Jack Saturday

Saturday, August 20, 2005

A Tribute

I want to report one of the most beautiful discoveries I have stumbled across on the Internet since The Discourses Of Rumi. The "Blog Of Henry David Thoreau." I have spent wonderful evenings this summer savoring "Greg's" archives, reminded first of what W.B. Yeats said about the works of William Blake: "it is as though the spray of an inexhaustible fountain of beauty was blown into our faces.” -- and secondly of a poem by Robert Frost, which ends,

I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.


.......................


Nature never makes haste; her systems revolve at an even pace. The bud swells imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as though the short spring days were an eternity. All her operations seem separately for the time, the single object for which all things tarry. Why, then, should man hasten as if anything less than eternity were allotted for the least deed? Let him consume never so many eons, so that he go about the meanest task well, though it be but the paring of his nails. If the setting sun seems to hurry him to improve the day while it lasts, the chant of the crickets fails not to reassure him, even-measured as of old, teaching him to take his own time henceforth forever. The wise man is restful, never restless or impatient. He each moment abides there where he is, as some walkers actually rest the whole body at each step, while others never relax the muscles of the leg till the accumulated fatigue obliges them to stop short. As the wise is not anxious that time wait for him, neither does he wait for it.
Thoreau's Journal: 17-Sep-1839

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