Henry David Thoreau - WALDEN AND ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be

preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat

ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are

sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of

you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you

have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing

or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed

or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident

what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been

whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into

business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called

by the Latins _æs alienum_, another’s brass, for some of their coins

were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other’s

brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying

today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many

modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting,

contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an

atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your

neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his

carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that

you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked

away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more

safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how

little.

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to

attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro

Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both

north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to

have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of

yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the

highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir

within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is

his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he

drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how

he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being

immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of

himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant

compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself,

that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and

imagination,—what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think,

also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the

last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you

could kill time without injuring eternity.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called

resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go

into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the

bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is

concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of

mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is

a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief

end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it

appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living

because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there

is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun

rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of

thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What

everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to

be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted

for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What

old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds

for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough

once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new

people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the

globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the

phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an

instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned any thing of

absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important

advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and

their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as

they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which

belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I

have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the

first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They

have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing to the

purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me;

but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any

experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my

Mentors said nothing about.

One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for

it furnishes nothing to make bones with;” and so he religiously devotes

a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of

bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with

vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite

of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some

circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries

merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.

The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by

their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to

have been cared for. According to Evelyn, “the wise Solomon prescribed

ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman prætors have

decided how often you may go into your neighbor’s land to gather the

acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to

that neighbor.” Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut

our nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter

nor longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have

exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But

man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what

he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have

been thy failures hitherto, “be not afflicted, my child, for who shall

assign to thee what thou hast left undone?”

We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance,

that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of

earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some

mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are

the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different