目　录

中文目录

英文目录

企鹅口袋书系列·伟大的思想

我的栖身之所，

我的人生目的

（英汉双语）

亨利·戴维·梭罗　着　李育超　译

中国出版集团

中国对外翻译出版公司

图书在版编目（CIP）数据

我的栖身之所，我的人生目的/［美］亨利·戴维·梭罗着；李育超译—北京：中国对外翻译出版公司，2009.11

（企鹅口袋书系列·伟大的思想）

ISBN 978-2520-4

Ⅰ．我…　Ⅱ．①亨…②李…　Ⅲ．　　—　　　　—　　　Ⅳ．

中国版本图书馆CIP数据核字（2009）第　　　　　号

出版发行／中国对外翻译出版公司

地　　址／北京市西城区车公庄大街甲4号物华大厦6层

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策划编辑／李玉超

责任编辑／

封面设计／

排　　版／北京杰瑞腾达科技发展有限公司

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经　　销／新华书店

规　　格／880×1230毫米　1/32

印　　张／

字　　数／　　　千字

版　　次／2009年11月第一版

印　　次／2009年11月第一次

ISBN　978-2520-4　定价：00.00元

版权所有　侵权必究

中国对外翻译出版公司

中文目录

简朴生活

我的栖身之所，我的人生目的

冬日里的动物

结束语

返回总目录

简朴生活

以下篇章，更确切地说是大部分文字，是我离群索居，在马萨诸塞州康科德镇的瓦尔登湖滨那片森林里写就的。那时候，我孤身一人居住在自己亲手搭建的屋舍里，方圆一英里之内没有任何邻居，仅靠双手劳作来养活自己。在那里，我生活了两年又两个月。如今，我又成了文明生活的过客。

若不是镇子里的人对我的生活方式刨根问底，我本不会把自己这些私事强加给读者。有些人可能会把这种探询称为唐突无礼，不过，在我看来并非如此，而且，考虑到当时的情景，那是自然而然，合情合理的。他们中间有些人问我吃些什么，是否感到孤单寂寞，是否害怕，诸如此类。另有些人好奇地打探，我把自己收入中的多大一部分捐赠给了慈善事业；还有些人，家里人口多，想知道我抚养了几个贫苦孩子。在这本书里，我会对上述的某些问题作出回答，在此恳请那些对我这个人没有什么特殊兴趣的读者多加原谅。在多数作品中，第一人称“我”通常是避而不用的；而在我这本书里，“我”则大行其道；言必称我是本书与众不同的主要特点。其实，说到底，进行陈述的都是第一人称，我们却往往忽视这一点。倘若我对他人知之甚多，如同了解自己一般，我就不会大谈特谈自我了。遗憾的是，我阅历浅薄，只得囿于这一主题。不仅如此，就我而言，我想要每一个作家，都不仅仅是记述道听途说来的别人的生活，而是或迟或早，把自己的生活以一种简洁而真诚的方式描述出来；类似于他从遥远的异地写给亲人的生活实录；因为我觉得，如果一个人真诚地生活过，他必定是生活在一个与我相距遥远的地方。也许这些篇章更适合那些清贫的莘莘学子，至于其他读者，他们自会各取所需。我相信，没有人愿意穿上一件紧绷绷的衣衫，只有合乎尺寸的衣服穿上才会感到舒适自如。

我在此娓娓道来的事情与中国以及桑威奇群岛〔1〕的人没有多大关系，而是与阅读这些文字的诸位——你们这些生活在新英格兰的人息息相关；我所说的正是你们的际遇，尤其是你们在这个世界上，在这个城镇里生活的外部境况或环境，也就是说，你们生活得如此不尽人意是不可避免的吗？这种状况是否能够得到改善？我在康科德游历过很多地方，所到之处，不论是商店、办公室，还是田野里，我无不感觉到这里的居民仿佛正在以数以千计不同寻常的方式身体力行着苦修赎罪。我听说，婆罗门教徒会坐在四堆火之间，眼睛直视太阳，或者头朝下倒挂在火焰之上，或者侧转头颅仰视苍穹，“直至无法恢复原状，只有液体能够通过扭曲变形的脖子进到胃里”；还有的用铁链锁在树下，如此终其一生，或者像蠕虫一样，用自己的躯体丈量帝国的广袤土地，或者单腿直立在柱子顶端——这些形形色色有意识的苦行赎罪行为，足以让人感到匪夷所思、惊诧不已，然而，我每天亲眼目睹的情形有过之而无不及。和我的邻居们所从事的劳役相比较而言，赫拉克勒斯〔2〕的十二项艰巨任务简直就是微不足道——因为那只不过是十二项任务而已，总有结束的时候；可是我从来没有见过邻居们杀死或捕获过什么怪兽，也没有看到他们做完过什么苦役。他们也没有像伊俄拉斯这样的朋友来助其一臂之力，用火红的烙铁灼烧九头蛇的残颈，而是刚刚砍掉一个蛇头，立刻就有两个冒出来。

