Flowers and cages, heaven and earth
"All intelligences awake with the morning" (para 14).
This line was significant to me because, when I am on my normal
sleep cycle, I will be up in the morning. When I need to function and be
somewhere, it just happens naturally for me. Only when I repeatedly tell
myself - you don't have to get up tomorrow - and I mean repeatedly, do I manage
to get up after 8am. Getting up at 5am though is easy as eating pie for
me. Thoreau uses so many passages like this in
chapter 2 that I had a hard time picking one! There are many references
to music and nature that I just adored! This one is particular though
because he continues to discuss how waking with a dawn within is the important
part of living.
His particular description of nature throughout demonstrates true
beauty in my mind. Being an advocate of "nothing is trivial,"
the notice of detail that Thoreau uses gives me warm fuzzies.
Chapter 4 was more intriguing to me than chapter 2! Entitled
"Sounds," it seems that Thoreau understands what he is writing - or
at least writes in such a manner as to provide the reader with all details needed
to see what he saw.
Again, I had a lot of trouble picking just one thing to notice -
since all the descriptions of birds stood out. One reference that was not
to birds was this, "I am more alone than ever" (para 14). This
reminded me of a quote from a movie I like, "Thing to remember is if
we're all alone, then we're all together in that too" (P.S. I Love You).
I thought this was interesting in Thoreau's work because it was a very
small section amidst all the confusion of the birds and bells. Perhaps
even though he is surrounded by nature, he really feels alone. It is hard
to feel together when you are not surrounded by humanity. Even though the
feelings people can get from nature are those of 'being at one with nature,' it
is not the same as the feeling we get when we are with others.
On the opposite side, everyone
really is alone, which is why the movie comes to mind. A lot of people
prefer to "suffer in silence" as the saying goes. That makes
them alone in that sense, but we have to realize that even when we do this, we
are not the only person on the planet doing that, which provides a sense of
togetherness. What a weird situation that puts people in.
It looks like you probably drafted this in MS-Word and pasted it here. When you do that, you also paste in a lot of formatting junk that typically screws up your blog.
You could change your blog design to one that uses black text, or you could remember to change the color of your text to white in MS-Word before you copy-paste. I actually encourage people to do their writing right in the blog window, in order to avoid these formatting problems.
I'd be happy to show you another trick or two during class sometime.