different ones to see which one is the easiest/most delicious looking, make my list of ingredients, go to the grocery store, come back, review directions, and prepare.  Now I boot up the Betty Crocker app on the iPad and it eliminates 4 of those crucial steps.

But Thoreau's Walden experiment is not a sustainable model for society at large; if enacted on a societal scale, it would exemplify the tragedy of the commons.  More to come.  I seriously cannot concentrate right now.