Readathon

Today we had a study in silence, a day of sedentary thought, a readathon. This was the most strict readathon in which I've ever participated. There was no pizza, or root beer. There was no music, or laptops. My English teacher meant business by this readathon.

Tangent; my English teacher is an astounding man. He recently had a baby with his beautiful wife, but even before that he was the kind of person one would want to make a documentary about. Instead of reading, say, a book of Ralph Waldo Emerson's work, he was reading a religious (eastern religion, not, um, the more popular one in Utah) text. A few times, my friends and I looked up to find him rocking back and forth or actually standing in yoga positions. My English teacher is like, totally awesome.

The rules of the readathon were very specific. No talking or sleeping was allowed, and because it was an exercise in discipline, only one emergency hall pass would be given. My friend Markie and I were about to explode, we had to pee so bad. It was a dash to the door once we recessed for lunch.

My English teacher had said that he wanted to launch us all into a meditative state by keeping us quiet. Like, a meditative state of self-inquiry, and that silent feel that usually comes over a person at the end of a silent night. I don't know about anybody else, but I definitely started feeling the effects by the end of the first half. It was a sort of clenching feel that I've had before, like I was out of words to say, or like I had come out of a long sleep. And then we had lunch, and I had to force myself back into the social grind. After that, it was right back to the reading.

Henry David Thoreau built a house in the middle of a park. It was there that he wrote Walden; Life in the Woods. He lived in his small cabin for two years and two months, in the eighteenth century, when most music was imagined or played by somebody else on the grand piano in the parlor. He lived alone, so even when he would break from his thoughts to eat a lunch, presumably of lake fish and cabbage, he was still alone with those same thoughts. And Walden is a book of postulates. In between flipping through encyclopedias and specialty non-fictions, Thoreau sat on his bed and rubbed his eyes. "You think too much," he thought to himself. 

Or else, I like to think so.