Teaching The Lived

As I continued reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, I noticed how enthusiastic he is about the idea that we are all one, and the intricate relationship between poet and reader. After narrating an immense quantity of situations and jobs of the common people he has run into, he states that “the living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time; / The old husband sleeps by his wife, and the young husband sleeps by his wife; / And these one and all tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them; / And such as it is to be of these, more or less, I am” (317-321). I read this passage a couple of times until I deciphered several messages he has inscribed in those words. He is telling us how there are some people that are dead and are more alive than those that are alive, this is because their thoughts still exist and their names are still named. Sleep here appears as the state of dormancy which the individual experiences when he has lost his path, the path that leads to understanding the situation of others and not only thinking of oneself. In the end of this poem he shows how he is one of us, he is not an alien to mistakes and that young and old we keep doing the same mistakes in our lives. Another important aspect of these lines is how he uses a common everyday reality and routine, sleeping, to show how time passes but the essentials unite us and how important it is to value the mundane routine when contemplating our individual souls connection to all.

Another piece that impacted me was when Whitman stated that he is “A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest; / A novice beginning, yet experient of myriads of seasons” (336-337). Whitman once again levels himself with the reader, a technique I believe he uses to support the good nature of his messages. Whitman repeats this over and over again, always with different approaches, but always with the same essence. He wants us to understand that he makes mistakes as we could previously see, and he wants us to know that his word isn’t the final word, he can still be taught even though he has lived a long life. This made me think of how the elderly become more and more clutching and stubborn about their ideas about life. They become more conservative about what they have built for themselves and they don’t want to change anything. They hope to maintain the status quo which has seemed to work for them in their lives. It becomes scary and uncomfortable to try to change anything in their lives because they don’t want to change, maybe this is because it is the only way they can maintain control before the visit of inevitable death, the annihilator of all power to change.