Two passages, excerpted from Walden (Or Life in the Woods) by Henry David Thoreau, Boston 1854.

One from the middle and the other from very near the end of the novel. If you read carefully (those of you who read Thoreau already know you must read carefully or his words’ll go all dyslexic on you), my point of including this post and its contents should become dbisly apparent.

[Thoreau’s words are perfect, any mistakes in the transcription are all mine ..& unfortunate.]

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Chapter VI, Visitors, pages 233 & 234

… I asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he had got a new idea this summer. “Good Lord,” said he, “a man that has to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. May be the man you hoe with is inclined to race ; then, by gory, your mind must be there ; you think of weeds.” He would sometimes ask me first on such occasions, if I had made any improvement. One winter day I asked him if he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive for living. “Satisfied !” said he ; “some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with another. One man, perhaps if he has got enough, will be satisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the table, by George !” Yet I never, by any manœuvring, could get him to take the spiritual view of things ; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate ; and this, practically, is true of most men. If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered, without expressing any regret, that is was too late. Yet he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues.

There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself, distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man’s, it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported. He suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all ; who are as bottomless as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy.

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Chapter XVIII, Conclusion, pages 497-499

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 obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to 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 five 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.

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