ረቡዕ 4 ኖቬምበር 2015

Walden or Life in z Woods; CONCLUSION !

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
285



286 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography."

What does Africa, what does the West stand for? Is not oiu
own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove,
like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile,
or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage
around this continent, that we would find? Are these the prob-
lems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man
who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does
Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo
Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own streams
and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes, with ship-
loads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary;
and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved
meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus
to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new
channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord
of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but
a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be pa-
triotic who have no respect, and sacrifice the greater to the
less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no
sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay.
Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What was the meaning
of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade
and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there
are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man
is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is
easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and
cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and
boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the
Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

"Erret, et extremes alter scrutetur Iberos.
Plus habet hie vitae, plus habet ille viae."



WALDEN 287

Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.
I have more of God, they more of the road.

It is not worthwhile to go round the world to count the
cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and
you may perhaps find some "Symmes' Hole' 7 by which to get
at the inside at last. England and France, Spain and Portugal,
Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front on this private sea; but
no bark from them has ventured out of sight of land, though
it is without doubt the direct way to India. If you would learn
to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations,
if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized
in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against
a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and
Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.
Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that
run away and enlist. Start now on that farthest western way,
which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor
conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct,
a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night,
sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too.

It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascer-
tain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place
one's self in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of so -
ciety." He declared that "a soldier who fights in the ranks
does not require half so much courage as a foot-pad/' "that
honor and religion have never stood in the way of a well-
considered and a firm resolve." This was manly, as the world
goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would
have found himself often enough "in formal opposition" to
what are deemed "the most sacred laws of society," through
obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his
resolution without going out of his way. It is not for a man to
put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain
himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience



288 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition
to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.

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 en-
deavors 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.

It is a ridiculous demand which England and America
make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you.
Neither men nor toadstools grow so. As if that were important,
and there were not enough to understand you without them.



WALDEN 289

As if Nature could support but one order of understandings,
could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well
as creeping things, and hush and whoa, which Bright can
understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in
stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be
extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the
narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to
the truth of which I have been convinced. Extra vagance/ it
depends on how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo^ which
seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like
the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cowyard fence,
and runs after her calf, in milking time. I desire to speak
somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment,
to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that 1
cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a
true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared
then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever? In
view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and
undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side ;
as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the
sun. The volatile truth of our words should continually betray
the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is in-
stantly translated] its literal monument alone remains. The
words which express our faith and piety are not definite ; yet
they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior
natures.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and
praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the
sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring. Some-
times we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half-
witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a
third part of their wit. Some would find fcult with the morn-
ing red, if they ever got up early enough, "They pretend,"
as I hear, "that the verses of Kabir have four different senses;
illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the
Vedas ; " but in this part of the world it fa considered a ground



290 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

for complaint if a man's writings admit of more than one
interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the potato-
rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails
r/> much more widely and fatally?

I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I
should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my
pages on this score than was found with the Walden ice.
Southern customers objected to its blue color, which is the
evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and preferred the
Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds. The purity
men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not
like the azure ether beyond.

Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and
moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the
ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to
the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a
man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of
pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every
one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was
made.

Why s.hould 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 differ-
ent drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, how-
ever 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 sub-
stitute? 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 is an imperfect work
time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not



WALDEN 291

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 grevtf
not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resohp
tion, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowl-
edge, 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
stick 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 Candahar3
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 as-
tonished 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?

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well
at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part,
we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an



292 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves
into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it
is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only
the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what
you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde,
the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had any-
thing to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make
a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His
companion's prayer is forgotten.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun
it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks
poorest when you are richest. The faultfinder will find faults
even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps
have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-
house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the
almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow
melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but
a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as
cheering thoughts, as in a palace. The town's poor seem to me
often to live the most independent lives of any. Maybe they
are simply great enough to receive without misgiving. Most
think that they are above being supported by the town ; but
it oftener happens that they are not above supporting them-
selves by dishonest means, which should be more disreputable.
Cultiyate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble
yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.
Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we
change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will
see that you do not want society. If I were confined to a
corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would
be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me. The
philosopher said: "From an army of three divisions one can
take away its general, and put it in disorder; from the man
the most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought."
Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself
to many influences to be played on ; it is all dissipation. Humil*



WALDEN 293

ity like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of
poverty and meanness gather around us, "and lol creation
widens to our view." We are often reminded that if there
were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aim? must
still be the same, and our means essentially the same. More-
over, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you
cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but
confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you
are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most
sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is
sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No man loses
ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous
wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to
buy one necessary of the soul.

I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition
was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of
my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum
from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries. My neigh-
bors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and
ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but I
am no more interested in such things than in the contents of
the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about
costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still,
dress it as you will. They tell me of California and Texas, of

England and the Indies, of the Hon. Mr. of Georgia or

of Massachusetts, all transient and fleeting phenomena, till I
am ready to leap from their court-yard like the Mameluke
bey. I delight to come to my bearings, not walk in procession
with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk
even with the Builder of the universe, if I may, not to live
in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century,
but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men
celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements,
and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the
president of the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh,
to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and



294 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

rightfully attracts me; not hang by the beam of the scale
and try to weigh less, not suppose a case, but take the case
that is; to travel the only path I can, and that on which no
power can resist me. It affords me no satisfaction to commence
to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation. Let us
not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom every-
where. We read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp
before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had.
But presently the traveller's horse sank in up to the girths,
and he observed to the boy, "I thought you said that this bog
had a hard bottom." "So it has," answered the latter, "but
you have not got half way to it yet." So it is with the bogs and
quicksands of society ; but he is an old boy that knows it. Only
what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is
good. I would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a
nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would keep
me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the
furring. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and
clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and
think of your work with satisfaction, a work at which you
would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will help you
God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another
rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I
sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance,
and obsequious; attendance, but sincerity and truth were not ;
and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. The
hospitality was as cold as the ices. I thought that there was no
need of ice to freeze them. They talked to me of the age of
the wine and the fame of the vintage; but I thought of an
older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage,
which they had not got, and could not buy. The style, the
house and grounds and "entertainment" pass for nothing with
me. I called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and
Conducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There
Was a roan in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree.



WALDEN 295

His manners were truly regal. I should have done better had
I called on him.

How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and
musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As
if one were to begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a
man to iioe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth
to practise Christian meekness and charity with goodness
aforethought! Consider the China pride and stagnant self-
complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a little to
congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and
in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its
long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and
literature with satisfaction. There are the Records of the
Philosophical Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great Menl
It is the good Adam contemplating his own virtue. "Yes, we
have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall
never die," that is, as long as we can remember them. The
learned societies and great men of Assyria, where are they?
What youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are!
There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole
human life. These may be but the spring months in the life
of the race. K we have had the seven-years 7 itch, we have not
seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are ac-
quainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live.
Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped
as many above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are
sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves
wise, and have an established order on the surface. Truly, we
are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand over
the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor,
and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask my-
self why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its
head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and
impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded
of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over
me the human insect.



296 THE WRITINGS OF THOREAU

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world and
yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what
kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened
countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they
are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang,
while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We think that we
can change our clothes only. It is said that the British Empire
is very large and respectable, and that the United States are
a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls
behind every man which can float the British Empire like a
chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what
sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground?
The government of the world I live in was not framed, like
that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

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 Eng-
land, 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 gnaw-
ing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they



WALDEN 297

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.






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