WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR |
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.
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."
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.
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, nawed 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, 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.
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.
Old Cato, 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.
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.
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 defence 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 is but the outside of the earth
everywhere.
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 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.
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.
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 near by, 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.
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, when his herds required new and
larger pastures.
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 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."
What
should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always wandered
to higher pastures than his thoughts?
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 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 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 burn 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 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 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, 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?
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. 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, 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 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, 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.
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, 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;
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.
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, 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.
What news!
how much more important to know what that is which was never old!
"Kieou-he-yu (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 come to the end
of them. 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?"
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." 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.
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. 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, 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, 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.
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.
Reading
(Thoreau's reading)
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