And Then I Am Gone: A Walk with Thoreau
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15
Ratings1
Average rating4
And Then I Am Gone: A Walk with Thoreau tells the story of a New York City man who becomes an Alabama man. Despite his radical migration to simpler living and a late-life marriage to a saint of sorts, his persistent pet anxieties and unanswerable questions follow him. Mathias Freese wants his retreat from the societal "it" to be a brave safari for the self rather than cowardly avoidance, so who better to guide him but Henry David Thoreau, the self-aware philosopher who retreated to Walden Pond "to live deliberately" and cease "the hurry and waste of life"? In this memoir, Freese wishes to share how and why he came to Harvest, Alabama (both literally and figuratively), to impart his existential impressions and concerns, and to leave his mark before he is gone.
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I've read a few of Mathias B. Freese's book and I've never been disappointed. He is an exceptional writer, who shares his perspective, gained through his work as a psychotherapist, and also as a recipient of psychotherapy himself. This book appealed to me, as it portrays one man's choices and how he measures them in the winter of his life.
I've been to Thoreau's Walden Pond, so I welcomed the author's choice to walk with him and talk to him. Mathias B. Freese does not go gently in the night. He is candid about his own faults as well as his own strengths. He shares not only his difficulties moving geographically in the USA from an urban lifestyle in his beloved New York City to a rural home in Alabama, but also his sadness over his broken relationship with his daughter. The latter is balanced by his loving words about Nina, the new partner in his life.
His writing is at times uplifting, at times depressing, but that's what life is. The loss of health, family ties and place are not easy subjects, but Mathias B. Freese does it with grace and honesty. And woven in all of that is a nice dose of Thoreau.
