Writing and authors............

That is really interesting about Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott.


It's alluded to, in various forms that writers of the earlier age were tied together in some way, knew of one another and conversed by mail or came into each others presence and company at various venues or places and exchanged conversation and/or acknowledged recognition of each others work. Did they just talk shop or did they also investigate each others interests? One has to wonder, because can there be other interests than writing? There must be, but writing for many who love it is like a life blood, it feeds not only the skeleton, but all the tissue attached to it. Thoreau was a naturalist, and yet I'm uncertain if he was a herbalist and yet both these interests dovetail with writing. Different people, different ideas and different visions and reasons for writing or anything else they undertook. Was it mainly for money, or was the writing to appease the drive that so many writers appear to understand? To record thoughts and ideas, in print in those days.


In this day and age writers can meet and congregate on the Internet. They can brainstorm ideas and describe visions while actually doing what they love, writing. Writing, for anyone who enjoys it, is always thoughtful conversation. We live we learn, we share the experience and remove some of the exaggeration, the Chinese whispers effect, by referring people to the source if it's written text. That's not quite as easy with the spoken word, though older cultures have managed it they say, and yet when we hear the tales of older cultures, are they or have they have been “embellished” over millennium, and that's why they are so strange? It would not have been so had the word been written, even if the language was obscure, forgotten, it would have had a problem with interpretation, but we imagine the deviation would not have been very large. Dare we think that? The bible was written down, or parts of it were written down, and yet translation and interpretation is constantly being questioned, Thoreau's work is being used as a record of the plants that grew around Walden Pond when he was living there. Writing is a many faceted jewel.