Walt Whitman, Soon After His Paralysis, in What Makes Life Worth Living – The Marginalian

“Do you need a prod?” poet Mary Oliver asked in her sublime meditation on living a great life. “Do you need a little darkness to go?” A cripple descended on Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819-March 26, 1892) in his fifty-third year when a stroke left him severely disabled. It is a strange kind of darkness to be violently exiled from the human body – a lot of exiles, because it forced Whitman to leave his home in Washington, where he had settled after his good work as a nurse dedicated to the Civil War that first taught him about the connection between the body and the soul, and to live with his brother in New Jersey. Still, he kept looking for light as he slowly regained the strength to work physically — a slow recovery he called “being in the air every day,” among the trees and under the stars.

But as his body recovered, the experience had permanently imprinted his mind with new knowledge. Like all our unexpected brushes with death, the stroke had put a brush in his lap and demanded that he take responsibility for his life – who he is, what he stands for, what he has done to the world and how he wishes to be remembered by it. As nature brought him back to life in her embrace, Whitman found himself pondering the most important questions of existence – what makes life sweet, memorable? He recorded this thought on Sample Dates (public library) – an excellent collection of prose pieces, letters, and journal entries that give us Whitman's insight into the wisdom of trees and music as profound expressions of nature.

Writing to a German friend on his sixty-third birthday, ten years after his paralysis, Whitman reflects what the limitations of living in a crippled body taught him about the meaning of a full life:

As of today I am entering my 64th year. The disability that began to affect me about ten years ago, has since remained, in different ways – it seems to have settled quietly, and will probably continue. I get tired easily, I'm distracted, I can't walk a long distance; but my spirit is at a high level. I roam about the community almost every day – now and then I take a long journey, by railway or boat, hundreds of kilometers – I live mostly in the open – I am sunburned and strong, (weight 190) – continue my work and interest in life, people, progress, and questions of the day. About two-thirds of the time I'm free. Whatever mind I once had has not been affected at all; though physically I am crippled, and may be so, as long as I live. But the main thing of my life seems to be accomplished – I have very devoted and enthusiastic friends, and loving relatives – and I don't care about enemies at all.

Above all, though, Whitman found vitality in the natural world – in what he poetically called “the balance and brilliance of the outer world, the only complete reliance of a book or a human life.” Looking back on what helped him so much to get back to life after his stroke, Whitman echoes Seneca's wisdom in balancing our expectations in order to be satisfied and writes:

The trick is, I find, to make the tone you want and taste low enough, and do a lot of wrong, with daylight and sky.

[…]

After exhausting yourself in business, politics, romance, love, etc. – you find that none of these are satisfying, or wearable forever – what is left? Nature remains; bringing out of their hot places, open man or woman relationships, trees, fields, changing seasons – the sun by day and the stars of the sky by night.

Sample Dates it remains the world's biblical form of thinking, hearing man. Fill this piece with Dostoyevsky's dream about the meaning of life, Tolstoy on finding purpose when life seems meaningless, and the forgotten artist Alice James – the brilliant sister of William and Henry James – on how to live to the fullest while dying, then revisit why books are the backbone of democracy and her timeless advice on living a healthy life and rewarding Whitman.