Walden
by Henry David Thoreau
Yet we
do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are
sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that
some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners
which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are
fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to
spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour.
It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live,
for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits,
trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very
ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass,
for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying,
and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising
to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry
favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison
offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a
nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and
vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you
make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import
his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up
something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old
chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in
the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.
I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost
say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of
servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle
masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a
Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of
all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity
in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by
day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty
to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared
with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire
Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers
and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor
divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a
fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared
with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it
is which 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.
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