I guess I've been aware of Walt Whitman as an American national icon since I was at university, and have long admired what I may be his most famous poem, I Sing the Body Electric.
It's probably been said many times before, and much more profoundly, and studied and dissected, but the poet's words do indeed seem to crackle with electricity, with vitality, with what Robert Pirsig called in Lila, "dynamic quality". This is a celebration of connecting, of being alive.
"Examine these limbs, red, black, or white—they are so cunning in tendon and nerve;
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What is called vitality, sensitivity, and intelligence are not ready-made qualities, but a way of casting oneself into the world and of disclosing being - Simone de Beauvoir http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/12/20/simone-de-beauvoir-on…)
We are all conceived in close prison, and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death. Was any man seen to sleep in the cart between Newgate and Tyburn? Between prison and the place of execution does any man sleep? But we sleep all the way. From the womb to the grave, we are never thoroughly awake - John Donne, Sermons.
There is vitality only by means of free generosity." Simone de Beauvoir http://j.mp/UeEjdY
The most precious thing is vitality - Susan Sontag http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/12/20/simone-de-beauvoir-on…)
Life is always a feather bed or a tighrope.Give me a tightrope - Edith Wharton
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing - Agatha Christie
Pace David Bowie, and in the light of the hagiography building in some quarters around the late Steve Jobs, one wonders who are the real enduring, beyond "just for one day" heroes, ancient and modern?
A good candidate from my childhood is Alexander the Great, from the moment I first shed a tear when reading in a Ladybird history book (a constant companion, and part of a set which I preserve with fondness and gratitude to this day) about Alexander dying (at just 33, thereby giving him a special bond with Jesus in my young mind) "far from his homeland". As a long-standing, albeit non-heroic exile from my own homeland, this still resonates...