我见到过一些年轻人，那些和我住在同一个镇子里的人，他们继承了农庄、屋舍、谷仓、牲畜，还有农具，这对他们来说是一种不幸：因为这些东西得来容易，舍弃可就难了。他们倒还不如降生在空旷的牧场上，让狼来哺育他们，这样，他们也许能够更清楚地意识到，他们是被召唤到什么样的田地上来劳作。是谁使得他们成了土地的奴隶？为什么他们能够享受60英亩土地的供养，而有些人命中注定只能含垢忍辱？为什么他们刚刚降临人世就开始自掘坟墓呢？他们不得不度过人的一生，推着所有这些东西一路前行，尽其所能生活得好一些。我遇到过多少令人怜悯而又永世无绝的灵魂啊，他们不堪生活的重负，几乎被压垮、窒息而死，他们在人生之路上艰难爬行，推着一座75英尺长40英尺宽的大谷仓，一个从未清扫过的奥吉亚斯牛圈〔3〕，还有100英亩土地——耕地、牧草地、牧场和林地！那些没有产业可以继承的人，倒是无需费心竭力地载负这种多余的身外之累，不过，他们为了几立方英尺的血肉之躯，已经够委曲求全，含辛茹苦了。

然而，人的艰苦劳作总是错误所致。一个人生命中的大部分光阴都在转瞬间被犁进泥土，化作了肥料。正如一本古书中所说，他们往往被一种似是而非，通常被称作“必然”的命运所支配，靠劳作积累起财富，结果却遭到虫蛀锈蚀，乃至招致贼人破门而入，偷窃一空〔4〕。这是一种愚蠢的生活——人生在世倘若对此不甚明了，等到弥留之际他们终会大彻大悟。据说，丢卡利翁和皮拉在创造人类的时候，是把石头从头顶上方丢到身后〔5〕，诗曰——

从此人类成为坚韧物种，历尽千辛万苦，

向我们证实我们的出处。〔6〕

罗利也用铿锵有力的语调作出回应——

从此我们善良的心灵坚硬如铁石，

证明我们的身躯具有岩石一般的品质。

原来人的创造不过是盲目服从一个大错特错的神谕——将一块块石头从头顶上方丢到身后，也不去看落在何处。

大多数人，即使生活在这个相对自由的国家里，纯粹由于无知和错误，为生活中人为的烦恼和没完没了的粗鄙活计而终日忙忙碌碌，因而无法采摘更为美好的生命果实——他们的手指由于过度劳作而变得笨拙僵硬，颤抖不止，根本无法做到。实际上，日复一日，劳作之人根本没有空闲让自己拥有真正完整的人生；他无法和他人保持最为高尚的关系；他的劳动在市场上总会贬值。除了充当一架机器，他没有时间去担当任何其他角色。那些迫不得已经常运用自己的知识的人，怎么能够清楚地记得自己的无知呢？——而这正是他成长所需要的。在评说他们之前，我们有时候应该让他们不花分文吃饱穿暖，并且用滋补品帮助他们恢复体力。我们天性中最美好的品质，犹如果实上的粉霜，唯有百般小心才能保存下来。然而，我们对待自己或者彼此相待却难得有如此的柔情。

我们都知道，你们中间有些人家境贫寒，觉得生活甚为艰辛，有时候甚至可以说是艰于呼吸。我毫不怀疑，本书的读者之中，有的无钱偿付吃下的每一餐饭，衣服鞋子很快就会磨损残破或者已经变得褴褛不堪，好容易忙里偷闲，才能读几页文字，这片刻时间还是从债主那里偷借而来。你们这许多人过得是何等卑贱、畏缩的生活啊，这是显而易见的，因为生活阅历已经使我的眼光变得敏锐起来；你们总是挣扎在人生的边缘，进退维谷，想靠做生意来还债，这可是一个自古就有的泥沼，拉丁文称之为aes alienum，所谓别人的铜币——因为他们的钱币有些就是铜铸的；你们就在别人的铜币中生存、死亡、埋葬；你们总是许诺偿还债务，明天就偿还，结果明日复明日，直到死在今天，债务仍然没有了断；你们靠阿谀逢迎求取恩惠，除了会带来牢狱之灾的作奸犯科之事，不知用了多少手段；你们谎话连篇、熘须拍马、投票选举，把自己蜷缩在谦恭有礼的硬壳里，或者自我吹嘘，摆出一副空洞虚幻的慷慨模样，这样一来，也许就能让邻居信任你，愿意让你给他们做鞋子、帽子、衣服或者马车，为他们代购食品杂货；你们攒钱防病，结果却落得疾病缠身——你们把钱藏在旧箱子里或灰泥墙面后头的袜子里，或者为了更保险起见，把钱存入砖墙垒砌的银行里；不管藏在哪里，也不管数目是多是少。

