Some of my most enjoyable moments were in the long storms of spring and autumn, which kept me confined to my room in the morning and afternoon, with only the incessant rain and roaring comforting me; I entered the long twilight from the early morning of the light, during which many thoughts took root and developed themselves. In the pouring rain from the northeast, the houses in the village were put to the test, the maids had already carried buckets and mops to stop the flood from flooding at the gate, and I sat behind the door of my little hut, the only door, but admiring the protection it gave me.
In a thunderstorm, a bolt of lightning struck a pine on the other side of the lake, and from top to bottom, it drew an inch, or more than an inch deep, four or five inches wide, a distinctly spiral-shaped deep groove, like a groove you carved on a cane. I passed it again that day, and when I looked up and saw this trace, I was amazed, it was the trace left by a terrible, irresistible thunder eight years ago, but now it was clearer than before.
People often say to me, "I think you must be lonely living there, and you always want to be close to people, especially on rainy and snowy days and nights." I replied with a tickle in my throat—
The whole earth we inhabit is just a small dot in the universe. There's a star over there, and our astronomical instruments can't measure how big it is, so how far can the two most distant inhabitants above it be? How can I feel lonely? Isn't our earth in the Milky Way?
It seems to me that the question you are asking seems to be the least important. What kind of space can separate people from people and crowds and make people feel lonely? I have found that no matter how hard the two legs try, they cannot bring the two hearts closer together.
Who would we most like to live next to? People do not all like the station, the post office, the bar room, the venue, the school, the grocery store, the volcano, the five-point area, although people often meet there, people are more willing to approach the inexhaustible source of life, nature, in our experience, we often feel such a need, like the willows at the water's edge, must stretch its roots in the direction of water.
Man's personalities are different, so the needs are also very different, but a wise man must dig his cellar in nature, the source of inexhaustible resources...
One night on my way to Walden Lake, I caught up with a fellow citizen who had accumulated what he called "a very impressive estate," though I never saw it well. That night he drove a pair of cattle to the market, and he asked me, how did I come up with it, would rather give up so much fun in life?
I replied that I was sure I enjoyed my life like this; I was not joking. So I went home, went to bed, and let him walk in the darkness and mud to Brighton—or rather, to the city of light—probably not until dawn.
For a deceased person, any awakening, or resurrection, renders all time and place irrelevant. Everywhere this can happen is the same, and there is indescribable joy for our senses. But most of us only let superficial, very short-lived things become the work we do. In fact, these are the reasons why we are distracted.
The closest thing to all things is the force that created everything. Second, the universal law close to us is constantly at work. Secondly, it is not the craftsmen we employ, although we rejoice in talking to them, but the master, whose creations we ourselves are.
We are experimental material, but I am interested in this experiment. In such a situation, can't we leave for a moment our society full of right and wrong – and let only our own thoughts inspire us? Confucius said it well, "Virtue is not alone, but there will be neighbors." ”
With thoughts, we can rejoice in a conscious state. As long as our minds make a conscious effort, we can rise above any action and its consequences; all good and bad things, like a rushing current, pass by us.
We are not completely entangled in nature. I can be a piece of driftwood in a rapids, or I can be Indra looking at the dust from the air. Watching a play may well have touched me; on the other hand, events that were more at stake in my life may not have touched me. I know only that I exist as a human being; I can say that I am a stage that reflects my thoughts and feelings, and I have a more or less dual personality, so that I can see myself from a distance as if I were looking at others.
No matter how intense the experience I have, I can always realize that a part of me is criticizing me from the sidelines, as if it were not a part of me, just a bystander, not sharing my experience, but noticing it: just as he is not you, he cannot be me. When the drama of life is finished, it is likely to be a tragedy, and the audience will go on its own. With regard to this second personality, this is naturally fictional, merely a creation of imagination. But sometimes this dual personality can easily make it difficult for others to be neighbors and make friends with us.
Most of the time, I feel that loneliness is good for health. With a companion, even the best companion will soon get tired and make it very bad. I love solitude. I have not met a better companion than loneliness. Going abroad to be in the crowd is probably more lonely than being alone indoors. A man who is thinking and working is always alone, let him love wherever he is, and loneliness cannot be calculated by the distance a person leaves his companions.
Truly diligent students, in cambridge college's most crowded hive, were as lonely as a dervish in the desert. The farmer may spend the whole day alone in the fields, in the forest, ploughing the land or cutting down, but he does not feel lonely, because he has a job; but at night when he returns home, he cannot meditate alone indoors, but must go to the place where "the man who can see him" to entertain, with his thoughts, to compensate for his loneliness of the day; therefore he wonders why the students can sit indoors all day and all night without being bored and "melancholy"; but he does not understand that although the students are indoors, they work in his fields. Harvesting in his forest, like a farmer in a field or forest, after which the student also has to find recreation and socialize, although that form may be more condensed.
Socializing tends to be cheap. The time of being together is too short for each other to gain anything new and valuable.
We see each other three times a day, and everyone re-tastes our stale cheese. We must all agree to a number of rules, the so-called etiquette and courtesy, so that this regular gathering can be peaceful and avoid public quarrels, and even red-faced.
We met at the post office, at social places, every night by the fire; we lived too crowded, interfering with each other, holding each other together, so I think there was a lack of respect for each other.
Of course, for all important and enthusiastic gatherings, it is enough to have a little less often. Imagine a female worker in a factory – never to live alone, and even to dream is difficult to be alone. It would be much better if there was only one person a mile, like I am here. Man's value is not on his skin, so we don't have to touch the skin.
I had heard of someone lost in the forest, collapsed under a tree, hungry and exhausted, and with a lack of physical strength, a sick imagination that allowed him to see many strange apparitions around him, which he thought were all true. Similarly, when both body and soul are healthy and powerful, we can constantly be inspired by similar, but more normal, and natural societies to discover that we are not lonely.
I have many companions in my house; especially in the morning when no one has come to visit me. Let me give you a few metaphors that may convey some of my situation.
I'm no lonelier than the loud-laughing diving birds in the lake, and I'm no lonelier than Walden. I would like to ask who is the companion of this lonely lake? However, on its blue waves, there are not blue devils, but blue angels.
The sun is lonely, unless the sky is full of dark clouds, sometimes it seems as if there are two suns, but that one is false.
God is lonely—but the devil is never lonely; He sees many partners; He is to form a gang.
I am no lonelier than a hairy flower or a dandelion on a pasture, and I am no lonelier than a bean leaf, a soy sauce grass, or a horse fly, or a bumblebee.
I am no lonelier than Mill Creek, or a hyacinth chicken, or the North Star, or the south wind, and I am no lonelier than the rain of April or the melting snow of the first month of the new house.
In the long winter night, when the snow was drifting wildly and the wind was howling in the forest, an elderly immigrant, the original owner, came to visit me from time to time, and it was said that Walden Lake was dug up, paved with stones, and planted pine trees along the lake; he told me the eternal story of the old and the new.
The two of us had a pleasant evening, full of sociable joy, exchanging pleasant opinions on things, though there was no apple or cider—the wisest and most humorous friend, I really liked him, who knew more secrets than Guffy or Wallace; though he was said to be dead, no one pointed out where his grave was.
There was also an old lady who lived near me, and most of whom could not see her at all, but I was sometimes glad to go for a walk in her fragrant herb garden, to collect herbs, and to listen to her fables; for she had an incomparably rich creativity, and her memory went all the way back to the pre-mythological times, and she could tell me the origin of each fable, which fable was based on which fact, for it all happened when she was young. A rosy, lean old lady, who was full of excitement regardless of the weather or the season, seemed to live longer than her children.
The sun, the wind and rain, the summer, the winter – the indescribable purity and grace of nature, they always provide so much health, so much joy! Such sympathy for us human beings, if someone grieves for a legitimate reason, then nature will be moved, the sun will dim, the wind will lament like a living person, tears will fall from the clouds, and the trees will shed their leaves and put on their mourning clothes in midsummer. Shouldn't I be connected to the land? Am I not myself part of the dirt of green leaves and greens?
What medicine makes us sound, quiet, and content? Not your or my great-grandfather's, but our nature's great-grandmother, the tonic of vegetables and plants throughout the universe, who herself is forever young and lives longer than Thomas Thomas. Pyle lasted longer, adding to her well-being with their decaying fats.
Not the kind of potion made by the jianghu doctor's formula, mixed with the waters of the Styx and the Dead Sea, in the kind of medicine bottles that we sometimes see bottles on the shallow, long, black boat-like cart, that is not my panacea: let me take a sip of the pure dawn air.
O air of dawn! If people are not willing to drink this spring at the source of the day, then, ah, we must put it in bottles; put them in stores and sell them to those in the world who have lost their reservations for the dawn. Remember, however, that it can be refrigerated under the cellar and kept until noon, but long before that, open the cork and follow the footsteps of the dawn westward.
I do not worship the goddess of health of Nass, she is the daughter of the ancient herbalist Escuapis, and on the monument she holds a snake in one hand and a cup in the other, and the snake often drinks the water in the cup; I prefer to worship Hippo, the cupkeeper of Jupiter, the goddess of youth, who drinks for the gods, and she is the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, who can rejuvenate the gods and men.
She was perhaps the healthiest, strongest, and best-bodied maiden ever on earth, and wherever she went, it became spring.