Monday, October 22, 2007

A tweak

A new quote, a new mood, a slant for this blog: Henry David Thoreau, who says, 'What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.'

It strikes a chord particularly because I’ve come across that quite a lot recently, one way or the other. People banding together, physically, emotionally, and disappointingly, because it so goes against the spirit of the thing, intellectually. Banding together, not necessarily from genuine kinship, but because it gives them security. Not a thing wrong with that – smart fellows, pigs, but I do think it a bit chicken in people (I’ve got the animal kingdom awfully mixed up but you know what I mean).

So to Henry David, who knew a thing or two about walking alone… salut!

2 comments:

Sharada said...

Whoah! Even I've been witnessing loads of that! Kwazy, Kwazy world...
Just today, a group of us met up after college. People who have nothing in common, people who don't really enjoy each others' company.With a false sense of friendship. (The first image that sprang to my mind was the above incident when I finished reading the post).
And it also reminds of the oh-so-numerous times when one person stands up in class to voice an opinion, different from others. Everyone else too has opinions. They're just scared to articulate them. Stuck in a weird, strange comfort zone.

Destination Infinity said...

I think its easy for us to comment on the quote. Think of a situation where you are in medivial times where, you cannot hope to survive unless you kill, you cannot eat unless you till, there is perfect chaos and barbarism around you. What was wrong in wanting a little bit of security and order then? When every thing is given to us in a platter, we sometimes dont realize the value....