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, woodlot, 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, gnawed 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 Rusticâ” 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 the 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
every where.
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 wilder 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 whippoorwill, 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 north-west, 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 Tching-thang 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 Irish-man, 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 to-day to save nine to-morrow. 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 any
thing new that has happened to a man any where 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.
