I would like to talk about a short passage from Walden, written by Henry David Thoreau. At the tail end of the chapter “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”, Thoreau talks about the relevance of time and the value of intellect as we see it. I gave my first attempt at close reading on my own and this is what I came up with.
In the beginning of the paragraph, Thoreau starts by writing, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” Thoreau compares our perception of time to the flowing water of a stream, unidirectional and never repeating itself. Each glance at the moving water in a stream offers a unique visual image that can be recalled from our memory, but never duplicated exactly. Similarly, our perception of time causes continual change which prevents us from recreating the past, forcing us to rely on memories to revisit those past moments.