After-Orts
#139
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Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.
— Leonard Cohen, in How the Light Gets In, a New Yorker profile (Oct.17, 2016) by David Remnick
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/leonard-cohen-makes-it-dark
If there had been a Mrs. Thoreau, … she would’ve scoffed at his nonsense — “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” He was chewing on the wrong weed when he came up with that, a line that has led people to waste years writing a bad novel who could’ve been happy bus drivers. Henry wouldn’t have said so much about the necessity of solitude with a woman looking over his shoulder.
— Garrison Keillor, in a Substack post:
A Lutheran Anthem
by Garrison Keillor
Episcopalians are proud of their faith,
You ought to hear ’em talk.
Who they got? They got Henry the 8th
And we got J. S. Bach.
Henry the 8th’d marry a woman
And then her head would drop.
J. S. Bach had twenty-three kids
’Cause his organ had no stop.
If Thoreau were a woman, and this goes for all the rest of the Trancendentalists, he could never have written that stuff -- women, above all if they have children, cannot afford to follow their inner bent no matter what; they have other's lives to take care of. Much as I admire him and Emerson, they were men writing for men.