The Other Side of Silence

The rise and fall. Doomed to fail are nations founded on the belief that people can take what they want, and sell what doesn’t belong to them. Likewise, individual lives.

Throw it away. Out of sight, out of mind? Or, out of sight, out of our minds?

Thoreau’s journal, February 19, 1854.

Many college text-books which were a weariness and a stumbling-block when studied, I have since read a little in with pleasure and profit. . . . Types almost arrange themselves into words and sentences as dust arranges itself under the magnet. Print! it is a close-hugging lichen that forms on a favorable surface, which paper offers. The linen gets itself wrought into paper that the song of the shirt may be printed on it. Who placed us with eyes between a microscopic and a telescopic world? . . . Saw an otter track near Walden.

Tell me it isn’t so, and I am sure it is. Tell me it is so — now you have me wondering.

Read the nineteenth and twentieth chapters of Middlemarch.

. . . If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. . . .

Two squirrels chasing each other up, down, and around the trunk of the big fir tree behind the house, well aware I’m watching, leaf rake in hand, from just a few feet away.

September 15, 2023.

[ 1868 ]