Walden

I was lucky to have another chance of absorbing the serenity of Walden Pond. It had been more than a year since my last visit. Last fortnight, I took some time out on a weekend to visit Walden Pond. Walden has remained my all time favorite book. In spite of having many visitors that weekend, I could still feel the grace and serenity the pond carried in its stillness. There were a few people swinging their fishing rods. Even the visitors once they entered the pond area suddenly became silent as if the pond imposes a silence on its patrons. I saw a person sitting on the shore, reading Walden. Some others were walking their children on the natural pathways on the borders of the pond.

For those of you who are new to this column, This column is named after  Henry David Thoreau’s classic “Walden”, which even today is read by millions the world over. Thoreau was just 27 yrs when he decided to live near the pond in Ralph emerson ’s property, in a single room cottage which he built by himself. He stayed there for a year and a half, observing nature. He published his observations as “Walden”. Thoreau believed in simple living and high thinking.Generations since have been inspired by the classic.  Walden had put ecology into the limelight. Man’s love for the nature and his

Inquisitiveness to understand its mysteries had found an expression in Thoreau’s work.

I passed by Robert Frost’s grave at Bennington in Vermont. “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world” read Frost’s epitaph at old church. I recollected my favorite Frost Poem (not “The road not taken”), driving through the White Mountains and then onto Moosehead Lake in Maine, home to Longfellow and Stephen King.

THE MASTER SPEED

No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still--
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
that life is only life forevermore
together wing to wing and oar to oar.

• Robert Frost.

The next day, I was at MIT Musuem watching Kismet, a robot which understands and emphasizes with a human’s emotions. There were many other such inventions going on, trying to make robots imitate the humans. Though the ongoing research intrigued me as an engineer, I came out amused because just that morning I had been at Walden Pond, a living experiment of Man’s desire to be one with the nature. 20 Miles away, there was yet another experiment going on at MIT, Man’s desire to recreate himself. It seemed as if we have given up understanding our true nature and our place in the Natural world. Hence we were rather better trying to create units which recreated Man.