WALDEN AND ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. Henry David Thoreau

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СКАЧАТЬ then the warmth of the affections.

      We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some

      enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every

      child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out

      doors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having

      an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with which when

      young he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was

      the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor

      which still survived in us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs of

      palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass

      and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we

      know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic

      in more senses than we think. From the hearth to the field is a great

      distance. It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days

      and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies,

      if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell

      there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their

      innocence in dovecots.

      However, if one designs to construct a dwelling house, it behooves him

      to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself

      in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an almshouse, a

      prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a

      shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this

      town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a

      foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have it

      deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my living

      honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question

      which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am

      become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six

      feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at

      night, and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might

      get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it,

      to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and

      hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be

      free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable

      alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you

      got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for

      rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and

      more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as

      this. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being

      treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable

      house for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was

      once made here almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished

      ready to their hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians

      subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, “The best

      of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of

      trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up,

      and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they

      are green.... The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of

      a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not

      so good as the former.... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet

      long and thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their wigwams,

      and found them as warm as the best English houses.” He adds, that they

      were commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered

      mats, and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had

      advanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat

      suspended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge

      was in the first instance constructed in a day or two at most, and

      taken down and put up in a few hours; and every family owned one, or

      its apartment in one.

      In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best,

      and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I

      speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have

      their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams,

      in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a

      shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially

      prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small

      fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside

      garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy

      a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as

      they live. I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring

      compared with owning, but it is evident that the savage owns his

      shelter СКАЧАТЬ