Where I Lived and What I Lived For

Time is but a 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 neccessary. 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.

-From "Where I Lived and What I Lived For."

Henry David Thoreau


Some people can't stand Thoreau because his sentences are endless and his thoughts sometimes clumped together in a seemingly linear rant. I think I've always identified with him. Trying to decipher that passage, which is something I've been attempting since first reading it as a junior in high school, I see a lot of myself. Granted, I could never write as eloquently as Thoreau, but the frenetic pace at which he doles out his wisdom in Walden; going from a fortune-cookie like nugget of wisdom to a three page rant about the price of beans and hoes, is a lot like how I think. My mind seems to be a clutter of incomplete thoughts. I'll start off on one task, and on the way there get side-tracked and do something else, and if I'm lucky I'll eventually get to the original task.

Now, with my life as it is, I find myself trying to maintain several different streams of thought and different modes of life. There's my teacher mode, my roomate mode, my friend mode, my college student mode, my boyfriend mode, my son/brother mode, my introspective mode, my grieving mode...the list goes on. It's hard to juggle all of these modes, but I'm trying.