Culture October 26, 2021

After reading Walden, I like to rip it up. Not the book itself, but the sentences and passages that Thoreau so painstakingly put together. When I do, I make it a party, or at least a group affair. On various occasions I have convinced a small group of people to choose sentences at random (some short, some Thoreauvianly long) and then to read those sentences aloud, simultaneously, at various different tempos and modulating volumes, while standing in a circle. The result is an aural montage: some words and phrases lost in the river-rush of words, some bobbing to the surface,