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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 _æs 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 offences; 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, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new

      people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the

      globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the

      phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an

      instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

      One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned any thing of

      absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important

      advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and

      their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as

      they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which

      belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I

      have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the

      first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They

      have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing to the

      purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me;

      but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any

      experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my

      Mentors said nothing about.

      One farmer СКАЧАТЬ