Ask Chris: Where does the title of your blog come from?
Max asked me yesterday where the title of my blog comes from. He’s right, you can find the words “quiet desperation” in Pink Floyd’s Time:
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought Id something more to say
But I pulled it from the older source, Henry David Thoreau, in Walden:
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
In Max’s words: “God… Thoreau’s writing is often like being punched in the brain.”
Yep. Sure is. I hope, one day, to have the wisdom not to do desperate things.
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August 12th, 2009 at 6:05 am
After listening to Kelly's “Burn”, Thoreau will never be the same to me. I love the idea of being a noncomformist. I think that adolescents should not read this essay, however because they typically use it as an excuse to willfully obtuse – I know I did. Obtuse does not mean you are not comforming: You can conform by doing the opposite of what is conforming: so that's why stores like Hot Topic exist.