GC: A soul-traveler. Never to forget whom we might be, to what we might aspire.
HDT: I was "fed on the pap" at Harvard, and then decided I must "finish my education at a different school."
GC: The school of hard knocks and the school of life".
HDT: I taught a bit. But the principal wanted me to inflict corporal punishment--to beat their kind of nonsense into the boys! In my early 20s, I resigned my post. My older brother John and I founded our own little progressive school. But, John nicked himself when shaving one day, and died in my arms from tetanus.
GC: Our lives are shaped by scratches".
HDT: The Emersons took me under their great wings. I tutored their kids. Ralph Waldo advised me to keep a journal, to observe, to listen, to reflect. He traveled a lot in Europe. (Of "tourist"-travelers he wrote: "They carry ruins to ruins.") I was sort of his grounds-keeper and caretaker and live-in handyman when he was away. He let me live on his land at Walden Pond--remote, but not inaccessible. In two years there, I wrote "Walden" and "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers." I self-published my books--1,000 copies each. I still had most of them stored in my family home when I "shuffled off this mortal coil"!
GC: And you lectured, when you could.
HDT: "An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not." I wrote, and spoke out, against slavery. I espoused John Brown's war against it. People thought me crazy for supporting a man who wanted to start a revolution to stop that horrid practice!
GC: "He had the courage to face his country herself, when she was in the wrong." So you wrote in your "Plea for Captain John Brown." We have these kinds of people now: Snowden, Manning, Assange, Kathy Kelly, Greenwald, Cynthia McKinney, Cindy Sheehan, Lynn Stewart, Ellsberg, Blum, Atzmon, the too-soon-gone, Michael Hastings. And many unsung heroes. A nascent movement called "Occupy"--slumbering now, but it will revive.
HDT: It never ends. Every action we take, we take for all time. That's the weight of our actions and decisions! That's the greatness of it all! This continuum--within us and within all Nature. That's the responsibility we bear--to our souls, and to the Self within. So I wrote in "Walden": "I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta". I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! There I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug" and our buckets grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges."
GC: That's what you brought to American Literature: that sense of timelessness. Virginia Woolf suggested it, too, in "Orlando"". And there was something else you gleaned. A persistence of personality; rebirth". How did you put it?
HDT: "The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of divinity: and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed."
GC: And another". I memorized this: "Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages." That reminds me of Blake writing about "cleansing the doors of perception." Our great band, "The Doors," took their name from that. Aldous Huxley took the title of his last book from that.
HDT: Ideas don't die. The Self is an idea. Blake also wrote: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand./ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,/ And Eternity in an hour."
(A gentle breeze blew, and I remembered where I was--remembered in a dream. I shook my head--)
GC: It's not like that now! It can never be like that again, I think. We're so damn "wired" now. It's a 24-7 world. I don't have to read the Vedas to know about India now. I pick up my "smart phone" and call my friend there--
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