It has become a recurring thought in my mind: We never suspect how far our influence may extend, quite without out intention. Henry Thoreau laid down his life peacefully, tranquilly, in the spring of 1862, and yet he continues to change people’s lives today. Presumably he will continue to change people’s lives into the indefinite future. Certainly he changed mine!
I have told the tale of how I came to choose to explore Thoreau’s early social view as my Master’s thesis topic. It isn’t a very interesting story, except perhaps, in that as I began reading Walden, I was brought absolutely to a standstill by a paragraph that spoke to me. Later I learned that many people have been similarly moved by the same words, but at the time, I knew only that this man’s words, and therefore his heart, spoke to me. He said,
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation unless it was quite necessary.”
I wonder, do those two sentences still do for others what they did for the 24-year old I was then? I never had a yen to live alone in the woods (too far from libraries, for one thing!), but from that moment, I looked at life differently. weighed things in a different scale.
Or perhaps that is merely hindsight. All I know for sure is that I was one person when I picked up that book, and another when I finished reading it. Then came his journals (24 years’ worth of volumes, though in graduate school I had time only to read and absorb those from the first ten years), and the essays, and eventually the other volumes.
An attractive man, both in the content of his thoughts and in the dressing of them. His was the first writing that forced me to read between the lines to get his meaning.(Stray thought: Had I not learned on Thoreau, would I have known, much later, how to read Hemingway?)
Speaking of reading between the line, here is a thought-experiment. Can you see how the things I am going to quote affected me? Or, another way to look at it, can you see what pre-existing facets of my community of strands they would have activated? And more important than what they stirred up in me, what do they stir up in you?
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These are but a few gems, plucked almost at random.
- Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect.
- There is always room and occasional enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first.
- The highest condition of art is artlessness.
- Truth is always paradoxical.
- By sufferance you may escape suffering.
- When a dog runs at you, whistle for him. [I have always loved this one!]
- It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians. [This one too.]
- To be brave is the beginning of victory.
- Ah! Such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of, — we three, — it expanded and racked my little house; I should not dare to say how many pounds’ weight there was above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened the seams so that they had to be caulked with much dullness thereafter to stop the consequent leak; — but I had enough of that kind of oakum already picked.
- It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense.
- Undoubtedly all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level.
- Live free, child of the mist.
- “If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
- “A bore is someone who takes away my solitude and doesn’t give me companionship in return.”
- “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
- “A man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting his living.”
- “A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.”
- “Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.”
- “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”
- “As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”
- “Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.”
- “Be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be.”
- “Being is the great explainer.”
- “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”
- “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
- “Cowards suffer, heroes enjoy.”
- “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
- “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”
- “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”
- “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”
- “Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.”
- “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.”
- “Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”
- “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.”
- “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
- “If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.”
- “In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.”
- “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
- “The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”
- “We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”
Trust me, I could go on and on for a good long time. But perhaps a word to the wise is enough to send you to the library or bookstore. Only, be warned, this man will change your life, if you let him.
“Our thoughts are the epochs of our life: all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.”