"Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a person who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper . . . In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself in a long while. I do not know but it is too much [even] to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and during the time that I did, it seems to me that I did not dwell in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees do not try to say so much to me."
Henry David Thoreau
If Thoreau lived in our era, he would be talking about text messages, email and Facebook instead of letters.
Photo: Two crows cawing at one another, Lory State Park, June 2, 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment