Thinking about Thoreau today...

I've been rereading The Secret Life of Bees as my students read it for the first time. It is a book that speaks to so many different audiences, something that often seems to be a challenge with contemporary literature. My students are loving their version of it, and I am loving mine, as I just realized for the first time Kidd's nod to the American Romantics. Lily and Rosaleen flee Sylvan, S.C. during the summer of 1964 to escape from Lily's father and a group of racists who have brutalized Rosaleen for her attempt to register to vote. Quickly their escape turns into a journey toward a new way of life. As Lily and Rosaleen camp on the side of a river (halfway between their old life and their new one), Lily thinks of Thoreau and his decision to make his own society in the woods on Walden Pond. Here is the quote I was fumbling for in class today while trying to explain the scene at the river when Lily and Rosaleen figuratively baptize themselves into a new beginning. Lily even pops a red river rock in her mouth, "sucking for whatever marrow was inside it" (56):

"I went to the woods because I wished 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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

New appreciation for Sue Monk Kidd, and a renewed appreciation for HDT. A good day overall.