Conclusion
To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery.
Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does not grow in
New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here. The wild goose
is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes
a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern
bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons
cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and sweeter
grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail fences
are pulled down, and stone walls piled up on our farms, bounds are
henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen
town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer: but
you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is
wider than our views of it.
Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like curious
passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum.
The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our
voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for
diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to southern Africa to chase the
giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after. How long,
pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also
may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot
one's self.--
"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet
undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography."
What does Africa--what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior
white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast,
when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the
Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would
find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the
only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him?
Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park,
the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans;
explore your own higher latitudes--with shiploads of preserved meats to
support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for
a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be
a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new
channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm
beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state,
a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no
self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil
which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may
still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What
was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its
parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there
are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an
isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to
sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a
government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it
is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's
being alone.
"Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.
Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille
viae."
Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.
I have more of God,
they more of the road.
It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in
Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps
find some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at last. England
and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front
on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of sight of
land, though it is without doubt the direct way to India. If you would
learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations,
if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all
climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even
obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are
demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to
the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. Start now on that farthest
western way, which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor
conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct, a tangent
to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down,
and at last earth down too.
It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain what
degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's self in
formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society." He declared that
"a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much courage
as a footpad"--"that honor and religion have never stood in the way of a
well-considered and a firm resolve." This was manly, as the world goes;
and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would have found
himself often enough "in formal opposition" to what are deemed "the most
sacred laws of society," through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and
so have tested his resolution without going out of his way. It is not
for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain
himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the
laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just
government, if he should chance to meet with such.
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed
to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any
more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we
fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I
had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to
the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it
is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen
into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft
and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind
travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world,
how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a
cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the
world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do
not wish to go below now.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances
confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the
life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible
boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish
themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and
interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with
the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies
his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and
solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness
weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be
lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall
speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow
so. As if that were important, and there were not enough to understand
you without them. As if Nature could support but one order of
understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as
well as creeping things, and hush and whoa, which Bright can
understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity
alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be _extra-vagant_
enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily
experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been
convinced. Extra vagance! it depends on how you are yarded. The
migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not
extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cowyard
fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time. I desire to speak
somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in
their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough
even to lay the foundation of a true expression. Who that has heard a
strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more
forever? In view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly
and undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our
shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile
truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the
residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal
monument alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are
not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to
superior natures.
Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as
common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they
express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are
once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only
a third part of their wit. Some would find fault with the morning red,
if they ever got up early enough. "They pretend," as I hear, "that the
verses of Kabir have four different senses; illusion, spirit, intellect,
and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas"; but in this part of the world
it is considered a ground for complaint if a man's writings admit
of more than one interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the
potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails
so much more widely and fatally?
I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should be
proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score than
was found with the Walden ice. Southern customers objected to its blue
color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and
preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds. The
purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like
the azure ether beyond.
Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally,
are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the
Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better
than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to
the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every
one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such
desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the
music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important
that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn
his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made
for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will
not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven
of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to
gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were
not?
There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive
after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having
considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into
a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be
perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life.
He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it
should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and
rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they
grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. His
singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed
him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no
compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a
distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock
in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he
sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it the
proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the
point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in
the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and
polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had
put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma
had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these
things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly
expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of
all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff,
a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities
and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken
their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his
feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been
an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a
single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the
tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure;
how could the result be other than wonderful?
No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as
the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where
we are, but in a false position. Through an infinity of our natures, we
suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at
the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we
regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not
what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the
tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say.
"Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread
before they take the first stitch." His companion's prayer is forgotten.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call
it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you
are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love
your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling,
glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from
the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode;
the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see
but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering
thoughts, as in a palace. The town's poor seem to me often to live the
most independent lives of any. Maybe they are simply great enough
to receive without misgiving. Most think that they are above being
supported by the town; but it oftener happens that they are not
above supporting themselves by dishonest means, which should be more
disreputable. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not
trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.
Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell
your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want
society. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a
spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts
about me. The philosopher said: "From an army of three divisions one
can take away its general, and put it in disorder; from the man the
most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought." Do not seek so
anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to
be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the
heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us,
"and lo! creation widens to our view." We are often reminded that if
there were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must still
be the same, and our means essentially the same. Moreover, if you
are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and
newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant
and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which
yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone
where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No man
loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous
wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one
necessary of the soul.
I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured
a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there
reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise
of my contemporaries. My neighbors tell me of their adventures
with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the
dinner-table; but I am no more interested in such things than in the
contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about
costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it
as you will. They tell me of California and Texas, of England and the
Indies, of the Hon. Mr.----of Georgia or of Massachusetts, all transient
and fleeting phenomena, till I am ready to leap from their court-yard
like the Mameluke bey. I delight to come to my bearings--not walk in
procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk
even with the Builder of the universe, if I may--not to live in this
restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or
sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They are
all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from
somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his
orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most
strongly and rightfully attracts me--not hang by the beam of the scale
and try to weigh less--not suppose a case, but take the case that is; to
travel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resist me. It
affords me no satisfaction to commerce to spring an arch before I have
got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a
solid bottom everywhere. We read that the traveller asked the boy if
the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had.
But presently the traveller's horse sank in up to the girths, and
he observed to the boy, "I thought you said that this bog had a hard
bottom." "So it has," answered the latter, "but you have not got half
way to it yet." So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but
he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought, said, or done at
a certain rare coincidence is good. I would not be one of those who will
foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would
keep me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the
furring. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so
faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with
satisfaction--a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the
Muse. So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as
another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table
where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance,
but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the
inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices. I thought
that there was no need of ice to freeze them. They talked to me of the
age of the wine and the fame of the vintage; but I thought of an older,
a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they had
not got, and could not buy. The style, the house and grounds and
"entertainment" pass for nothing with me. I called on the king, but he
made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for
hospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow
tree. His manners were truly regal. I should have done better had I
called on him.
How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty
virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were to begin
the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in
the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity
with goodness aforethought! Consider the China pride and stagnant
self-complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a little to
congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in
Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent,
it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with
satisfaction. There are the Records of the Philosophical Societies, and
the public Eulogies of Great Men! It is the good Adam contemplating his
own virtue. "Yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which
shall never die"--that is, as long as we can remember them. The learned
societies and great men of Assyria--where are they? What youthful
philosophers and experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers
who has yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the spring months
in the life of the race. If we have had the seven-years' itch, we have
not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted
with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved
six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not
where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we
esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface.
Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand over
the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and
endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will
cherish those humble thoughts, and bide its head from me who might,
perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering
information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence
that stands over me the human insect.
There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we
tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons
are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such
words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung
with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We think
that we can change our clothes only. It is said that the British
Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a
first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind
every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should
ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust
will next come out of the ground? The government of the world I live in
was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over
the wine.
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year
higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even
this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It
was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks
which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its
freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New
England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of
an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's
kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in
Massachusetts--from an egg deposited in the living tree many years
earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it;
which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by
the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and
immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful
and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many
concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society,
deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which
has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned
tomb--heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family
of man, as they sat round the festive board--may unexpectedly come forth
from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy
its perfect summer life at last!
I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is
the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to
dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day
dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a
morning star.
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