Walden

tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot!  The portionless, who
struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it
labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.
    But men labor under a mistake.  The better part of the man is
soon plowed into the soil for compost.  By a seeming fate, commonly
called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book,
laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves
break through and steal.  It is a fool's life, as they will find
when they get to the end of it, if not before.  It is said that
Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads
behind them:--

           Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
           Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,--

  "From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,
   Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are."

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the
stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.
    Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere
ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and
superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be
plucked by them.  Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy
and tremble too much for that.  Actually, the laboring man has not
leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain
the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the
market.  He has no time to be anything but a machine.  How can he
remember well his ignorance -- which his growth requires -- who has
so often to use his knowledge?  We should feed and clothe him
gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we
judge of him.  The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on
fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling.  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.  But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do
desperate things.
    When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the
chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of
life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode
of living because they preferred it to any other.  Yet they honestly
think there is no choice left.  But alert and healthy natures
remember that the sun rose clear.  It is never too late to give up
our prejudices.  No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can
be trusted without proof.  What everybody echoes or in silence
passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow,
mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would
sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.  What old people say you
cannot do, you try and find that you can.  Old deeds for old people,
and new deeds for new.  Old people did not know enough once,