Читать книгу Restless Souls - Leigh Eric Schmidt - Страница 7

To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.

—Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” 1856

The ripeness of Religion is doubtless to be looked for in this field of individuality, and is a result that no organization or church can ever achieve. As history is poorly retained by what the technists call history, and is not given out from their pages, except the learner has in himself the sense of the well-wrapt, never yet written, perhaps impossible to be written, history—so Religion, although casually arrested, and, after a fashion, preserved in the churches and creeds, does not depend at all upon them, but is a part of the identified soul…. I should say, indeed, that only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion positively come forth at all. Only here, and on such terms, the meditation, the devout ecstasy, the soaring flight.

—Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1871