Two Months Back

Two months ago now, just at that moment of the deep dive into true summer, I went out and bought a fat book to celebrate the season. It was about Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great philosopher and Transcendentalist, and it had a wonderful title: "Emerson: The Mind on Fire: it was called^.. I remember that there was a wild cloudburst as I drove to the bookstore, found this volume and forked over the full $35 for this book. The price seemed worth it to me though; I think that for me it symbolized these ten delicious weeks of school’s-out freedom.

And it certainly started out in lively enough fashion, recounting how a year after his first wife died at age 20, the grief-stricken young Emerson has her body disinterred so he could gaze once more upon her face.

Talk about your sensational opening chapters!

But as I have continued reading, I have been sorry to find the rest of the book to be as dry as toast, dealing more with the influences playing upon the man, what he must have been reading when he wrote this or that - in short, the kind of stuff that scholars build careers arguing over.

 As a result I’m still on page 68. Just sixty-eight pages for my $35! What was I thinking?

Maybe I was drawn to it not just because of my fondness for this man but also because of how I passed so many summer days as an adolescent: When swimming and field sports were done for the day, I read.

 Of these young summers I remember chiefly this:  The shady porch of a simple house built my grandparents in 1920.  A living room furnished with wicker and ignored ever since.

 I close my eyes and see more still: The floorboards by the windows washed bare of varnish by winter sun and the spill of summer rains. Two rugs, faded to grey and as thin as Kleenex. The lumpy cushions on that wicker couch and me stretched out on them, reading and reading.

I carried a battered dictionary everywhere then, to look up unknown words. I still have a list of the ones I wrote down at 13. When I say them aloud now I see a girl in an oversized shirt and cut-offs, barefoot, and deeply absorbed.

I kept a notebook then too, of all the quotes that moved or inspired me, which I own still and have just pulled down from the shelf. And surprisingly enough, here are the words of Mr. Emerson himself, copied so long ago. I read them again now:

 He said, “You shall have joy, or you shall have power.... You shall not have both.”

 He said, “Give me health and a day and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.” I love that one.

 He said, “For everything you have missed, you have gained something else."

 And finally he said this, as if he were sitting right here beside me and clapping shut every book in sight:

 “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”

All right, Mr. Emerson, here is what I know:

 I know that my time is my own, to savor or to waste.

 I know that many fat books await me if I but make time to read them.

 And I know that sweet nostalgia notwithstanding, this summer, the summer of Right Now, beats any summer I could hope to disinter from memory’s dusty vaults.

I Went to the Woods...

“I went to the woods to live deliberately...” That's Henry David Thoreau in the opening pages of Walden, the little book he wrote after two years of living in the cabin he built on the shores of Walden Pond, just two miles from the town of Concord where Nathaniel Hawthorne briefly lived. Where Bronson Alcott lived too, with his high-minded ways and raised up the dark-eyed talented Louisa. Where, most of all in my mind anyway, Ralph Waldo Emerson lived, with his big nose and his kind face; Emerson, who helped support his far younger friend Henry, lending him the use of that patch of land by the pond, and even taking him into his house to live with his family and tutor his children..Around these parts we all know Walden Pond over there in Concord.I know it's just ten miles from my house. I know it was formed by the retreating glacier a mere 10 or 12 thousand years ago. I know, or learned much later, it's the place where my teen children went night-swimming with their pals behind all our backs and all in defiance of many laws.I have read Thoreau’s Walden so many times that the things he says there and facts of his life come constantly into my mind, and I wonder always how he managed after losing his brother to John to lockjaw. It was about their trip down the Concord and Merrimack rivers that he was trying to write when he lived in that little cabin. I always assumed he was trying to bring his brother close again in the writing, as I have been trying to do with my sister Nan who, much to my dismay, moved to faraway Florida in the late '70s and has been there ever since.This week my man and I are away from our house that lies so close to Concord. Life chugs along without us there however, since four adults and an infant are living with us this summer - which means that I the worrier am free from worry over who will bring in the mail and papers. Free from worry over what lights we’ll leave on to fool those robbers in their cartoon robber-masks who we somehow picture making their nightly rounds, trying doors, as faithful as lamplighters of old ....This week I'm free from all such worry. Free to hike and swim and read Walden in these soft New Hampshire hills, where we mean to spend our time.Here’s something I read there just now, upon rising from my bed:

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Food for thought all right. I wonder: should it be crisp broccoli, rich butternut squash and good dark beans for our supper tonight?