“I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”
But Paley appears never to
have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not
apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice,
cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning
man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to
Paley, would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such
a case, shall lose it. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to
make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.
In their practice, nations agree with Paley; but does anyone think that
Massachusetts does exactly what is right at the present crisis?
“A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut,
To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.”
Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are
not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand
merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and
agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do
justice to the slave and to Mexico, _cost what it may_. I quarrel not
with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with,
and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would
be harmless. We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are
unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially
wiser or better than the many. It is not so important that many should
be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere;
for that will leaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are _in
opinion_ opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do
nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of
Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets,
and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even
postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade, and
quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from
Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What
is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate,
and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in
earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to
remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..
Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the
highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir
within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is
his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he
drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how
he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being
immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of
himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant
compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself,
that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and
imagination,—what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think,
also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the
last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you
could kill time without injuring eternity.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go
into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the
bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is
concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of
mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is
a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief
end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it
appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living
because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there
is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun
rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of
thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What
everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to
be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted
for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What
old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds
for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough
once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new
people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the
globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the
phrase is.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours..
It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to
society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself
through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of
opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it
seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare
any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly
we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.
I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to
the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it
is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen
into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is
soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which
the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the
world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to
take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck
of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the
mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances
confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the
life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible
boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish
themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and
interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with
the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies
his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and
solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness
weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be
lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you
shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor
toad-stools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not
enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support but
one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as
quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and _hush_ and _who_,
which Bright can understand, were the best English.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring
compared with owning, but it is evident that the savage owns his
shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man hires his
commonly because he cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the long
run, any better afford to hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this
tax the poor civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared
with the savage’s. An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred
dollars, these are the country rates, entitles him to the benefit of
the improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and
paper, Rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper
pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. But how
happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a
_poor_ civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a
savage? If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the
condition of man,—and I think that it is, though only the wise improve
their advantages,—it must be shown that it has produced better
dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is
the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged
for it, immediately or in the long run. An average house in this
neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this
sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer’s life, even if
he is not encumbered with a family;—estimating the pecuniary value of
every man’s labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others
receive less;—so that he must have spent more than half his life
commonly before _his_ wigwam will be earned. If we suppose him to pay a
rent instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils. Would the savage
have been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms?
It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of holding
this superfluous property as a fund in store against the future, so far
as the individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying of funeral
expenses. But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself.
Nevertheless this points to an important distinction between the
civilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have designs on us
for our benefit, in making the life of a civilized people an
_institution_, in which the life of the individual is to a great extent
absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the race.
It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always.
There is another kind of success than
his. Even here we have a sort of living to get, and must buffet it
somewhat longer. There are various tough problems yet to solve, and we
must make shift to live, betwixt spirit and matter, such a human life
as we can.
A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents
a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for
Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some,
but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his
leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the
solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland
streams.
Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything,
because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them
in the end. The sort of morality which the priests inculcate is a very
subtle policy, far finer than the politicians, and the world is very
successfully ruled by them as the policemen. It is not worth the while
to let our imperfections disturb us always. The conscience really does
not, and ought not to monopolize the whole of our lives, any more than
the heart or the head. It is as liable to disease as any other part. I
have seen some whose consciences, owing undoubtedly to former
indulgence, had grown to be as irritable as spoilt children, and at
length gave them no peace. They did not know when to swallow their cud,
and their lives of course yielded no milk.
Conscience is instinct bred in the house,
Feeling and Thinking propagate the sin
By an unnatural breeding in and in.
I say, Turn it out doors,
Into the moors.
I love a life whose plot is simple,
And does not thicken with every pimple,
A soul so sound no sickly conscience binds it,
That makes the universe no worse than ’t finds it.
I love an earnest soul,
Whose mighty joy and sorrow
Are not drowned in a bowl,
And brought to life to-morrow;
That lives one tragedy,
And not seventy;
A conscience worth keeping,
Laughing not weeping;
A conscience wise and steady,
And forever ready;
Not changing with events,
Dealing in compliments;
A conscience exercised about
Large things, where one _may_ doubt.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a
million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one
in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be
alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have
looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical
aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not
forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact
than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a
conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular
picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful;
but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and
medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the
quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to
make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his
most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such
paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us
how this might be done.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it
had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not
lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor
did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I
wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so
sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to
cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and
reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then
to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness
to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be
able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men,
it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is
of the devil or of God, and have _somewhat hastily_ concluded that it
is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were
long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is
error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its
occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it
seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare
any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly
we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.
