You know, I’ve never really got on with
Henry David Thoreau’s writing. I mean
he’s a walker and I’m a walker, but as anybody can tell you there are as many
different kinds of walker as there are walkers.
And really he’s always been the kind of walker who gets on my wick, with
this kind of thing:
“To come down to my own
experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure
in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order—not Equestrians
or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and
honorable class, I trust. The Chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged
to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker—not
the Knight, but Walker, Errant.” Couldn’t
you just tone it down a bit Henry?
On the other hand Thoreau did have a fair
bit to say about cats, including, “The most domestic cat, which has lain on a
rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and
stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular
inhabitants.” Is this actually true, cat
lovers? It doesn’t sound true.
And of course most famously he also said.
“It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in
Zanzibar.” Which is obviously a
metaphor, I suppose, that heaven is on your own doorstep, kind of thing. I gather there really are really a lot of
cats in Zanzibar and I suppose Thoreau knew that, and although personally I
wouldn’t go to Zanzibar to count them, I’d be happy enough to go and look at them
and have a walk around them. They look
like this apparently:
But in fact the whole of that Thoreau
quotation runs as follows: “It is not worth the while to go round the world to
count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you
may perhaps find some ‘Symmes' Hole’ by which to get at the inside at last. England
and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front on this
private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of sight of land, though it
is without doubt the direct way to India.”
The Symmes here is John Cleves Symmes, who
believed the earth was hollow and that there were various, undiscovered
entrances – i.e. Symmes Holes, which a person could walk through and be in
the hollow, brightly lit interior of the earth.
I’ve been thinking a lot about holes
lately. The other day I found a man
spraying what you might call terraglyphs, or in any case strange symbols, on
the road surface outside the front gate, tracking the route of the gas lines,
he explained. The symbols looked like
this:
Yes, they’re about to start digging up the
street and replacing the ancient, endlessly cracking water and sewer
pipes. This is obviously a good thing in
the long run, but in the short run it’s going to make walking in the neighborhood
a lot harder. After the gasman had done
his work, another guy arrived and he painted some parallel white lines along
the length of the street, and it looked as though he was marking out a path or
walking route. Although of course that
wasn’t the purpose:
Next day some different guys arrived and
they had a big machine, kind of like a massive vacuum cleaner, the kind of
thing that might appear in robot wars, and it had blades, which they used to
cut along the white lines, and there was some kind of slush or I suppose
coolant, or perhaps lubricant, that got sprayed across the street as it went,
with an end result that looked like this:
The next step I guess is for a different
crew to come and start digging up the whole street. In fact they’ve done some of this piecemeal
over the years, and they go pretty deep – at least a man’s height – the earth
may not be hollow but there are obviously some little-explored cavities down
there.
Anyway, since walking in the neighbourhood
has become a bit tricky with all these holes and trucks and machines, I went
for a walk in downtown.
It was by no means hole-free, they’re
digging things up all over the place there too and it wasn’t absolutely cat-free either. I found this piece of terra-art – Felix painted,
or I suppose stenciled, on the ground.
It was the only cat I found. The
only one I needed to count.
