my mind drifted to thoughts of Walden and Thoreau today when any chance arose. there aren't a lot of natural swimming holes hereabouts, so Walden shimmers with that attribute. my family aimed elsewhere for swimming excursions, as I was growing up. my grandmother lived in the town of Townsend, on the NH border, so we went there. the VFW kept up a swimming area across the street from the little store my grandmother had there. saturday nights thru the summer there were chicken barbecues with a band concert after. it was like Mayberry, or one of Mark Twain's stray warm memories of youth. a few years ago Beth and I were coming back from western Mass and made our way to the swimming hole. the river was gone, gone I tell you. only the bare bones of the band box remained of, what, my youth? the river, no major artery, had apparently been diverted. my friend grew up in Concord and fondly remembers the cement pier that stretched into the water of Walden, perfect for leaping into the water from. I always considered that thing monstrous, but I saw with different eyes than my friend. just as the many visitors to Walden see different uses. as Beth and I walked along one time, we unavoidably heard a conversation between a man in the water and one on shore. the one in the water was opining about the Jungian qualities of swimming. etc, as you might imagine. and sure, some people want to enact an Annie Dillard moment. I mean that kind of self-conscious circumspection that accounts for a great deal of nature writing. I demarcate a difference in Thoreau, cheer me on at your pleasure. sure he was a hearty blowhard, insofar as he was loaded to the gills with aphoristic concentrations. I think he's hilarious and fresh air often, but still, you know, he could get caught up in a John Brown mystique. I forgive him, as I should forgive all such eager failings in judgment. but I see conviction in his process, or more aptly: actions in his words rather than words in his actions. the Annie Dillard sort of precognitive philosophizing is thoughtfully glib. which doesn't sound like I'm making sense. I mean something about how the subject jolts her expression, like her thinking is controlled by the structure of essay, and not in Montaigne's embracing sense (whose effort of comprehensive consideration reminds me of Thoreau). rather, Dillard defines territories of populated worth. I offer Dillard only as an example of a collective of popular, or populist, writing. and maybe why I give Thoreau the nod is simply the palpable example of his cabin (by which I mean the replica sitting there near the parking lot, a couple hundred yards from the actual site of his cabin). that replica offers a wonderful, perhaps useful, picture. room enough for a bed, a desk and a chair. for all that, a kindly fireplace, and an open, brimming door. I see this as a vision of a writer. there would be room for that handful of books, more accurately that armful. say ten essential books. we just moved, as I've said. our books are in boxes, may remain thus for a while. which ones will call for me? as a writer, what books do I need? a writer writes. a writer is not a NYC bar. a writer is not a school or tenure track or political position. you know where this is going. a writer efforts letters, words and sounds. that uncluttered cabin is so much writing. it is the Bhagavad-Gita played as a trumpet. it is a walk out and about transmogrified into letters surrounding words. Walden Pond is a movie only vaguely starring the glacial pothole itself. people go there to exercise, to play, to relax, to talk, to eat, to imbibe some rarity of thought or mood, and all of this is right. the writer has this clean box of a room and the mechanism to enter the written motion. think of Thoreau with his outlook on the pond. his little desk upon which he writes his journal, tinged with the loss of his brother. I don't mean to make hero of Thoreau any more than call Walden Eden. neither assertion would be useful. Walden has just been particularized, and Thoreau is just another candidate in the flush. how crucial to remember this! we write poems not as proofs or definitions. we write what is with us, in our cabin, in the squared resonance of our place, here, now. if Don Henley had not come along, Walden would not be here? I don't know. I just want to stay with the particulars of the place. the one here and now, with all the words involved.