This quotation from Thoreau’s journal struck me, particularly as soon after I came across what seemed a perfect riposte to the question it raises, featured here, by a poet writing a few decades earlier, John Keats.

‘Life!  who knows what it is, what it does?’ (6 July 1845)

Source: Henry David Thoreau,The Journal 1837-1861, Damion Searls (ed.), preface by John R. Stilgoe (New York: New York Review Books, 2009), p. 28

Photo credit: Bryan Minear at unsplash