22 out of 22 people found this review helpful.
Walden: A Call to Spiritual Arms
Date of Review: May 3, 2000
I love shorewalks in the evening. I love the way great, grey waves, shaggy
with foam, shatter on the broken shoreline; the meandering jags of chalky
cliffs scrawled along the skyline. I love how the sea seems to sweat
sunbeams, as the dusk-clouds whirl in a cotillion of color. I love the beach, bearded with tiny rills, and the haze of stars in the horizon. Even
more, I love to take strolls in the surf at dawn. I love the shuttered eyes of whitewashed adobe houses, particolored parasols askew in the slate-hued sand piles. I love the tulip blush of sun, the sky flushing fucshia. I love the peopleless piers, the uncrowded concrete. As the people of the world are collectively blinking their sleep-smeared eyes, I am miles away in the misty maze of shore, lost in a narrow lane of land that bookends an eternity of waves. Most of all, I love the loneliness.
Man is a gregarious creature, yes! But I am not. "There is a rapture in the lonely shore...\I love not man the less, but nature more," wrote Byron. There is something to this continuum of sky and sea, the slow shuffle shoreward of the tide: a loveliness, a joy. Perhaps that's why I can identify so readily with Henry David Thorea's Walden, an extended essay on Thoreau's observations of spiritual seclusion. The book was radical in its day. The notion of an Oversoul, a sort of amorphous spiritual jellyfish from whose tendrils the entire universe suckles, was revolutionary in a time when crucifixes and catechisms were still in fashion. Although Thoreau gravitated toward the woods(whereas, I gravitated toward the shore), we both share the same vista, the same mental view. In the six-lane, nine-to-five, hustle and bustle of modern life, we have homogenized the material and the spiritual. Our spiritual, emotional, and mental welfare is meted by the bulge of our wallets, the size of those chrome contraptions that lurk in our garages. We need to cloister ourselves away from the caterwaul of sirens, the bleat of microwave ovens, for a good length of time, and, as Byron said," steal from all I have been, or may be; to mingle with the universe and feel that
which I cannot express, yet cannot all conceal."
