Henry David Thoreau on solitude and poverty

 

23 September 2017

Thinking this afternoon of the prospect of my writing lectures and going abroad to read them the next winter. I realized how incomparably great the advantages of obscurity and poverty which I have enjoyed so long (and may still perhaps enjoy)...I had spent my years hitherto, without care or engagement. I have given myself up to nature; I have lived so many springs and summers and autumns and winters as if I had nothing else to do but live them, and imbibe whatever nutriment they had for me... Ah, how I have thriven on solitude and poverty! I cannot overstate this advantage. I do not see how I could have enjoyed it, if the public had been expecting as much of me as there is danger now that they will. If I go abroad lecturing, how shall I ever recover the lost winter? 

                        --Henry David Thoreau, Journal; September 19, 1854.

Temporary Permanence

  

Labyrinth under leaves outside of Buddhist temple, Terrebonne Avenue;
this Buddhist temple used to be a part of Rosedale United Church

There is no real permanence to life, there is only change and impermanence. The opposite of change and impermanence isn't permanence, it is not a duality; we fool ourselves thinking things are dualities when they really have nothing to do with each other; is good the opposite of bad or are they totally different states of being? Writers have a claim on permanence, a temporary claim, and this lies in writing things down, this gives a kind of permanence to what we think or say. Of course, it is also a kind of folly, but who really cares? We prefer illusion over truth; all writing is illusion and impermanent and one day even Shakespeare's plays will disappear. Writing is folly if we think it will give us any permanence; life is not constituted to be permanent. So we vote for a temporary permanence, and we love irony.