First time reading Walt Whitman

[Mu]

This more or less started when, last year, under recommendation of Digital Buddha I watched a film called 'My Dinner With Andre'. One of the main characters mentioned a book by an author 'Walt Whitman' called 'Leaves of Grass'.


Skip to Paris a few months thereafter. Me and a fellow dude, Alex are on a two week trip to visit my cousins and uncle. She lives in one of the Northern parts of Paris in a tiny apartment beside one of those small city parks with a basketball court. One day I look around her bookshelf and find the book sitting there, so I borrow it and me and Alex go sit in the park, smoking and reading this book. I get to page 45, and its some deep voodoo:

"I know I am deathless
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child's carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.

I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood"


My mind is blown by this guy's eloquence. Around this line, we hear a smashing noise. A few feet down from us, this guy has broken a bottle and is looking around all paranoid. The basketball playing going on a few feet to our right had stopped.

All of a sudden, about 20 guys all in black and balaclavas come running down the steps to our right beside the basketball court, some with crowbars, some with bottles and just go for this helpless guy, kicking him into the fountain in the centre of the kids park, laying into him for what seems like eternity as kids and mothers are wailing all around us in French, absolute chaos. Alex is from New York so he's sitting there laughing, I'm shitting myself, yet stationery as there's no way to leave, most undude like. Eventually they all split en masse and the police come with these crazy nunchuck things, late as always.


So yeah. That's how I came to discover 'Leaves of Grass' by Walt Whitman