A Poet's Journal: March 1st, 2013


March 1st, 2013

The first responsibilities ever given us always hold in memory a special charm and seem as if to have happened while we were facing the sun.  It was then that we could know our own thoughts and persist with determination in our ignorance.  This is something age comes to take for granted, desiring to shade inexperience when it believes our first responsibility no longer, so that everything else becomes proper and congenial to its attitude.  And though it may be nonetheless true that our experience has grown past the naive importance of youth, there is something left behind and secondary to our maturity.  We have forgotten the primitive state of what it is to call things what they simply are, but in naming them so, only see what we have known and not what we have thought about them.  The first act of putting a halter on a horse, or buckling the saddle, or rubbing down its legs, holds something which is lost when the task becomes familiar.  We forget, when we finally see the future open before us, that those new and inspired feelings associate with old experience and its origin, and the grand present that we live in, the arbitrary moment of our ancestors.

Douglas Thornton

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