evidence: Schulz claims that Thoreau "identified not with the drowned or the bereaved but with the storm." For those with heightened sensory awareness, however—and Thoreau’s writings reveal him to be just such a person—the world is a storm. His is a storm of flowers, bees, sunlight, wind. His is a storm of inconsistencies, his own and the world’s, because his thinking was not constrained by propriety to good taste but to the truth of what he saw. [...] I wish my friend Neal could walk in such soft sunlight. Like the syntax of a poem, like the wind through the branches of a tree, he was an inscrutable presence, one who lives on now in those of us whose days he brightened with a story and a smile, those of us who tried to help him but couldn’t save him. The people surrounding Thoreau, his family and friends, made it possible for him to live as himself, to do the things that gave him life. It worked to everyone’s benefit, theirs and—all these years later—ours. The people surrounding Neal—the ones with power, who could have had an impact—turned their backs. His only value to them lay in how he made their lives easier. In the end, he only needed what we all need, love and some basic, practical support, and people with every comfort and privilege withheld it.