Nightly To Walden

I have never been to Walden Pond.

That confession is an easy admission. I've admitted maybe too many things on this blog but few bother me. This next one though leaves me feeling uneasy and I worry about people finding out. I may have kind of led people to believe otherwise. And so I pause a moment before telling you this:

I have never read Henry David Thoreau's Walden.

It's one of those books I should have already read, that I should know, and that should be a foundation for me. Yet, I haven't read it. I've started it several times and I've read sections of it for a class way back in college, enough so that I wrote a good paper about it. I've read of it many times, admiring the book, the writer, and the writers writing about it. All of which is to say that I know Walden by proxy but have never read the damn thing and every time I start reading it (with nothing but the best intentions), I get distracted and intimidated by the task. I quit. I quit. I quit every single time because it feels like too much.

So I'm reading it now one page per night.

Each night before turning out the light, I open Walden and read one page. I follow the last sentence onto the next page but stop as soon as I can. The next night I re-read from the top of the page (or the bottom of the previous page) and end when I have finished that one page.

It is slow going but what else should a trip to Walden Pond be but slow and deliberate?

At this rate I don't expect to finish Walden until 2019. I hope I make it all the way to the end and maybe turn back to page one and begin again. If nothing else, I hope to enjoy the journey taken slowly as if on foot from Concord to Fitchburg. Going slow, I want to remember that I've long wanted to make my home in a tiny shack near water. For one page a night that's just what I'll be doing. If you need me, I'll be at Walden Pond. Stop by any time.

The Right Direction

On Friday, a kid left our school. The kid was a handful, often challenging, usually draining, really loud or completely withdrawn, a bundle of nerves. At the end of the day, after the kid had said a final goodbye, a few of us stood in the hall talking. It was mostly rehashing old complaints and expressing relief to be free of the kid. I stood thinking that this was the kind of kid for which our school is designed. As they talked I felt a courseness developing within me.

Thoreau wrote:

As I go through the fields, endeavoring to recover my tone and sanity and to perceive things truly and simply again, after...dealing with the most commonplace and worldly-minded men, and emphatically trivial things, I feel as if I had committed suicide in a sense." (The Journal, pg. 80)

I left the group and went into my classroom and be alone. I'm not sure I recovered my tone or sanity, but it was a step in the right direction.

I noticed again how often the right direction is away from the crowd and trivial affairs.