“I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”
In this video, the narrator is reading an excerpt from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman with a few visuals to go with it. For the first 30 seconds, he is reading the quote written above. I chose this video because I highly agreed with this quote and I think the concept is still relevant today.
An interpretation of this quote is that there are all these voices and ideas in the world or in people’s heads — Whitman calls these voices “the talk of the beginning and the end” — and this means that the voices are all too busy worrying about the past or the future. With all this noise, however he is still able to separate himself from it and have a mind where he controls his thoughts and he chooses to live in the present. He is motioning to the idea that we need to remove all outside disruptions and really listen to our own thoughts and ideas and that is a notion that holds true today more so than ever.
In today’s world, we hear other people’s opinions whether it be how we should live our lives, what ideas we should believe, or what politics we should abide by every way we turn with all the media that surrounds us constantly. Sometimes it becomes easy to get lost in these voices and lose our own because we are bombarded with other people’s ideas that we mistake to be ours. I like that this excerpt reminds us to take a step back from all the noise that seem to be the “right way” and formulate our own views no matter how different or unheard of the may be because that is what Whitman does.