My recent immersion in James Gleick’s exquisite inquiry into how our fascination with time travel mediates our anxiety about mortality reawakened in my conscience a few lines from Walt Whitman’s 1855 masterpiece Leaves of Grass (public library | public domain). Written when he was only thirty-six and then self-published, it survived a dispiriting initial reception and, thanks to a soul-saving letter of encouragement from Emerson, went on to touch generations. In the century and a half since, it has catalyzed fanciful artistic interpretations and continues to inspire with its largehearted wisdom on living a vibrant and rewarding life.

In 1953, the BBC set out to record an hour of selections from the Whitman classic and approached a somewhat unusual reader: legendary filmmaker, actor, and broadcaster Orson Welles (May 6, 1915–October 10, 1985), thirty-eight at the time and already one of the most recognizable cinematic voices in the world. The recordings were later released on an LP — a Moore’s ghost that has perished into technological obscurity and rendered the readings absent from the common record, now scarcely available as the hard-to-find Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass Read by Orson Welles.

Here is a rare surviving recording of one of Welles’s readings, which gives Whitman’s radiant words a strange and satisfying weight of a different order.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
    hands;
How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it
    is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
    green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we
    may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe
    of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
    zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the
same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and
    from offspring taken soon out of their mother’s laps,
And here you are the mother’s laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
    mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
    for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
    and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
    taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and
    children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
    at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
    luckier.

Complement the timelessly rewarding Leaves of Grass, the preface of which alone is a masterpiece of the highest caliber, with Whitman on the power of music, healthcare and the human spirit, and the pillars of democracy.

For more electrifying readings of literary classics, hear Amanda Palmer reading Wisława Szymborska, Sylvia Boorstein reading Pablo Neruda, Jon Kabat-Zinn reading Derek Walcott, and Bill T. Jones reading four beloved poets.