Volume 9
August, 1856 - August, 1857
Such preparation, such an outfit, has our life, and so little brought to pass!
In fact, I expected little of this walk, yet it did pass through the side
of my mind that somehow, on this very account (my small expectation),
it would turn out well, as also the advantage of having some purpose,
however small, to be accomplished -- of letting your deliberate wisdom
and foresight in the house to some extent direct and control your
steps. If you would really take a position outside the street and
daily life of men, you must have deliberately planned your course, you
must have business which is not your neighbor's business, which they
cannot understand. For only absorbing employment prevails, succeeds,
takes up space, occupies territory, determines the future of individuals
and states, drives Kansas out of your head, and actually and permanently
occupies the only desirable and free Kansas against all border ruffians.
The attitude of resistance is one of weakness, inasmuch as it only
faces an enemy; it has its back to all that is truly affirmative.
You shall have your affairs, I will have mine. You will spend this
afternoon in setting up your neighbor's stove, and be paid for it; I
will spend it gathering the few berries of Vaccinium oxycoccus
which Nature produces here, before it is too late, and be paid for
it also after another fashion. I have always reaped unexpected and
incalculable advantages from carrying out at last, however tardily, any
little enterprise which my genius suggested to me long ago a thing to
be done -- some step to be taken, however slight, out of the usual course.
How many schools of thought I have thought of which I might go to
but did not go to! expecting foolishly that some greater advantage or
schooling would come to me! It is these comparatively cheap and private
expeditions that substantiate our existence and batten our lives, as,
where a vine touches the earth in its undulating course, it puts forth
roots and thickens its stock. Our employment generally is tinkering,
mending the old worn-out teapot of society. Our stock in trade is solder.
Better for me, says my genius, to go cranberrying this afternoon for the
Vaccinium oxycoccus in Gowing's Swamp, to get but a pocketful and
learn its peculiar flavor, aye, and the flavor of Gowing's Swamp and of
life in New England, than to go consul in Liverpool and get I don't
know how may thousand dollars for it, with no such flavor. Many of our
days should be spent, not in vain expectations and lying on our oars,
but in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little
purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him. Let not
your life be wholly without an object, though it be only to ascertain
the flavor of a cranberry, for it will not be only the quality of an
insignificant berry that you will have tasted, but the flavor of your
life to that extent, and it will be such sauce as no wealth can buy.
I think we may detect that some sort of preparation and faint expectation preceded every discovery we have made. We blunder into no discovery but it will appear that we have prayed and disciplined ourselves for it.
I feel this difference between great poetry and small: that in the one, the sense outruns and overflows the words; in the other, the words the sense.
Sophia says, bringing company into my sanctum, by way of apology, that I regard the dust on my furniture like the bloom on fruits, not to be swept off.
I do not perceive the dramatic and poetic capabilities of an anecdote or a story which is told me, its significance, till some time afterwards. One of the qualities of a pregnant fact is that it does not surprise us, and we only perceive afterward how interesting it is, and then must know all the particulars.
I am amused to see four little Irish boys only five or six years old getting a horse to pasture, for their father apparently, who is at work in a neighboring field. They have all in a row got hold of a very long halter and are leading him. All wish to have a hand in it. It is surprising that he obeys such small specimens of humanity, but he seems to be very docile, a real family horse. At length, by dint of pulling and shouting, they get him into a run down a hill, and though he moves very deliberately, scarcely faster than a walk, all but the one at the end of the line soon cut and run to the right and left, without having looked behind, expecting him to be upon them. They haul up at last at the bars, which are down, and then the family puppy, a brown pointer, about two-thirds grown, comes bounding to join them and assist. He is as youthful and about as knowing as any of them. The horse marches gravely behind, obeying the faint tug at the halter, or honestly stands still from time to time, as if not aware that they are pulling at all, though they are all together straining every nerve to start him. It is interesting to behold this faithful beast, the oldest and wisest of the company, thus implicitly obeying the lead of the youngest and weakest.
It is well to find your employment and amusement in simple and homely things. They wear best and yield most. I think I would rather watch the motions of these cows in their pasture for a day, which I now see headed one way and slowly advancing -- watch them and project their course carefully on a chart, and report all their behavior faithfully -- than wander to Europe or Asia and watch other motions there; for it is only ourselves we report in either case, and perchance we shall report a more restless and worthless self in the latter case than in the first.
Men commonly exaggerate the theme. Some themes they think are significant and others insignificant. I feel that my life is very homely, my pleasures very cheap. Joy and sorrow, success and failure, grandeur and meanness, and indeed most words in the English language do not mean for me what they do for my neighbors. I see that my neighbors look with compassion on me, that they think it is a mean and unfortunate destiny which makes me to walk in these fields and woods so much and sail on this river alone. But as long as I find her the only real Elysium, I cannot hesitate in my choice. My work is writing, and I do not hesitate, though I know that no object is too trivial for me, tried by ordinary standards; for, ye fools, the theme is nothing, the life is everything. All that interests the reader is the depth and intensity of the life excited. We touch our subject but by a point that has no breadth, but the pyramid of our experience, or our interest in it, rests on us by a broader or narrower base. That is, man is all in all. Nature nothing, but as she draws him out and reflects him. Give me simple, cheap, and homely themes.
I love and could embrace the shrub oak with its scant garment of leaves rising above the snow, lowly whispering to me, akin to winter thoughts, and sunsets, and to all virtue. Covert which the hare and the partridge seek, and I too seek. What cousin of mine is the shrub oak? How can any man suffer long? For a sense of want is a prayer, and all prayers are answered.
As for the sensuality in Whitman's Leaves of Grass, I do not so much wish that it was not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read it without harm.