I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to
the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it
is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen
into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is
soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which
the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the
world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to
take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck
of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the
mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances
confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the
life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible
boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish
themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and
interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with
the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies
his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and
solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness
weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be
lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you
shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor
toad-stools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not
enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support but
one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as
quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and _hush_ and _who_,
which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there were
safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be
_extra-vagant_ enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow
limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of
which I have been convinced.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the
highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir
within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is
his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he
drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how
he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being
immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of
himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant
compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself,
that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and
imagination,—what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think,
also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the
last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you
could kill time without injuring eternity.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go
into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the
bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is
concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of
mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is
a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief
end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it
appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living
because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there
is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun
rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of
thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What
everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to
be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted
for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What
old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds
for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough
once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new
people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the
globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the
phrase is.
A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.
What the Roman and Grecian
multitude could not _hear_, after the lapse of ages a few scholars
_read_, and a few scholars only are still reading it.
However much we may admire the orator’s occasional bursts of eloquence,
the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the
fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the
clouds. _There_ are the stars, and they who can may read them. The
astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not
exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is
called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the
study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion,
and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can _hear_ him; but the
writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be
distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks
to the intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can
_understand_ him.
No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions
in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. It is
something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any
other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may
be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually
breathed from all human lips;—not be represented on canvas or in marble
only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an
ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech. Two thousand
summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her
marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried
their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect
them against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of
the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books,
the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves
of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while
they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse
them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every
society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on
mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by
enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is
admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at
last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect
and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and
the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his
good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that
intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that
he becomes the founder of a family.
The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
We feel her heat and see her body darkening
over us. Our thoughts are not dissipated, but come back to us like an
echo.
The different kinds of moonlight are infinite. This is not a night for
contrasts of light and shade, but a faint diffused light in which there
is light enough to travel, and that is all.
A road (the Corner road) that passes over the height of land between
earth and heaven, separating those streams which flow earthward from
those which flow heavenward.
Ah, what a poor, dry compilation is the “Annual of Scientific
Discovery!” I trust that observations are made during the year which
are not chronicled there,—that some mortal may have caught a glimpse of
Nature in some corner of the earth during the year 1851. One sentence
of perennial poetry would make me forget, would atone for, volumes of
mere science. The astronomer is as blind to the significant phenomena,
or the significance of phenomena, as the wood-sawyer who wears glasses
to defend his eyes from sawdust. The question is not what you look at,
but what you see.
I hear now from Bear Garden Hill—I rarely walk by moonlight without
hearing—the sound of a flute, or a horn, or a human voice. It is a
performer I never see by day; should not recognize him if pointed
out; but you may hear his performance in every horizon. He plays but
one strain and goes to bed early, but I know by the character of that
single strain that he is deeply dissatisfied with the manner in which
he spends his day. He is a slave who is purchasing his freedom. He is
Apollo watching the flocks of Admetus on every hill, and this strain
he plays every evening to remind him of his heavenly descent. It is all
that saves him,—his one redeeming trait. It is a reminiscence; he loves
to remember his youth. He is sprung of a noble family. He is highly
related, I have no doubt; was tenderly nurtured in his infancy, poor
hind as he is. That noble strain he utters, instead of any jewel on his
finger, or precious locket fastened to his breast, or purple garments
that came with him.
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
How unaccountable the flow of spirits in youth. You may
throw sticks and dirt into the current, and it will only rise the
higher. Dam it up you may, but dry it up you may not, for you cannot
reach its source. If you stop up this avenue or that, anon it will come
gurgling out where you least expected and wash away all fixtures. Youth
grasps at happiness as an inalienable right. The tear does no sooner
gush than glisten. Who shall say when the tear that sprung of sorrow
first sparkled with joy?
ALMA NATURA
_Sept. 20._ It is a luxury to muse by a wall-side in the sunshine of
a September afternoon,—to cuddle down under a gray stone, and hearken
to the siren song of the cricket. Day and night seem henceforth but
accidents, and the time is always a still eventide, and as the close of
a happy day. Parched fields and mulleins gilded with the slanting rays
are my diet. I know of no word so fit to express this disposition of
Nature as Alma Natura.
COMPENSATION
_Sept. 23._ If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find
compensation in every disappointment. If a shower drives us for shelter
to the maple grove or the trailing branches of the pine, yet in their
recesses with microscopic eye we discover some new wonder in the bark,
or the leaves, or the fungi at our feet. We are interested by some
new resource of insect economy, or the chickadee is more than usually
familiar. We can study Nature's nooks and corners then.[40]
MY BOOTS
_Oct. 16._
Anon with gaping fearlessness they quaff
The dewy nectar with a natural thirst,
Or wet their leathern lungs where cranberries lurk,
With sweeter wine than Chian, Lesbian, or Falernian far.
Theirs was the inward lustre that bespeaks
An open sole—unknowing to exclude
The cheerful day—a worthier glory far
Than that which gilds the outmost rind with darkness visible—
Virtues that fast abide through lapse of years,
Rather rubbed in than off.
HOMER
_Oct. 21._ Hector hurrying from rank to rank is likened to the moon
wading in majesty from cloud to cloud.
All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.
A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a
new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in
the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero
longer than they have served his valet,—if a hero ever has a
valet,—bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only
they who go to soirées and legislative halls must have new coats, coats
to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and
trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do;
will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes,—his old coat, actually
worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a
deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be
bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do
with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,
and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how
can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before
you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to _do
with_, but something to _do_, or rather something to _be_. Perhaps we
should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until
we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we
feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like
keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the
fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary
ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the
caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for
clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall
be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at
last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.
We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by
addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are
our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may
be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker
garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but
our shirts are our liber or true bark, which cannot be removed without
girdling and so destroying the man.
The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings.
It
is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the
purest imagination and the rarest faith. It says by a silent but
eloquent behavior,—“I will be so related to thee as thou canst imagine;
even so thou mayest believe. I will spend truth,—all my wealth on
thee,”—and the Friend responds silently through his nature and life,
and treats his Friend with the same divine courtesy. He knows us
literally through thick and thin. He never asks for a sign of love, but
can distinguish it by the features which it naturally wears. We never
need to stand upon ceremony with him with regard to his visits. Wait
not till I invite thee, but observe that I am glad to see thee when
thou comest. It would be paying too dear for thy visit to ask for it.
Where my Friend lives there are all riches and every attraction, and no
slight obstacle can keep me from him. Let me never have to tell thee
what I have not to tell. Let our intercourse be wholly above ourselves,
and draw us up to it.
The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an
intelligence above language. One imagines endless conversations with
his Friend, in which the tongue shall be loosed, and thoughts be spoken
without hesitancy or end; but the experience is commonly far otherwise.
Acquaintances may come and go, and have a word ready for every
occasion; but what puny word shall he utter whose very breath is
thought and meaning? Suppose you go to bid farewell to your Friend who
is setting out on a journey; what other outward sign do you know than
to shake his hand? Have you any palaver ready for him then? any box of
salve to commit to his pocket? any particular message to send by him?
any statement which you had forgotten to make?—as if you could forget
anything.—No, it is much that you take his hand and say Farewell; that
you could easily omit; so far custom has prevailed. It is even painful,
if he is to go, that he should linger so long. If he must go, let him
go quickly. Have you any _last_ words? Alas, it is only the word of
words, which you have so long sought and found not; _you_ have not a
_first_ word yet.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
If you give money, spend
yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make curious
mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he
is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely
his misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags
with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on
the pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more
tidy and somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day,
one who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him, and I
saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere
he got down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it
is true, and that he could afford to refuse the _extra_ garments which
I offered him, he had so many _intra_ ones. This ducking was the very
thing he needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would
be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole
slop-shop on him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil
to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows
the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by
his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to
relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every
tenth slave to buy a Sunday’s liberty for the rest. Some show their
kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they
not be kinder if they employed themselves there? You boast of spending
a tenth part of your income in charity; maybe you should spend the nine
tenths so, and done with it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the
property then. Is this owing to the generosity of him in whose
possession it is found, or to the remissness of the officers of
justice?
Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently
appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our
selfishness which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day here
in Concord, praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, he
was kind to the poor; meaning himself.
We are constantly invited to be what we are.
After this we are not surprised
when he concludes by saying: "The society of young women is the most
unprofitable I have ever tried." No, no; he was nothing like Mr. Samuel
Pepys.