有时候，我很是疑惑不解，我禁不住要说，我们何以如此轻率，竟然干起那罪恶昭著、违背常理的勾当来了，那就是奴役黑人；不论是在南方还是在北方，都有为数众多的精明狡诈的奴隶主。南方监工让人不堪忍受；北方的监工带来的灾难更为深重；但最可怕的情形莫过于你是自己最苛刻的监工。居然奢谈什么人的神圣！看那大路上的车夫，正日夜兼程赶往交易市场，他的心中会激荡着一丝一毫神圣的感情吗？他的最高职责就是给马匹饮水喂草，仅此而已！比起货运所得的利益，他的个人命运算得了什么呢？难道他不是在为一位富绅赶车吗？他有什么神圣可言，又有什么不朽可言？你看他，一副畏畏缩缩、偷偷摸摸的样子，一天到晚隐隐地提心吊胆，哪里谈得上什么神圣和不朽，只不过是自我评价的奴隶和囚徒，以及用自己的行为赢得名声的奴隶和囚徒而已。和我们对自己的看法相比，公众舆论不过是一个软弱无力的暴君。一个人如何看待自己，这决定了或者说预示了他自己的命运。即使是在西印度群岛的各个殖民地，就心灵和思想的自我解放而言，有哪个威尔伯福斯〔7〕能够有所作为呢？再来想想这个国家的妇女，末日即将来临之时，她们还在编织着梳妆用的坐垫，似乎对自己的命运毫不关心！仿佛消磨时日丝毫无损于永恒。

芸芸众生在静默无声的绝望中度日。所谓听天由命即是根深蒂固的绝望。你从绝望的城市走向绝望的乡村，不得不用水貂和麝鼠的勇敢来安慰自己。即使在人类所谓的游戏和娱乐背后，也潜藏着一种固定不变、不知不觉的绝望。这其中也没有什么乐趣可言，因为工作之余才谈得上乐趣。然而，不做绝望的事情，才是智慧的特征。

当我们用问答的形式，来探究何为人生的宗旨，以及什么是生活真正的需要和方式的时候，人类仿佛经过一番深思熟虑，选择了这种共同的生活方式，原因是他们更喜欢这种方式。而他们也确实认为自己别无选择。但是，头脑清醒、身心健康的人都不会忘记——太阳升起，天地一片清朗。放弃偏见，永远不会为时过晚。任何一种思维或行为方式，不论多么年深日久，如果不经过证实，就不能轻易相信。今天人人附和或者默认的真理，明天有可能会被证实为谬误，犹如虚无缥缈的一片氤氲，却被某些人当作云朵，以为能够化作滋润田野的雨露。年老之人认定办不到的事情，你尝试过后，发现是能够做到的。老人有老一套，新人有新作为。老辈人恐怕不曾知道添加新燃料可以让火焰经久不息，而新的一代则将少许干柴放在锅底下，就可以像飞鸟一般绕着地球旋转，正如谚语所云：“气死古人。”上年纪的人并不比年轻人更能胜任传道授业的角色，甚至比年轻人还稍逊一筹，因为随着年龄的增长，他们的所失大于所得。我们几乎可以质疑，即便是最具有智慧的人，究竟能否从自己的人生阅历中得到任何绝对有价值的东西。实际上，老辈人没有任何至关重要的忠告可以给予年轻人，他们一定心知肚明——由于种种个人原因，他们自己的经验不过是一孔之见，他们的一生无非是惨痛的失败；也许他们还存有一些与自己的经历不一致的信念，可是他们已经不再拥有往昔的青春岁月了。我已经在这个星球上生活了大约三十个年头，时至今日，我从未从长辈那里听到一句有价值的忠告，甚而连热诚的忠告都没有。就此而言，他们未曾告诉我任何东西，也许是无能为力吧。这就是生活，一个我在很大程度上还没有尝试过的实验；他们已经尝试过了，可对我来说毫无裨益。如果我得出任何自认为有价值的经验，我肯定会反思一下，得出的结果是，我的前辈导师谁都不曾提起过。

有个农夫对我说：“你不能光靠蔬菜为生，因为蔬菜提供不了骨胳所需的营养。”因此，每天他都虔诚地献出一部分时间，为他的身体提供骨胳所需的养分；他一面跟在耕牛后面，一面如此说道，而那靠植物发育起骨胳的耕牛，却不顾一切障碍，拖着他和笨重的犁头颠簸前行。某些物品，对于某个特定的人群来说——比如那些无依无靠和病魔缠身的人，的确是生活必需品，对另一个群体来说，则仅仅是奢侈品而已，再换一个群体，兴许闻所未闻。

