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2. Where I
Lived,
and What I Lived for
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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
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