The sect of young women, we may add, need not feel deeply affronted by
this ungallant mention. It is perhaps the only one of its kind in the
journal (by its nature restricted to matters interesting to the author),
while there are multitudes of passages to prove that Thoreau's aversion
to the society of older people taken as they run, men and women alike,
was hardly less pronounced. In truth (and it is nothing of necessity
against him), he was not made for "parties," nor for clubs, nor even for
general companionship. "I am all without and in sight," said Montaigne,
"born for society and friendship." So was not Thoreau. He was all
within, born for contemplation and solitude. And what we are born for,
that let us be,—and so the will of God be done. Such, for good or ill,
was Thoreau's philosophy. "We are constantly invited to be what we are,"
he said. It is one of his memorable sentences; an admirable summary of
Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance.
His fellow mortals, as a rule, did not recommend themselves to him. His
thoughts were none the better for their company, as they almost always
were for the company of the pine tree and the meadow. Inspiration, a
refreshing of the spiritual faculties, as indispensable to him as daily
bread, that his fellow mortals did not furnish him. For this state of
things he sometimes (once or twice at least) mildly reproaches himself.
It may be that he is to blame for so commonly skipping humanity and its
affairs; he will seek to amend the fault, he promises. But even at such
a moment of exceptional humility, his pen, reversing Balaam's rôle,
runs into left-handed compliments that are worse, if anything, than
the original offense. Hear him: "I will not avoid to go by where those
men are repairing the stone bridge. I will see if I cannot see poetry
in that, if that will not yield me a reflection.
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
It is very evident
what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been
whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into
business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called
by the Latins _æs alienum_, another’s brass, for some of their coins
were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other’s
brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying
today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many
modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting,
contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an
atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your
neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his
carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that
you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked
away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more
safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how
little.
I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to
attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro
Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both
north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to
have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of
yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the
highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir
within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is
his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he
drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how
he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being
immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of
himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant
compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself,
that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and
imagination,—what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think,
also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the
last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you
could kill time without injuring eternity.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go
into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the
bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is
concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of
mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is
a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief
end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it
appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living
because they preferred it to any other.
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to
have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of
yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the
highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir
within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is
his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he
drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how
he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being
immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of
himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant
compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself,
that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and
imagination,—what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think,
also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the
last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you
could kill time without injuring eternity.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go
into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the
bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is
concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of
mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is
a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief
end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it
appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living
because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there
is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun
rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of
thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What
everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to
be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted
for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.
Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work like
busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the
implements of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page of
the almanac; and as often as I looked out I was reminded of the fable
of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, and the like;
and now they are all gone, and in thirty days more, probably, I shall
look from the same window on the pure sea-green Walden water there,
reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its evaporations in
solitude, and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there.
Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes
himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat, like a floating
leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred
men securely labored.
Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New
Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the
morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal
philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the
gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and
its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is
not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its
sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well
for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of
Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges
reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and
water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and
our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden
water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring
winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis
and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by
Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the
tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which
Alexander only heard the names.
Spring
The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond
to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold
weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not the effect on
Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new garment to take the
place of the old. This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in
this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having
no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice. I never knew
it to open in the course of a winter, not excepting that of ’52–3,
which gave the ponds so severe a trial. It commonly opens about the
first of April, a week or ten days later than Flint’s Pond and
Fair-Haven, beginning to melt on the north side and in the shallower
parts where it began to freeze.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of
New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry
leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s
kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in
Massachusetts,—from an egg deposited in the living tree many years
earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it;
which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the
heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and
immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful
and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many
concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society,
deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which
has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned
tomb,—heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished
family of man, as they sat round the festive board,—may unexpectedly
come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture,
to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!
I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is
the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to
dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that
day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is
but a morning star.
THE END
ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
I heartily accept the motto,—“That government is best which governs
least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and
systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I
believe—“That government is best which governs not at all;” and when
men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they
will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments
are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The
objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they
are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be
brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm
of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the
mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally
liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.
Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few
individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the
outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.
The luxuriously
rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I
implied before, they are cooked, of course _à la mode_.
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are
not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of
mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever
lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient
philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than
which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward.
We know not much about them. It is remarkable that _we_ know so much of
them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and
benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of
human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary
poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in
agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays
professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to
profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is
not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so
to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of
simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some
of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The
success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like
success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by
conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the
progenitors of a nobler race of men. But why do men degenerate ever?
What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which
enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of it in
our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the
outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed,
like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not
maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?
When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what
does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and
richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant
clothing, more numerous incessant and hotter fires, and the like.
