Walking the Wall

A popular passage from Thoreou’s Walden was quoted in a movie I watched tonight, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” the full paragraph of the work takes that further:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is
called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city
you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with
the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious
despair is concealed even under what are called the games and
amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after
work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things (Ch.1, Para.9).

This
was quoted in response to the question as to why someone would do
something completely outside of the bounds of their normal personality,
would change their life up in some little or big way that seems a shot
out of the dark. In the end, the answer wasn’t anything big, the main
character wasn’t unhappy with his wife, or his children, or even his
life as a whole–he just wanted something more, some bit more of
happiness–he hid it because he was ashamed at wanting more. As if
every human being doesn’t deserve every bit of happiness they can
scrape up. I think that people are creatures of habit, we get into ruts
and just move along as we go, until we don’t even really think about
life, we just move along with the flow. While there is a certain
comfort in that, we run the risk of not really seeing the world around
us, of plodding around instead of taking a twirl in the middle of the
side walk instead of just walking quietly with our eyes to the ground.
There was a man who worked in the apartment where I grew up, he was a
big man, very quiet, in fact, I don’t know if I ever heard him say
anything to anyone. He was the janitor and while we used to say he was
crazy–looking back I can still see him dancing with a broom down the
side walks, light on his feet for such a big man. He would freeze when
he knew some one was looking, and only once they had looked away and
moved on, would he resume his dance. In a dream of him, I would see him
dancing down the middle of a road, people all lined on the streets as
if they were waiting for a parade to go by, and he wouldn’t stop
dancing just because people were looking, he would dance and dance and
dance with the most amazing smile on his face–there would always be
time for play, always time to dance.