Walden

             Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse."

    All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is
one.  It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or
sleep sensually.  They are but one appetite, and we only need to see
a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist
he is.  The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity.  When the
reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at
another.  If you would be chaste, you must be temperate.  What is
chastity?  How shall a man know if he is chaste?  He shall not know
it.  We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is.  We
speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard.  From exertion
come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.  In the
student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind.  An unclean person
is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun
shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued.  If you
would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it
be at cleaning a stable.  Nature is hard to be overcome, but she
must be overcome.  What avails it that you are Christian, if you are
not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are
not more religious?  I know of many systems of religion esteemed
heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke
him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites
merely.
    I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the
subject -- I care not how obscene my words are -- but because I
cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity.  We discourse
freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about
another.  We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the
necessary functions of human nature.  In earlier ages, in some
countries, every function was reverently spoken of and regulated by
law.  Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however
offensive it may be to modern taste.  He teaches how to eat, drink,
cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is
mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things
trifles.
    Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the
god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by
hammering marble instead.  We are all sculptors and painters, and
our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.  Any nobleness
begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or
sensuality to imbrute them.
    John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard
day's work, his mind still running on his labor more or less.
Having bathed, he sat down to re-create his intellectual man.  It
was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were
apprehending a frost.  He had not attended to the train of his
thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that
sound harmonized with his mood.  Still he thought of his work; but
the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his
head, and he found himself planning and contriving it against his
will, yet it concerned him very little.  It was no more than the
scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off.  But the notes
of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from
that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which
slumbered in him.  They gently did away with the street, and the
village, and the state in which he lived.  A voice said to him --
Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a
glorious existence is possible for you?  Those same stars twinkle
over other fields than these. -- But how to come out of this
condition and actually migrate thither?  All that he could think of
was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his
body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.


                          Brute Neighbors

    Sometimes I had a companion in my fishing, who came through the
village to my house from the other side of the town, and the
catching of the dinner was as much a social exercise as the eating
of it.
    Hermit.  I wonder what the world is doing now.  I have not heard
so much as a locust over the sweet-fern these three hours.  The
pigeons are all asleep upon their roosts -- no flutter from them.
Was that a farmer's noon horn which sounded from beyond the woods
just now?  The hands are coming in to boiled salt beef and cider and
Indian bread.  Why will men worry themselves so?  He that does not
eat need not work.  I wonder how much they have reaped.  Who would
live there where a body can never think for the barking of Bose?
And oh, the housekeeping! to keep bright the devil's door-knobs, and
scour his tubs this bright day!  Better not keep a house.  Say, some
hollow tree; and then for morning calls and dinner-parties!  Only a
woodpecker tapping.  Oh, they swarm; the sun is too warm there; they
are born too far into life for me.  I have water from the spring,
and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf. -- Hark!  I hear a rustling
of the leaves.  Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the
instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these
woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain?  It comes on apace; my
sumachs and sweetbriers tremble. -- Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you?  How do
you like the world to-day?
    Poet.  See those clouds; how they hang!  That's the greatest
thing I have seen to-day.  There's nothing like it in old paintings,
nothing like it in foreign lands -- unless when we were off the
coast of Spain.  That's a true Mediterranean sky.  I thought, as I
have my living to get, and have not eaten to-day, that I might go
a-fishing.  That's the true industry for poets.  It is the only
trade I have learned.  Come, let's along.
    Hermit.  I cannot resist.  My brown bread will soon be gone.  I
will go with you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a serious
meditation.  I think that I am near the end of it.  Leave me alone,