Ana keeps a notebook, where she records quotations and ideas she wants to remember. She particularly likes this quotation from Walt Whitman, made for Thanksgiving Day:
"'Thanksgiving goes probably far deeper than you folks suppose. I am not sure but it is the source of the highest poetry....We Americans devote an official day to it every year; yet I sometimes fear the real article is almost dead or dying in our self-sufficient, independent Republic. Gratitude, anyhow, has never been made half enough of by the moralists; it is indispensable to a complete character, man's or woman's — the disposition to be appreciative, thankful. That is the main matter, the element, inclination — what geologists call the 'trend.' Of my own life and writings I estimate the giving thanks part, with what it infers, as essentially the best item. I should say the quality of gratitude rounds the whole emotional nature; I should say love and faith would quite lack vitality without it.'"
Walt Whitman, The Philadelphia Press, Thanksgiving Day, 1884
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
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