Three samples from a book of Thoreau’s letters seem to have application to our lives today. But then, I could quote him up one side and down the other. His lightest comments are full of meat and vigor. And what is he preaching here but what he always preached? Integrity, attention to guidance, self-sufficiency.
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At age 22, to his sister Helen, June 13, 1840:
“Ley us leave trifles, then, to accident; and politics, and finance, and such gossip, to the moments when diet and exercise are cared for, and speak to each other deliberately as out of one infinity into another – you there in time and space, and I here. For beside this relation, all books and doctrines are no better than gossip or the turning of a spit.”
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To H.G.O. Blake, Dec. 19, 1854:
“Why should we ever go abroad, even across the way, to ask a neighbor’s advice? There is a nearer neighbor within us incessantly telling us how we should behave. But we wait for the neighbor without to tell us of some false, easier way.”
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To Blake, May 21, 1856:
“It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner til there is none at all.”