The unexpected happens

 A line in Henry Seidel Canby’s biography of Thoreau is haunting to me: 

There are no records of intellectual interests of any kind in the Thoreau family before Henry’s generation.

 

Canby was referring to Thoreau’s father’s side of the family. His mother’s side was a little livelier. But the starkness of the sentence reminded me of what a wonder college can be — what an education can be.

Suddenly, the curtain goes up, and a young person begins to think in ways you wouldn’t expect, even if you looked at all the generations that came before.

Canby calls it a flowering of the mind. He said in Thoreau’s case, it happened about halfway through college.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 15.