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Mom and Betty Jo, Joe’s mother, asked me to look through some of his books and find something to read or have read at the funeral. I read quite a bit of Leaves of Grass (which, I must report, I liked only in patches) and Walden. Several passages in the latter were underlined, helpfully; Walden was Joe’s essential book. As Ender’s Game is to me, so Walden to Joe.

I ended up picking two passages and a poem, all of which evoked Joe almost tangibly to me. I read them for Mom and Betty Jo and asked them to help me pick one, but they said they liked them all too much to decide. In the end I read all three. I’ve reprinted them below (edited slightly, as I read them, for brevity).

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves within and around him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

–Thoreau, Walden, p. 345

“The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands… It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets.

Everyone has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years… Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

Such is the character of that morrow with mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

–Thoreau, Walden, p. 353-354

Miracles

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,

Or stand under trees in the woods,

Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in bed at night with any one I love,

Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,

Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer fore-noon,

Or animals feeding in the fields,

Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,

The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,

The fishes that swim–the rocks–the motion of the waves–the ships with men in them,

What stranger miracles are there?

–Whitman, Leaves of Grass, p. 224-225