First few pages

My door was not locked. Of course it was not locked. As Thoreau once said, “What is a house but a sedes-a seat?” When I read this line I was in gentle concurrence, but hardly about to downsize. What I had never bothered to consider, of course, was that Thoreau and his “real estate” company would one day come knocking, or rather, bursting on my door.

The first thing I picked out of him was his shadow. Typical, but rather beardy, it slowly elongated itself on the wall of my modest coatroom. At first thinking nothing of it I merely took the time to recall Emerson. “With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.” Emerson. The man who’s musings I has both admired and despised. The man who was famously “anti-social.” Never had I thought his pattern of recluse would be broken with me.

The first thing I noticed of him was the smell. A country smell, which to me seemed ironic, as I had always considered him to have been a rather classy gentleman. The scent was, well, as Whitman would say, “The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn” I smile to myself. Whitman had always amused me. The man who talked on street corners and sat naked on the shore. Yet never had I though that the river where he chose to, as he saw it, be one with nature, would be mine.

The first thing I found was that I was faced with a sudden grip of terror. What terrible rules of time must have been broken? What would god say if…of course. That was it. What would god say? He would say what they believed him to say, which, from a group as strange as this could be rather diverse indeed. Emerson attacked the Church in his Divinity School Address with a “noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.” Had these three men, through some twist of fate and logic, decided that rather than bring Jesus back down to the race of mortals they would join him in the race of gods? Unlikely, yes, but no more so then having arguably the three greatest American intellectuals of the nineteenth century striding into my home.

I stood in awe as they walked past me, giving me little more then a glance. The stopped in the middle of my living room and looked at the abode surrounding them with mystified eyes. Emerson was the first to speak. After looking around at all of the books of history and fiction he said to the bookcase, “Man is timid and apologetic: he is no longer upright.” At this queue the man who I was sure was Thoreau walked over to Emerson, pulled a trash bag out of his coat, and started to pull books of the shelf and put them inside of it.

Meanwhile Whitman had circled like a dog preparing a nest on my carpet, and started to remove his cloths. Upon seeing my look of shock he simply shrugged and said “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Walt at this stage was hardly a young, good-looking man, and this thought was rather disturbing. Before Whitman had completed stripping an angry voice came over from where my backpack was. It turned out that Emerson had discovered excerpts of his work inside, and they had infuriated him. I caught what he was saying midsentence; “like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandmams and tutors…painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke” His tirade against the teaching and memorization of his work suddenly switched viewpoints. He was suddenly yelling about the unjustness of having butchered his books into 15 page installments. I felt as uncomfortable as bewildered. How did I go about telling the great thinker of his time he was contradicting himself? How do I point out a hole in logic far more famous than mine could ever be?

By this point Whitman had finished undressing, and was making towards the door he had enter from. I was by now operating in a sort of shock induced semi-vegetative stat, but was still able to chase after him. I did not think the neighborhood had ever had a man bathe naked in Cornett Creek (for that was where he was headed), nor did I think they wanted to witness it now. I watched in horror as he skipped jauntily across the alley, and plunked himself down on the bank.