Do You Remember?

July 16, 1851

            In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember well that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet to me.

            It's a sad fact of life.  As we get older, we get more blasé about life.  It's probably necessary, so that as an adult, you can better tolerate the ups and downs of life.  Look at how upset a young child gets over a broken toy, or the loss of a pet.  Imagine if we carried those volatile emotions throughout life.  How could we live with all the tragedy and suffering in the world?

            But the downside is our joys are lessened, too.  Even our best days aren't what they used to be.



            Below is a selection from William Wordsworth's poem "Intimations of Immortality".  Wordsworth is one of the English Romantic Poets, a group that preceded the Transcendentalists and shared a lot of their philosophy.

        V

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.