Hello friends,
"The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. "
Is there anything new to say in the field of literature? Some people believe that whatever we try to say has been somehow said by someone in the past. Hafez says, “Love is but a single story and yet it is so strange that in every tongue it sounds new.”
What Thoreau says in the above piece is in fact true about his own words and the way they reach my heart in this distant land. That is how Thoreau’s voice sounds so sweet to me in the middle of literally hundreds of thousands of lines of poetry from Rumi, Saadi, Hafez and so many other Persian giants.
What is the significance of “distance” in Thoreau’s thinking? In the following piece Thoreau is again using the word distance.
“. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.”
What a precious lesson has Thoreau learned from what the leaves and needles do to the sound of the bell. I am very much interested to know what Thoreau thought about the way we must interpret his voice in other cultures and introduce him to their people.
Rumi too says, “Do not be merely a pitcher to transfer the water which others pour in you. Be the skies, be the clouds and pour down your own rains and snows.”
Like the atmosphere that poured the beautiful azure tints on Thoreau’s ridges, the intervening cultural distance between him and me has made Thoreau’s words much more beautiful to me. Such pieces take the American literature to the highest skies inside my heart.
Ali in
