Blog - 8/22/10 - Excerpts from the writings of Henry David Thoreau
Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed from us all our lives. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, --not a grain more.
Winnipesaukee means the smile of the great spirit
A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.
Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness, —to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces streams. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast.
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.
The earth is not a mere fragment of dead, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit, --not a fossil earth but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.
Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.
I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society. 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.
Thoreau influenced Jack Kerouac – Kerouac took out from his local library Thoreau’s essay entitled “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” and never returned it. In this copy Kerouac underlined the sentence “The traveler must be born again ON THE ROAD”
Thoreau influenced Gandi with his essay “Civil Disobedience”
Other titles of his include: Cape Cod, Walking, The Maine Woods, Autumnal Tints, Slavery in Massachusetts, A plea for Captain John Brown, and Walden.