Thank goodness Henry David Thoreau spent so much time alone. I think if he hadn’t, he may not have been able to write as much. I found this wonderful blog a while back of his writings- It makes him there for me, on my phone, when I need him.
http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/
It’s an amazing thing, melancholy. You can’t tell when it will hit. When it does, Thoreau can be better than a pill for some.
When Thoreau wrote the above quote, he was responding to a letter from Harrison Blake. It is part of a collection of letters published as ‘Letters to a Spiritual Seeker’. I see the quote as one of Thoreau’s reminders that we, as alive humans, should experience every sensation with gusto. To be able to be melancholy is a privlege of the living.
When I found this little bird, I was with my kid and friends, in Oklahoma City, walking in the parking lot of a mall. Our original mission was to shop for a dress for a teenager, to wear to her father’s second wedding, which had triggered a sense of melancholy in the teen. The mall was enough melancholy for me. After we parked, our mission changed.
We noticed a little boy, about 5 years old, with a faded yellow transformers t-shirt on, and little jeans, standing alone on one of the green grass islands in the parking lot. I asked him what he was doing there, and how could I help, and he proceeded to tell me, in broken English/Spanish, that he had lost his dad in the mall, and had been long looking for his car in the parking lot.
After a bit more conversation, attempting to prove we were okay to trust, I suggested we should all go inside the mall and find some way to contact someone, but the little boy said wait- and grabbed my wrist. He pointed my hand to a tiny dead bird lying near his right foot. I looked at the boy clearly in the eyes, and then we regarded the bird.
We inspected the ants as they were slowly dismantling the birds’ eyes and beak. We noticed the itty bitty feet and how stiff they seemed, and curled up. We moved it a bit with that stick in the picture and noticed that it didn’t flop, and in Spanish, he said ‘it must be dead.’
I suggested that we take a picture of it so we can continue to look at it inside. He agreed that was a good idea, and then we proceeded with the plan. Simultaneously, we had reached security while he and I stayed put, and after about 20 minutes more, a large woman came flailing through the racks of clothes at Dillard’s and burst from the glass doors of the mall running toward us, singing ‘Angel! Angel! Angel!’
He sprinted to her and he was scooped up in her giant momma arms. She turned and hugged me with him still connected. She put him down and held my face for a second with her big hands, singing and crying ‘gracias gracias!’
Our melancholy lifted.
Incidentally, I like listening to Pablo Casals. He seems like he knows what the meaning of Thoreau’s quote is.
xian pitt 