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

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СКАЧАТЬ by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use

      has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from

      savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.

      To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life,

      Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable

      grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest

      or the mountain’s shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than

      Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may,

      accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food,

      Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are we

      prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a

      prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and

      cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth

      of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the

      present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the

      same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately

      retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel,

      that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not

      cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the

      inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were

      well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these

      naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great

      surprise, “to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a

      roasting.” So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity,

      while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine

      the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the

      civilized man? According to Liebig, man’s body is a stove, and food the

      fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold

      weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a

      slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too

      rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the

      fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with

      fire; but so much for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above

      list, that the expression, _animal life_, is nearly synonymous with the

      expression, _animal heat_; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel

      which keeps up the fire within us,—and Fuel serves only to prepare that

      Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from

      without,—Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the _heat_ thus

      generated and absorbed.

      The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the

      vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our

      Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our

      night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this

      shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves

      at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is

      a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer

      directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes

      possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food,

      is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are

      sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various,

      and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half

      unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my

      own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a

      wheelbarrow, &c., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and

      access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be

      obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side

      of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves

      to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live,—that is,

      keep comfortably warm,—and die in New England at last. The luxuriously

      rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I

      implied before, they are cooked, of course _à la mode_.

      Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are

      not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of

      mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever

      lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient

      philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than

      which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward.

      We know not much about them. It is remarkable that _we_ know so much of

      them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and

      benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of

      human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary

      poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in

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