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Walden passage

 

            
            
             Henry David Thoreau went to live in the woods to try to discover a higher, simpler meaning to life. In one of his new intellectual outlooks on life he summarizes the everlasting course of time and the individual lives of humans and material objects by comparing them to a stream in which he fishes in because he wants to voice his opinion on the understanding that little things like life in the flow of time are just currents sliding away in a stream. .
             I interpreted the following passage: .
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             "Time is but the 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 think current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and think rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.".
             Thoreau's ideas flow into different concepts throughout this entire passage, opening up his beliefs on life and time. Interpretively, the stream he fishes in is him existing in time. Thoreau drinking at the stream but at the same time seeing the sandy bottom and detecting its depth is him living life and acknowledging how short and futile it is. By stating, "Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains", he conveys that individual lives and material possessions die or break, but time never fades away.


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