What I Learned Today

He was a man of independence and learning, with passion for his convictions and love for nature. But less often do we hear of Thoreau’s feelings towards women. His biographers note his marriage proposal to Ellen Seawall (who rejected him) and the love poems he sent to Mary Russell (whom he never proposed to). More mysteriously, Thoreau himself wrote in his diary:

“The obstacles which the heart meets with are like granite blocks which one alone cannot move. She who was as the morning light to me is now neither the morning star nor the evening star. We meet but to find each other further asunder, and the oftener we meet the more rapid our divergence. So a star of the first magnitude pales in the heavens, not from any fault in the observer’s eye nor from any fault in itself, perchance, but because its progress in its own system has put a greater distance between.”

This was however recorded 10 years after his compositions for Mary. Was he looking back on the past? Or was he enamored of another, whose ardor for him had dimmed? No matter the reason, this poignant prose speaks of a loss and melancholy that reaches across the years to today.

[Thanks to The Blog of Henry David Thoreau, which posts excerpts from his diaries on a daily basis.]

Robert Frost had some similar sentiments to share:

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
— Reluctance

This treason of acceptance is, however painful, a part of life. But our poets can take that moment and paint it in beautiful words and hang it on the wall for us to acknowledge, and consider, and deliberate upon. Who does not prefer, in theory, to yield with grace to reason? And yet who does not find it, in reality, to be all-nigh unbearable?