When I get as far as my bean-field, the reflected white in the winter horizon of this perfectly cloudless sky is being condensed at the horizon's edge, and its hue deepening into a dun golden, against which the tops of trees -- pines and elms -- are seen with beautiful distinctness, and a slight blush begins to suffuse the eastern horizon, and so the picture of the day is done and set in a golden frame.
After spending four or five days surveying and drawing a plan incessantly, I especially feel the necessity of putting myself in communication with nature again, to recover my tone, to withdraw out of the wearying and unprofitable world of affairs. The things I have been doing have but a fleeting and accidental importance, however much men are immersed in them, and yield very little valuable fruit. I would fain have been wading through the woods and fields and conversing with the sane snow. Having waded in the very shallowest stream of time, I would now bathe my temples in eternity. I wish again to participate in the serenity of nature, to share the happiness of the river and woods. I thus from time to time break off my connection with eternal truths and go with the shallow stream of human affairs, grinding at the mill of the Philistines; but when my task is done, with never-failing confidence I devote myself to the infinite again. It would be sweet to deal with men more, I can imagine, but where dwell they? Not in the fields that I traverse.
There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me and excites such serene and profitable thought. The objects are elevating. In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it -- dining with the Governor or a member of Congress! But alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak, and to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine.
For some years past I have partially offered myself as a lecturer; have been advertised as such several years. Yet I have had but two or three invitations to lecture in a year, and some years none at all. I congratulate myself on having been permitted to stay at home thus, I am so much richer for it. I do not see what I should have got of much value, but money, by going about, but I do see what I should have lost. It seems to me that I have a longer and more liberal lease of life thus. I cannot afford to be telling my experience, especially to those who will perhaps take no interest in it. I wish to be getting experience.
Men even think me odd and perverse because I do not prefer their society to this nymph or wood-god rather. But I have tried them. I have sat down with a dozen of them together in a club, and instantly -- they did not inspire me. One or another abused our ears with many words and a few thoughts which were not theirs. There was very little genuine goodness apparent. We are such hollow pretenders.
There are infinite degrees of life, from that which is next to sleep and death, to that which is forever awake and immortal. We must not confound man with man. We cannot conceive of a greater difference than between the life of one man and that of another. I am constrained to believe that the mass of men are never so lifted above themselves that their destiny is seen to be transcendently beautiful and grand.
By poverty, i.e., simplicity of life and fewness of incidents, I am solidified and crystallized, as a vapor or liquid by cold. It is a singular concentration of strength and energy and flavor.
By simplicity, commonly called poverty, my life is concentrated and so becomes organized, or a cosmos, which before was inorganic and lumpish.
I perceive that some, commonly talented, persons are enveloped and confined by a certain crust of manners, which, though it may sometimes be a fair and transparent enamel, yet only repels and saddens the beholder, since by its rigidity it seems to repress all further expansion. They are viewed as at a distance, or like an insect under a tumbler. They have, as it were, prematurely hardened both seed and shell, and this has severely taxed, if not put a period to, the life of the plant. This is to stand upon your dignity.
Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply, for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is, in fact, a subtle detraction.
Often I can give the truest and most interesting account of any adventure I have had after years have elapsed, for then I am not confused, only the most significant facts surviving in my memory. Indeed, all that continues to interest me after such a lapse of time is sure to be pertinent, and I may safely record all that I remember.
It is foolish for a man to accumulate material wealth chiefly, houses and land. Our stock in life, our real estate, is that amount of thought which we have had, which we have thought-out. The ground we have thus created is forever pasturage for our thoughts. I fall back on to visions which I have had. What else adds to my possessions and makes me rich in all lands? If you have ever done any work with these finest tools, the imagination and fancy and reason, it is a new creation, independent of the world, and a possession forever. You have laid up something against a rainy day. You have to that extent cleared the wilderness.
Methinks I hear these sounds, have these reminiscences, only when well employed, at any rate only when I have no reason to be ashamed of my employment. I am often aware of a certain compensation of this kind for doing something from a sense of duty, even unconsciously. Our past experience is a never-failing capital which can never be alienated, of which each kindred future event reminds us. If you would have the song of the sparrow inspire you a thousand years hence, let your life be in harmony with its strain today.
As for completeness and roundness, to be sure, we are each like one of the laciniae of a lichen, a torn fragment, but not the less cheerfully we expand in a moist day and assume unexpected colors. We want no completeness but intensity of life.
All genuine goodness is original and as free from cant and tradition as the air. It is heathen in its liberality and independence on tradition.
I sometimes awake in the night and think of friendship and its possibilities, a new life and revelation to me, which perhaps I had not experienced for many months. Such transient thoughts have been my nearest approach to realization of it, thoughts which I know of no one to communicate to. I suddenly erect myself in my thoughts, or find myself erected, infinite degrees above the possibilities of ordinary endeavors, and see for what grand stakes the game of life may be played.
I am interested in an indistinct prospect, a distant view, a mere suggestion often, revealing an almost wholly new world to me. I rejoice to get, and am apt to present, a new view. But I find it impossible to present my view to most people. In effect, it would seem they do not wish to take a new view in any case. Heat lightning flashes, which reveal a distant horizon to our twilight eyes. But my fellows simply assert that it is not broad day, which everybody knows, and fail to perceive the phenomenon at all. I am willing to pass for a fool in my often desperate, perhaps foolish, efforts to persuade them to lift the veil from off the possible and future, which they hold down with both their hands, before their eyes. The most valuable communication or news consists of hints and suggestions. When a truth comes to be known and accepted, it begins to be bad taste to repeat it. Every individual constitution is a probe employed in a new direction, and a wise man will attend to each one's report.
