Below is an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”. We humans take ourselves to be the peak of evolution and the yet we aspire to what animals possess already. How many times have we heard the call to “be now”. Animals cannot be anything else but now. Our imagination takes us out of ourselves. We can relive the past and we can project ourselves into various futures. This has given us dominion of them. We have the power – they have corner on being entirely immersed in the moment. They also have the dignity of being only who they are. With diligent effort and much practice we might just be able achieve their level of contentment.From "Song of Myself"
By Walt Whitman
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
3 comments:
Thank you for you Walt Whitman segment. Can you find the one in Song of Myself (I think) where he talks of being a cow and how cows just are, and they don't worry about anything, just chewing their cud? In other words living in the present. I have been looking for that for years and, short of reading everything he wrote, I can't find it. thanks.
I think that the above passage is exactly what you are thinking of. The only mention of the word "cow" in all of "Song of Myself" is in the passage I quote in the next posting.
Could you please tell me the original title of the picture and who painted it?
Thank you very much in advance!
Katharina.
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