Rainey Blogs on Some Days

I sometimes like to go for a lunchtime walk at Ramapo Valley County Reservation in Mahwah. It makes me think of what Walden Pond must have been like, except at Ramapo Reservation you have walking paths worn from too many suburbanites walking their dogs and carrying the poop around in bags. Some are even wearing flip-flops while they do this! This is why no one writes a book about a place like Walden Pond or Ramapo Reservation anymore. You can't have your mind ascend to literary heights when you are carrying, or surrounded by people who are carrying, bags of dog doo-doo and wearing flip-flops. Besides that little difference, Ramapo Reservation is probably quite similar to Walden Pond. Well, then there's another thing I just thought of. Maybe the signage that prohibits horses, guns, swimming, etc. is another important difference. I think I'd like to take it back. Maybe it's not like Walden Pond after all. Maybe the progress of civilization from traversing amidst raw, ...

"The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." Henry David Thoreau After watching Dead Poets Society over the weekend and hearing Thoreau's quote, I cannot get it out of my head. The weight of its truthfulness is bearing down on me. I think I am living a life of quiet desperation, the grand ambitions of youth replaced by "the resignation that living brings" to quote Jackson Browne's " Before the Deluge ." I think resignation and desperation go hand-in-hand. Desperation is the feeling. Resignation is one of its sources. Maybe most us reach that place where we resign ourselves to making a living because our families need us to do that. We step aside and let the next generation have their shot at life. "Happily ever after fails, we've been poisoned by these fairy tales" (Don Henley,  End of the Innocence ). Life never delivers what it promises, and this hollow ringing sound of resignation is even found among the famous and the su...