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 Tchingthang
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
hum 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.
