When Henry David Thoreau, the story goes, was on his death-bed, a parson asked him whether he had any intimations of the world to come. "One world at a time" was Henry David's reply.
Category: Emerson, Thoreau, and Friends
The Emersonian Travel Passage in Seneca
In a previous complaint about the travails of travel, I quoted a line from Emerson's "Self-Reliance": "Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places." I claimed that the thought was Seneca's before it was Emerson's. In the meantime the passage has been located in my hardcopy of the Loeb Classical Library, no. 75 (Seneca IV, Epistle XXVIII ad Lucilium, trans. R. M. Gummere, p. 199):
Though you may cross vast spaces of sea, and though, as our Vergil
(Aeneid, iii. 72) remarks, "Lands and cities are left astern, your
faults will follow you whithersoever you travel." Socrates made the
same remark to one who complained; he said: "Why do you wonder that
globe-trotting does not help you, seeing that you always take
yourself with you? The reason that set you wandering is ever at
your heels."
Licet vastum traieceris mare, licet, ut ait Vergilius noster,
"Terraeque urbesque recedant, sequentur te, quocumque perveneris,
vitia." Hoc videm quaerenti cuidam Socrates ait: "Quid miraris
nihil tibi peregrinationes prodesse, cum te circumferas? Premit te
eadem causa, quae expulit."
A Thoreauvian Justification for My Mode of Scribbling
Henry David Thoreau, Journals, 4 September 1851:
It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many themes, that so you may find the right and inspiring one. Be greedy of occasions to express your thought. Improve the opportunity to draw analogies. There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth.
Seize and Squeeze
Seize the day and squeeze it for all the juice it's worth. Repeat tomorrow. And no day without a little Emerson:
. . . we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. (From "Experience")
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread
"The sky is the daily bread of the eyes," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson magnificently and truly. And this from a man who lived in New England where there is no sky to speak of. What would he have written had he been able to bathe his thoughts in the lambent light of the desert Southwest?
Seize and Squeeze
Seize the day and squeeze it for all the juice it's worth. Repeat tomorrow. And no day without a little Emerson:
. . . we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. (From "Experience")
Now that is good writing.
Most Common Thoreau Misquotation?
It rankles this curmudgeon when the following beautiful line of Henry David Thoreau is butchered:
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Again and again, people who cannot read what is on the page substitute 'wilderness' for 'wildness.' People see what they want to see, or expect to see. Here is an example of double butchery I found recently:
In wilderness is the preservation of Mankind.
(Warren Macdonald, A Test of Will, Greystone Books, 2004, p. 145.)