"Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder."
-Carl, from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
i am learning more and more that i want to be needed. as much as i aspire to anonymity in the larger scheme of things, i can't imagine living a life in which no one person remembers the way that i laughed or hugged or kissed or cried. we only have this life, and in it we only have each other and the earth that we stand upon.
b
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Thanks for sharing this, B.
I read a poem today, which I highly recommend...
"A man leaves the world / and the streets he lived on / grow a little shorter."
from 'Streets'
by Naomi Shihab Nye
in 'Words Under the Words'
(I'll let you discover the rest of the poem)
That easily could've been written by Wendell Berry.
What's really interesting is that to some people this sort of anonymity is appealing. I imagine that for some, that's one of the draws of a city--getting lost in the crowd.
Post a Comment