13 Years Ago TodayBy Moristotle
[Published originally on October 3, 2009.]
Having found Poet’s Walk gentle and fairly level last Saturday, I took my wife there today—and Siegfried, who was thrilled by the “new book” (as my wife phrased it) of all the unfamiliar scents he could put his quivering nose to. He and I had to walk ahead so that he wouldn’t in his eagerness continually run into her. But once, when we got far enough ahead (only ten or fifteen yards) for him to feel some disquiet apparently, he stopped and sat to wait for her, and in so doing reminded me of Wally’s doing the same on an autumn walk in Duke Forest two or three years ago. (I thought I’d blogged about this, but if I did I couldn’t find the post, unless it was “In the woods,” but the incident isn’t mentioned. I remember now, and mention here, Wally’s animating spirit.)
Near the end of Poets Walk (or the beginning, depending on where you start), there’s a “reflection pond” so picturesque that I wished I’d brought my camera (and would return with it the next morning):
And also at the end (or the beginning), there’s a display with a quotation from Emerson appropriate to my reflections on last week’s walk and talk here:
The first two lines appear in Emerson’s poem “Threnody,”1 a meditation on the loss of his animated five-year-old son Waldo to scarlet fever (1842), but the four lines together are from the little poem “Nature,”published in his Essays: Second Series (1844):
The rounded world is fair to see,Again, “the only ‘animated spirits’ that we have any experience of” are those of Nature, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, seemed to know it already2.
Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.
—p. 539, Library of America edition
of Emerson’s Essays and Lectures]
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- P. 120, Library of America edition of Emerson’s Collected Poems & Translations.
- “1841: First series of Essays published in March, and aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, pronounces it a ‘strange medly of atheism and false independence’...,” p. 1301, Chronology in Library of America edition of Emerson's Essays and Lectures.
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I like where my head was 13 years ago, especially its animation then, when I was only 66 years old.
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