Morning with Henry

This morning I was reading from The Selected Journals of Henry David Thoreau. I find I can purchase the complete fourteen volume edition of  the Journals in like-new “collectible” condition from Amazon.com for $220, and they’d look mighty fine in my living room bookcase proclaiming to all what a well-read fellow I am. 

On the other hand, I’ve found the 319 pages of my Signet Classic paperback are adequate to my needs. It rests on my bedside bookshelf, where it impresses nobody, but is handy for dipping into. Today I happened to open it to July 16, 1851 where the sage observes, “In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet to me.”   

I wondered if he was thinking of William Wordsworth who had died the previous year. 

“What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;”

Personally I don’t remember that my senses were sharper in my youth, although I wear glasses and must admit people seem to be speaking more softly than they used to.  I think it’s not vestigial memories of heaven that fires the awareness of children, but the newness of the world and their eagerness to take it in.  I was bathing my younger daughter when she put her mouth on the rim of the tub, and it suddenly came to me that I perfectly recalled the wet, smooth hardness of the curved porcelain and the slightly soapy taste.  She was an explorer of the world, and I had been one too.   

The other day my granddaughter, who is coming up to two years old, heard that there are dinosaur bones at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and demanded, “Put my sneakers on and let’s go.” Ruminating through books and websites, I find I have lost a little of that pure flame.  Learning is the business of us all, but it’s particularly urgent to the very young. 

I love Wordsworth’s image of plump babies descending from heaven trailing clouds of glory, but had the poet consulted midwives, he would have found that newborns are not washed to clean them of stardust. Their holiness is their humanity, and they dive into life headfirst.  I now take my learning at a leisurely pace and am apt to do it in my stocking feet. 

Reading The Selected Journals this morning I was struck how like a blog they are, and to my great pleasure I find that there is a blog giving a journal entry for the very day of the year you access it. I bookmarked the site and intend to look at it during my morning computer time. It’s Thoreau in exactly the dosage I’m inclined to take him. He makes an amiable companion for a short visit, but he does go on.  Should you hunger for the whole enchilada, Thoreau’s complete journals are available for free.