Walden
Kyle and I went to Boston last weekend, and although it was supposed to be a work weekend for Kyle, taking all sorts of secret project photos, it seemed an awful lot like fun to me. We met fascinating people, like the singer Sarah Borrello who opened for Amanda Palmer in her series of semi-private concerts, and Sara Murphy, who is a wonderfully expressive model-actress currently living in Boston but also with ties to Philadelphia, which means we will be seeing a great deal of her in the future.
I haunted the foreign language bookstores in Cambridge and bought the complete memoir of George Sand, which I haven't been able to find anywhere until now. I've been learning all sorts of new French words as a consequence, like "acaperer," which means to monopolize. Now I just have to figure out how to conjugate it.
And I realized a dream, which was to see Walden Pond. I'd been to Concord, MA before, while in highschool. My family made a literary pilgrimage to see the homes of Louisa May Alcott (where her sister May's drawings can still be seen on the walls of her bedroom) and Hawthorne and the graves of the Transcendentalists, as well as the great Revolutionary War site of the Battle of Concord. But I'd never been to Walden.
Actually, I'd never felt a great need to go, having heard years ago that the area around the pond was over developed. I'd pictured a puddle of muddy water surrounded by sky scrapers. How wrong I was. Apparently, they've been working hard to preserve the area and create a gorgeous wild life and plant reserve. It was an amazing, calming, spiritual experience to walk through those trees, hearing the call and response of the birds overhead, to see the site of Henry David Thoreau's cabin and the pile of stones started by Bronson Alcott in the 1870s, and to be able to lose myself, even temporarily, in the thoughts and ideas that life in the city too often chases away. Even hearing the train was a reminder that Thoreau heard the same sound during the two years he lived there, and even walking to his parents' house in Concord took only 30 minutes. He was by no means completely isolated from civilization. But the impression is easily formed.
And now I have a cold. I'd like to think it's the distant offspring of a cough Thoreau had....
I haunted the foreign language bookstores in Cambridge and bought the complete memoir of George Sand, which I haven't been able to find anywhere until now. I've been learning all sorts of new French words as a consequence, like "acaperer," which means to monopolize. Now I just have to figure out how to conjugate it.
And I realized a dream, which was to see Walden Pond. I'd been to Concord, MA before, while in highschool. My family made a literary pilgrimage to see the homes of Louisa May Alcott (where her sister May's drawings can still be seen on the walls of her bedroom) and Hawthorne and the graves of the Transcendentalists, as well as the great Revolutionary War site of the Battle of Concord. But I'd never been to Walden.
Actually, I'd never felt a great need to go, having heard years ago that the area around the pond was over developed. I'd pictured a puddle of muddy water surrounded by sky scrapers. How wrong I was. Apparently, they've been working hard to preserve the area and create a gorgeous wild life and plant reserve. It was an amazing, calming, spiritual experience to walk through those trees, hearing the call and response of the birds overhead, to see the site of Henry David Thoreau's cabin and the pile of stones started by Bronson Alcott in the 1870s, and to be able to lose myself, even temporarily, in the thoughts and ideas that life in the city too often chases away. Even hearing the train was a reminder that Thoreau heard the same sound during the two years he lived there, and even walking to his parents' house in Concord took only 30 minutes. He was by no means completely isolated from civilization. But the impression is easily formed.
And now I have a cold. I'd like to think it's the distant offspring of a cough Thoreau had....