The writer at the Grave of Henry David Thoreau (Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Mass.)
After a few month away, I’m back to some writing. Sometimes you can go for months without the mood striking you, and so it goes. Recently, I’ve been reading Eric Weiner’s wonderful travelogue, The Geography of Bliss. In describing “the happy person”, he quotes the British philosopher Bertrand Russel: “Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joy that it affords, untroubled by the thoughts of death because he feels himself not really separated from those who will come after him. It is in such a profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.”
Earlier this year I took a trip to Concord, Mass. and felt a bit of this “profound instinctive union”. For me however, this bliss and happiness comes not from connecting with “those who come after”, but rather with “those who came before”. I find a sublime giddiness when history smacks me in the face. In Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, there is a little dirt trail running up a steep but short ridge. When it crests, you come face to face with history. Here are the graves of Thoreau, Alcott (Louisa May & Bronson), Emerson, and Hawthorne (along with his artist wife, Sophia Peabody), all within ten yards on each other. I felt at first disoriented, and a little intoxicated (hence the look on my face in the above photograph). But then came understanding: just as Jefferson, Adams, et al. created Political America, these people, whose mortal remains were at my feet, created Cultural America. Ahh…..a “hyper-senstivity” of history.
0 Responses to “Back to some writing & some history……”