Henry David Thoreau
American Philosopher
1817-1862 A selection from
WALDEN
Narrated by Lloyd James
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Conclusion
To the sick, the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and
scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does
not grow in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here.
The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast
in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the
night in a southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps
pace with the seasons cropping the pastures of the Colorado only
till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet
we think that if rail fences are pulled down, and stone walls piled
up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our
fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot
go to Tierra del Fuego this summer: but you may go to the land of
infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is wider than our views of
it.
Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like
curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors
picking oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of our
correspondent. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the
doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to
southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the
game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes
if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I
trust it would be nobler game to shoot one's self.—
"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography."
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps
it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not
spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and
insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track
for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a
path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six
years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I
fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it
open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet
of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and
dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of
tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage,
but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for
there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not
wish to go below now.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances
confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live
the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success
unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will
pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws
will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old
laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal
sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of
beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the
universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be
solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have
built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where
they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such
desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his
companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let
him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree
or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition
of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality
which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain
reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over
ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at
the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?
There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to
strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a
staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an
ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to
himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do
nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for
wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable
material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his
friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and
died, but he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose
and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his
knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with
Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance
because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in
all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he
sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it
the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and
with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that
race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had
smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star;
and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious
stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I
stay to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to
his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished
artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made
a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair
proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had
passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places.
And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet,
that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an
illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a
single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame
the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art
was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this
year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched
uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out
all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see
far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before
science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story
which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful
bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree
wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first
in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts — from an egg
deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared
by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out
for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who
does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality
strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and
winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many
concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society,
deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree,
which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its
well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by
the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board —
may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and
handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!
I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but
such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can
never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness
to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more
day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. More information about Henry David Thoreau from Wikipedia Another selection from Henry David Thoreau:
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