Friday, May 24, 2019

The sad surprise of remembering our past lives

May 24. 

Saturday. 

Our most glorious experiences are a kind of regret. Our regret is so sublime that we may mistake it for triumph. It is the painful, plaintively sad surprise of our Genius remembering our past lives and contemplating what is possible.

It is a regret so divine and inspiring, so genuine, based on so true and distinct a contrast, that it surpasses our proudest boasts and the fairest expectations. 

My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning. I frequently awake with an atmosphere about me as if my unremembered dreams had been divine, as if my spirit had journeyed to its native place, and, in the act of reentering its native body, had diffused an elysian fragrance around. 

The Genius says: 
"Ah! That is what you were! That is what you may yet be!” 
It is glorious for us to be able to regret even such an existence. A sane and growing man revolutionizes every day. What institutions of man can survive a morning experience? 

A single night's sleep, if we have indeed slumbered and forgotten anything and grown in our sleep, puts them behind us like the river Lethe. It is no unusual thing for him to see the kingdoms of this world pass.

It is remarkable that men commonly never refer to, never hint at, any crowning experiences when the common laws of their being were unsettled and the divine and eternal laws prevailed in them. Their lives are not revolutionary; they never recognize any other than the local and temporal authorities.

H. D Thoreau, Journal, May 24, 1851

A kind of regret . . . the painful, plaintively sad surprise of our Genius remembering our past lives and contemplating what is possible. See October 26, 1851 ("I awoke this morning to infinite regret . . .The instant that I awoke, methought I was a musical instrument . . . the organ and channel of melody, as a flute is of the music that is breathed through it . . .I heard the last strain or flourish, as I woke, played on my body as the instrument. Such I knew I had been and might be again, and my regret arose from the consciousness how little like a musical instrument my body was now.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Reminiscence and Prompting

My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning.  March 17, 1852 (“I am conscious of having, in my sleep, transcended the limits of the individual . . . There is a moment in the dawn . . . when we see things more truly than at any other time.”); October 29, 1857 ("Such early morning thoughts as I speak of . . . are a sort of permanent dream in my mind . . . we cannot tell what we have dreamed from what we have actually experienced. "); April 1, 1860 (“I am surprised that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, - not fore-thought, - so that I occasionally awake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I had never consciously considered before, and as surprising and novel and agreeable to me as anything can be. As if we only thought by sympathy with the universal mind, which thought while we were asleep”)


May 24. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, May 24 

The sad surprise of 
remembering our past lives –
That is what you were!

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024

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