Henry David Thoreau - Walden Conclusion, Różne EBOOK 340 szt
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Henry David Thoreau
Walden
“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
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography.”
What does Africa - what does the West stand for? Is not our 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 problems 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 shiploads 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
1
which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can
be patriotic who have no self-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 seal the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone. –
“Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.
Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae.”
Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.
I have more of God, they more of the road.
It is not worth the while 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” 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 bead 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 ascertain what degree of resolution
was necessary in order to place one's self in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of
society.” 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
2
obedience 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 Eve 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 endeavors 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. 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 cow-yard 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 I 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
3
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 instantly
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. Sometimes 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 fault with the morning 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 is considered a ground 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 so 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 should 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 different
drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however 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 substitute? 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?
4
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 in an imperfect work time
is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not 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 grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution,
and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, 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 stock 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 Candahars 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 astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of
Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with fun 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
infinity 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 anything 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 fault-finder will find faults even
5
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]