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From Walden:
II: 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 106 WALDEN 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, woodlot, 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. WHERE I LIVED 107 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 property. But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes, --
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. 108 WALDEN 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, 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. WHERE I LIVED 109 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. 110 WALDEN 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
the year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a traveling 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. WHERE I LIVED 111 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 out doors
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 wilder
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 whippoorwill, and many
others. 112 WALDEN
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 woodthrush 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 recently been cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond. WHERE I LIVED 113 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 the 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 intervening
water, and I was reminded that this on which I
dwelt was but dry land. 114 WALDEN 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. WHERE I LIVED 115
What should we think of the shepherd's life if
his flocks always wandered to higher pastures
than his thoughts? 116 WALDEN 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 WHERE I LIVED 117 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? 118 WALDEN 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. ) WHERE I LIVED 119 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 arid 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 estab- 120 WALDEN lishment, 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 WHERE I LIVED 121 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. 122 WALDEN 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. WHERE I LIVED 123 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 twelvemonth 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 124 WALDEN 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. WHERE I LIVED 125 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 126 WALDEN then it knows itself to be Brahma." 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 WHERE I LIVED 127 but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. 128 WALDEN 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 lamppost 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. WHERE I LIVED 129 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. | ||
Sources: Publisher New York, Thomas Y. Crowell & co
Collection library_of_congress; biodiversity; fedlink
Digitizing sponsor Sloan Foundation
Contributor The Library of Congress Proofreading, popup annotations and re-formatting were authored by Edward Eller. |
