WALDEN AND ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. Henry David ThoreauЧитать онлайн книгу.
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
beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the
same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as
our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to
another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through
each other’s eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the
world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry,
Mythology!—I know of no reading of another’s experience so startling
and informing as this would be.
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to
be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good
behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say
the wisest thing you can, old man,—you who have lived seventy years,
not without honor of a kind,—I hear an irresistible voice which invites
me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of
another like stranded vessels.
I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may
waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.
Nature