Thoreau

I spent the holidays here in the city. Reading, taking long walks, snapping photographs and being alone. I felt guilty for not going home to Virginia to be with my family and friends but felt I wanted some time alone. I found it hard to sleep. I stayed up reading and searching websites and blogs, all related to art and photography. I made a futile attempt to setting a time limit on these searches to around two hours but always seemed to go way over it. At one point I looked at my watch and it was 4:30am. I felt like I had been in a library all night. I'm still torn with my feelings about the Internet. The obvious vastness of information is incredible. Better than staring into a TV set in every respect but a "time sucker" nonetheless. Would I have felt less guilty if I was in the NYU library reading the same information for 7 hours? Probably not. I would have felt like some sort of academic.

At one point I was some reading some quotes from Thoreau in a book of photos by Eliot Porter. I especially liked this one:

"I want to go away soon and live by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. It will be success if I shall have left myself behind. But my friends ask what I will do when I get there. Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons?"