This feeling must have come after I re-read MLK's speech. Or maybe it has been lurking since New Year's Day. While away, I saw an old color movie with Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson. Jane is a widow with two children she has wrapped her life around, she lives in a small affluent town in Maine, or Mass. And she makes the mistake of falling in love with her landscape man (she explains to folks that he is definately not a gardener??) She goes to his cabin in the woods and picks up his book by Thoreau, it is open to Walden Pond, she understands him better and falls in love. Her neighbors and children find out and are embarrassed for her and themselves. She is persuaded to give him up, because, "What will people say??". Her best friend suggests that she get herself a new fangled television to keep herself company. She says no. A year later, her children are now ready to spread their adverturous wings so they buy mom a television to keep her company and warm. Oh yes, they want her to sell the house too. After all, it is far too big for one person. When I came home I looked for my copy but could not find it, I still think it is here somewhere :-(
A portion of Walden Pond, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." Awesome.
Sometimes I feel that I could live that way, but I fear that my former boss Walt Worrell was correct when told me that he thought that I would not be willing to move (he was thinking of buying another chain of newspapers, rural PA??, can't recall) because, I can't live without theater. I laughed and told him I love regional theater also. I admit now that he was dead on target at that time.
Henry David Thoreau, 1847
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