Lol who can't take a joke here? Did anyone seriously think A) that I think Octavious is going to hell or B) that I take delight in the fact? Lmao I was just fucking with him, obviously.
Normally online you use "lol" and "haha" to signal that what you are saying is a joke.
That being said it certainly is dismaying the way Octavious seems to think he knows everything he needs to know about the man when it's clear he knows nothing. Thoreau's quote is a manifestation of his refusal to lie to himself, and of his lifelong endeavor to meet the world head-on and "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
The quote you mocked is a defense of the examined life and the fruit it bears. Certainly if you knew anything about Thoreau you would know he was fulfilled. He even writes at one point that in the cosmic lottery there must have been some error in his favor for him to be so happy and at peace. And though he has a "hermit" reputation because he spent a lot of time alone and never married, he also lived with his family the lion's share of his life and was part of a community that ultimately admired, supported, and did indeed love him. Emerson's eulogy of the man should attest as much.
"His poem entitled "Sympathy" reveals the tenderness under that triple steel of stoicism, and the intellectual subtility it could animate. His classic poem on "Smoke" suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides. His biography is in his verses. His habitual thought makes all his poetry a hymn to the Cause of causes, the Spirit which vivifies and controls his own.
'I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before;
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore.'
And still more in these religious lines:--
'Now chiefly is my natal hour,
And only now my prime of life;
I will not doubt the love untold,
Which not my worth or want hath brought,
Which wooed me young, and woos me old,
And to this evening hath me brought.'
....
The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst of his broken task, which none else can finish,-- a kind of indignity to so noble a soul, that it should depart out of Nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he is. But he, at least, is content. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home."
And I will leave it at that.
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My first publication
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