And Sometimes Where You Start Is Where You Have Already Been

After just writing that I plan on writing some posts using quotes from my commonplace books as prompts, I ran into an omission in my commonplace books of such enormity that I burst out laughing. 

My new-to-me Walden arrived a few weeks ago and I have been reading it slowly, sometimes setting it aside to read a library book (due dates, you know). Last week, I concluded chapter 2, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For."

At the very end of the chapter, beginning the very last paragraph, are lines that have become ones I hold dear in my heart: "Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars."

The cause for my laughter? When I look at my oldest commonplace book, Volume 1, which I filled with a number of quotes from Walden, guess which lines I did not bother to write down back then?

You got it.

I am fairly sure that if I thumb through later volumes, I will find that quote, probably more than once. But then? Nope. 

Going back to my last post and my wondering whether my curated quotes would hold up over time, this is not unrelated. In my early 30s, I read Walden closely  (as opposed to dashing it off as I have done more than once) and apparently did not find those sentences worth saving.

If I had to guess why, I would say that early-30s-April did not give much thought to time other than the most immediate days and hours. But older (way older) April, who has lived with cancer for so long? Oh, yeah, she is a lot more aware of time.

I have written before in this blog that somewhere along the line, probably post-diagnosis, I stopped thinking of time as linear. Time became far more fluid for me: a lake that I float in. For me, it was realizing that I couldn't control time or, more specifically, I couldn't control how much time I had left. That was where I let go of time, of trying to hold it tight in my closed fist. Don't get me wrong. Yes, there are birthdays and anniversaries and appointments tied to the calendar and I did not toss them out. But I threw time as in "how long?" into the lake years ago. 

Time was but the stream that Thoreau went a-fishing in. And time is but the lake that I go a-floating in.