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2.
Where I Lived,
and What I Lived for
Thoreau
Reader - Walden
Contents - Next
Chapter
Walden Pond from Pine
Hill, by Herbert W. Gleason, circa 1900.
AT A CERTAIN season of our life we are accustomed to
consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus
surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I
live. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all
were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer's
premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him,
took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my
mind; even put a higher price on it-- took everything but a deed of
it-- took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk-- cultivated it,
and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it
long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This experience entitled me to
be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. Wherever I
sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me
accordingly. What is a house but a sedes,
a seat?-- better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house
not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far
from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well,
there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer
and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the
winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of
this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that
they have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land
into orchard, wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or
pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted
tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie,
fallow, perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of
things which he can afford to let alone.
[2]
My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several
farms-- the refusal was all I wanted-- but I never got my fingers burned by
actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual possession was
when I bought the Hollowell place, and had
begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a
wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a
deed of it, his wife-- every man has such a wife-- changed her mind and
wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now,
to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed
my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or who had
a farm, or ten dollars, or all together.
However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had
carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm
for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a
present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and
materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich
man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and
I have since annually carried off what it yielded without
a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes,
"I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute."(1)
[3] I have frequently seen a poet withdraw,
having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty
farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner
does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme,
the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it,
milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only
the skimmed milk.
[4]
The real attractions of the Hollowell
farm, to me, were: its complete retirement, being, about two miles from
the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from
the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river, which the
owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though
that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house
and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval
between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple
trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have;
but above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up
the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red
maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark. I was in haste to buy
it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down
the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had
sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his
improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was
ready to carry it on; like Atlas,(2) to take the
world on my shoulders-- I never heard what compensation he received for
that-- and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but
that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it; for I
knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the
kind I wanted, if I could only afford to let it alone. But it turned
out as I have said.
[5]
All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale-- I
have always cultivated a garden-- was, that I
had had my seeds ready. Many think that seeds improve with age. I have
no doubt that time discriminates between the good and the bad; and when
at last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed. But I
would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free
and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are
committed to a farm or the county jail.
[6]
Old Cato,(3)
whose "De Re Rustica" is my "Cultivator,"
says-- and the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the
passage--
"When you think
of getting a farm turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily; nor
spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round
it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is
good."
I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round
it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me
the more at last.
[7]
The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose to
describe more at length, for convenience putting the experience of two
years into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode to
dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning,
standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.
[8]
When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is,
began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was
on Independence Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not
finished for winter, but was merely a defense against the rain, without
plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough, weather-stained
boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night. The upright
white hewn studs and freshly planed door
and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the
morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied
that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it
retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral
character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had
visited a year before. This was an airy and unplastered
cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might
trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such
as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or
celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind
forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the
ears that hear it. Olympus (4) is but the outside of the earth
everywhere.
[9]
The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except
a boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions in
the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat,
after passing from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With
this more substantial shelter about me, I had made some progress toward
settling in the world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of
crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was
suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go
outdoors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of
its freshness. It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I
sat, even in the rainiest weather. The Harivansa
(5)
says, "An abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning." Such
was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds;
not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. I was
not only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and
the orchard, but to those smaller and more thrilling songsters of the
forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager-- the wood thrush, the
veery, the scarlet tanager, the
field sparrow, the whip-poor-will, and many others.
[10]
I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half
south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the
midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two
miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle
Ground; but I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a
mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant
horizon. For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it
impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom
far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it
throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by
degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was
revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in
every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal
conventicle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the
day than usual, as on the sides of mountains.
[11]
This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a
gentle rain-storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly
still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of
evening, and the wood thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to
shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the
clear portion of the air above it being, shallow and darkened by
clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower
heaven itself so much the more important. From a hill-top nearby, where
the wood had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista
southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills
which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward
each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a
wooded valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked between and
over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the
horizon, tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch
a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant
mountain ranges in the northwest, those true-blue coins from heaven's
own mint, and also of some portion of the village. But in other
directions, even from this point, I could not see over or beyond the
woods which surrounded me. It is well to have some water in your
neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. One value even
of the smallest well is that when you look into it you see that earth
is not continent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps
butter cool. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the
Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated
perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin,
all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and
floated even by this small sheet of interverting
water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was but dry
land.
[12]
Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not feel
crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my
imagination. The low shrub oak plateau to which the opposite shore
arose stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of
Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men.
"There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast
horizon"-- said Damodara,(6) when his
herds required new and larger pastures.
[13]
Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of
the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.
Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by
astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some
remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the
constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I
discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but
forever new and unprofaned part of the universe. If it were worth the
while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran (7) or Altair, then I was really there, or at
an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and
twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen
only in moonless nights by him. Such was that part of creation where I
had squatted,--
"There was a shepherd that did live,
And held his thoughts as high
As were the mounts whereon his flocks
Did hourly feed him by."(8)
What should we think of
the shepherd's life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures
than his thoughts?
[14] Every
morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity,
and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of
Aurora (9) as the
Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious
exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that
characters were engraven on the bathing
tub of King Tching Thang
(10)
to this effect: "Renew thyself completely
each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand
that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by
the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour
through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and
windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It
was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey (11) in the
air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement,
till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable
season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least
somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes
which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a
day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by
our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied
by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a
fragrance filling the air-- to a higher life than we fell asleep from;
and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no
less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day
contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral
hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a
descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous
life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each
day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All
memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a
morning atmosphere. The Vedas (12) say, "All intelligences awake with the
morning." Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the
actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon,(13) are the
children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought
keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes
and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.
Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give
so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They
are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with
drowsiness, they would have performed something. 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?
[15]
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.
[16]
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 practice 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."(14)
[17] 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. Our life is frittered away by
detail. An honest man has hardly need to
count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten
toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let
your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand;
instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your
thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such
are the clouds and storms and quicksands
and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live,
if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at
all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who
succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it
be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce
other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy,(15)
made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that
even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called
internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and
superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment,
cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by
luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim,
as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for
them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan (16)
simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men
think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and
export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an
hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we
should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we
do not get out sleepers,(17) and forge
rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon
our lives to improve them, who will build railroads?
And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season?
But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides
upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that
underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man.
The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the
cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And
every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some
have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be
ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep,
a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they
suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this
were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for
every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as
it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.
[18]
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined
to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves
nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.
As for work, we haven't any of any consequence. We have the
Saint Vitus' dance,(18) and cannot
possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give a few pulls at the
parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell,
there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord,
notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many
times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but
would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property
from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it
burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on
fire-- or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as
handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. Hardly a man
takes a half-hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his
head and asks, "What's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood
his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked
every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for
it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is
as indispensable as the breakfast. "Pray tell me anything new that has
happened to a man anywhere on this globe"-- and he reads it over his
coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning
on the Wachito River;(19) never
dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of
this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.
[19]
For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that
there are very few important communications made through it. To speak
critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life-- I
wrote this some years ago-- that were worth the postage. The penny-post
is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man
that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any
memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or
murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel
wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western
Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the
winter-- we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are
acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances
and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called,
is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I
hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by
the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging
to the establishment were broken by the pressure-- news which I seriously
think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years,
beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for
Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada,(20) from time
to time in the right proportions-- they may have changed the names a
little since I saw the papers-- and serve up a bull-fight when other
entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good
an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most
succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers: and as
for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from that
quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history
of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing
again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. If
one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does
ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.
[20]
What news! how much more important to know
what that is which was never old! "Kieou-pe-yu
(21)
(great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated
near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your master doing?
The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to diminish the
number of his faults, but he cannot accomplish it. The messenger being
gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy messenger! What a worthy
messenger!" The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers
on their day of rest at the end of the week-- for Sunday is the fit
conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning
of a new one-- with this one other draggle-tail of a sermon, should shout
with thundering voice, "Pause! Avast! Why
so seeming fast, but deadly slow?"
[21]
Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is
fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow
themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we
know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right
to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are
unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have
any permanent and absolute existence, that
petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This
is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering,
and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their
daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on
purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true
law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily,
but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I
have read in a Hindoo book, that
"there was a king's son, who, being expelled in
infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and,
growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the
barbarous race with which he lived. One of his
father's ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was,
and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself
to be a prince. "So soul," continues the Hindoo
philosopher, "from the circumstances in
which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is
revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme." (22)
I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this
mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface
of things. We think that that is which appears to be.
If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where,
think you, would the "Mill-dam" go to? If he should give us an account
of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in
his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail,
or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is
before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of
them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind
the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity
there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and
places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the
present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the
ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble
only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that
surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our
conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us.
Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never
yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least
could accomplish it.
[22]
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off
the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the
rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast,
gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go,
let the bells ring and the children cry-- determined to make a day of it.
Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset
and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner,
situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are
safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with
morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like
Ulysses.(23)
If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains.
If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of
music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our
feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and
tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion
which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and
Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and
philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in
place, which we can call reality, and say, This
is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui,(24) below freshet and frost and fire, a
place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post
safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer,(25) but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep
a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If
you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the
sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter,
and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and
so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death,
we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle
in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let
us go about our business.
[23] Time is but the stream I
go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy
bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but
eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom
is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter
of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise
as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and
rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My
head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in
it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as
some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine
and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is
somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I
judge; and here I will begin to mine.
Notes
1.
William Cowper (1731-1800) English poet, hymnist, The Solitude of
Alexander Selkirk (italics by Thoreau - a surveyor) - back
2. in Greek mythology Atlas supported the heavens on
his shoulders - back
3. Marcus
Porcius Cato (234-149 B.C.)
Roman agricultural author - back
4. in Greek mythology, home of the gods - back
5. 5th
century Hindu epic poem - back
6. another name for the Hindu god Krishna - back
7.
Cassiopeia's Chair, Pleiades, and Hyades are constellations - back
8. anonymous, published 1610 - back
9. in Roman mythology, the goddess of dawn - back
10. another name for Confucius - back
11. Iliad
and Odyssey, attributed to Homer, 8th cent. B.C. Greek epic
poet - back
12.
Brahmin religious books - back
13. statue in ancient Egypt said to produce music at
dawn - back
14.
Westminster Catechism - back
15.
group of European states,
1815-1866 - back
16. like the Spartans of ancient Greece, disciplined,
austere - back
17. wooden railroad ties that support the rails - back
18. chorea, a nervous disorder characterized by
involuntary movements - back
19. river in Arkansas and Louisiana - back
20. relating to Spanish & Portuguese politics,
1830's & 1840's - back
21. character in a book by Confucius - back
22.
Brahma, Hindu god of creation - back
23. Roman
name for Odysseus, character in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
- back
24. a point of support - back
25. gauge
used to measure the rise of the Nile River - back
Thoreau
Reader - Walden
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