Where do you Live? (With Quiet Desperation)

I’m struck by a line in the 1995 version of the movie Sabrina. In the greenhouse scene with Linus Larrabee, Sabrina says “I know you work in the real world and you're very good at it. But that's work. Where do you live, Linus?”

Where do you live?

Tomorrow I fly out after living for a couple weeks with one of my daughters here in this west side suburb of Las Vegas. As I walked busy Durango Drive this morning from the apartment to the nearby Starbucks inside an Albertsons store, I thought of Thoreau's famous line from Walden. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” There are over a million people in this metropolitan area and much evidence of quiet—and noisy—desperation.

I miss home, where I usually live, where I see only a handful of neighbors from our hillside vista on twenty acres. There are only about 13,000 people in the entire county. When I walk Veit Road it is never busy, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t just as much “desperation” around. Thoreau goes on to imply that there is no difference between the “desperate city” and the “desperate country.”

Come to think of it, I have my own fair share of desperation. It does seem to follow me everywhere. But I’m still ready to return to home sweet home. And hopefully I’m wise enough to avoid doing desperate things, wherever I am!

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden