LISTEN. It's glorious May in mid-TN, the season when I'm least apologetic for indulging WJ's advice to bring life "down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception." It is indeed intensely interesting, to slow down, look around, smell the roses, ride the bike, dip in the drink. Emerson had his bare common, James his Chocorua, I my redneck pool.
The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."
Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities. But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys.
Not me, not now, not in May.
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