What Thoreau Heard in the Song of the Crickets

Lewis Hyde wrote an article for New York Times. It starts out:

"Beginning in August and well into the fall here in New England, the crickets take over the night, their song a chiming of little bells or a rhythmic ripple of falling water. There has always been folklore to tell us what that song means. In ancient Greece, Aesop took it to be a sign of careless joy. In China it still portends wisdom and good fortune. In Germany it may warn of danger."

I liked this line: "Thoreau may have become a master of fruitful leisure but that doesn’t mean he was a stranger to the urge to improve himself and his world."

I like the dialectical thinking: "One mark of a durable fable is its ability to contain a contradiction without resolving it. In this case we have conflicting ways to hear the creaking of the crickets and both are true: time is limited and time is endless; you must get to work and you may relax. Thoreau was clearly familiar with both states of mind."

He reports there were 7 drafts of Walden over 9 years. How do I keep track of my disparate interests. Soccer, and opera, Buddhism, literature and Shakespeare, hiking and Thoreau, jazz and new music, chess and politics. 

Interesting distinction between robust and antifragile.