I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like Read Online Free Page A

accomplishments and betterabout myself, I was discovering that the path I’d been walking down was not taking me to a place where I wanted to go.
    I’m not exactly sure what precipitated the decision, but somewhere in the middle of the school year, I impulsively—and, in hindsight, ungracefully—resigned from almost all the groups that up to that point had been so important to me. My fraternity brothers and quite a few other people viewed my decision as a personal rejection, and for a time I was persona non grata with many former friends. Feeling alone and afraid, I took a small room in the basement of an off-campus apartment and began a program of intense reading and reflection. With the help of several people who agreed to serve as guides, I began reading as much as I could from a dozen or so writers, including Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a newcomer on the intellectual scene, the 1960 winner of the Nobel Prize, Albert Camus.
    Reading Walden for the first time, I was struck by the parallel between my recent personal choices and Thoreau’s decision to “live deliberately” and “to front only the essential facts of life.” I resonated deeply to his essential goal:
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    I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.
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    Life, of course, doesn’t have marrow; bones do. But Thoreau was writing figuratively, not literally. And by crafting his words in this way, he created an unforgettable image. Reading Thoreau for the first time, I felt as if I had made a new friend.
    I embarked on my reading program with enthusiasm, but it was far from a systematic effort. Like the proverbial child in a candy store, I jumped from one treat to another, sampling something from one writer, and then another, and then another. Early in my efforts, an observation from Albert Camus almost seemed to leap off the pages:
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    One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it.
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    The words had an unexpected impact, softening some of the self-criticism I had been feeling for making what seemed like poor choices. But perhaps I hadn’t been so foolish after all. Maybe Camus was right—we best discover what is right for us only after chasing what is wrong. In Sand and Foam , Kahlil Gibran expressed the thought in a slightly different way:
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    One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.
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    A short while later, returning to the writings of Thoreau, I was struck by an 1853 entry he made in his journal:
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    Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.
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    By relating human lives to the course of a river, Thoreau was suggesting we follow our natural inclinations. Yes, Shakespeare had said pretty much the same thing in “To thine own self be true,” but that line had already become a cliché. The Thoreau observation, on the other hand, seemed new and special. As his words reverberated in my mind, it was becoming clear that I had indeed made a mistake—but recalling the earlier Camus observation, an honest mistake—by trying to walk down a path better designed for another.
    A short while later, I felt a similar emotional stirring when I came across an observation attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson:
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    Do not go where the path may lead,
go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
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    And then again, when—for the first time—I came across this classic passage from Robert Frost’s 1916 poem The Road Not Taken :
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    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
    The ideas embedded in these observations seemed so important and profound that I jotted them down on those 3 × 5 index cards that were used back then for library research. Once they were recorded, I thumb-tacked the cards on the walls of my room. As the weeks passed I found myself going back to the quotations again and again for