在某些人看来，人生的全部，无论是高原险峰还是幽深低谷，都是先辈所涉足过的，而且所有的一切都得到了他们的瞩目。伊夫林〔8〕曾经说过：“智慧的所罗门曾颁布法令，规定了树木之间应当间隔的距离；罗马的地方官也曾规定过，你可以时隔多久到邻人的地里捡十掉落的橡果，而不被认定为非法进入，并规定了几成果实应当归属那位邻人。”希波克拉布底〔9〕甚至曾经传下如何修剪指甲的方法；也就是说，要剪得既不长也不短，与指尖平齐。毫无疑问，使生命的多姿多彩和无穷欢乐都消耗殆尽的种种单调乏味和枯燥无聊，是和亚当〔10〕一样古老的。但是，人的各种能力从来没有被衡量过，我们也不能按照任何先例来判断他的能力，因为已有的尝试实在太少。不管到目前为止你有过怎样的失败，“别苦恼，我的孩子，谁会指派你去做你未曾完成的事情呢？”〔11〕

我们可以用上千种简单的方法来尝试我们的生活；比方说，太阳使我们种植的豆类生长成熟，同时也照耀着和地球同类的其他星体。如果我们牢记这一点，就能避免某些错误。星星，是多么奇妙的三角形的顶点啊！在宇宙的各个地方，有多少相距遥远、形形色色的生命在同一时刻注视着同一个太阳！大自然和人生是千姿百态的，就像我们的体制一样不一而足。谁能说得出，生活会给其他人提供什么样的前景呢？对于我们来说，难道还有比转瞬之间通过彼此的眼睛去观察事物更伟大的奇迹吗？我们应该在短短一个小时之内历经这个世界的所有时代；是的，还要体验所有时代的每一个世界。历史、诗歌、神话！——据我所知，阅读别人的生活经历，从来没有如此令人惊异，如此增长见闻。

我的邻居称之为好的大部分事情，我在内心深处都觉得不以为然；而如果我为什么事情感到懊悔的话，那很可能是我的善行。是何种魔怪攫住了我，让我有如此善良的品行？老人家，您尽可以说出最睿智的话语——您已经生活了七十个年头，而且并非没有人生的荣耀——而我却听到了一个不可抗拒的声音，让我避开这一切。一代人抛弃另一代人的事业，如同遗弃搁浅的船只。

在我看来，我们完全可以毫无顾虑地相信更多的事情——比我们实际上相信的要多得多。我们可以对自己少一点关心，这样就可以真心实意地把这部分关爱施予他人。大自然既能适应我们的长处，也能适应我们的缺点。有些人总是没完没了地焦虑不安、忧虑重重，这几乎成了一种难以治愈的顽疾。我们生来就喜欢夸大自己所做工作的重要性，然而，有多少工作我们从未涉足啊！或者说，如果我们疾病缠身，又该如何呢？我们有多么警醒啊！如果能够避免，我们就决计不靠信仰生活；从早到晚，我们都戒心十足，到了夜深人静的时候则毫不情愿地祈祷一番，把自己交付给未知的命运。我们迫不得已，在生活中只能如此细致周到、诚心诚意，对人生充满敬畏之心，而否认变革的可能。我们说，这是唯一的生活之道；然而，从一个圆心出发，能画出多少条半径，就有多少种生活之道。所有的变革都是值得我们沉思默想的奇迹，而且这样的奇迹每时每刻都在发生。孔子曰：“知之为知之，不知为不知，是知也。”当一个人将他想象的情况归纳为他所了解的事实时，我可以预见，所有的人最终都将把自己的生活创建在这个基础之上。

让我们来思考一下，我在上面所提到的烦恼和忧虑大多是由何而发？有多少需要我们费心劳神，或者说至少是应该小心应付的？虽然我们生活在物质文明世界里，但是去过一过那种原始的拓荒生活，对我们来说是大有益处的，哪怕只是为了弄清楚哪些是生活的基本必需品，以及用什么方法可以获得，或者只是为了查看一下商人的旧账本，好知道人们在商店里最常买的是些什么，店里都储备哪些货品，也就是说，人们所需求的最基本的日用杂货有哪些。时代的进步对人类生存的基本法则并没有多大影响，正如我们的骨胳同我们的祖先相比，恐怕是难以区分的。

所谓生活必需品，在我看来，就是人类通过自己的努力获得的一切物品，从一开始，或者经过长期使用，已经成为人类生活的重要一环——没有哪个人试图舍弃这些东西，即使有，也是极少数的几个，他们或者是处于未开化的荒蛮状态，或者是由于贫困潦倒，或者是秉承某种人生哲学。对于许多生命而言，在这个意义上，人生必需品只有一种，那就是：食物。草原上的野牛，需要的仅仅是几英寸长的鲜美青草，还有饮用水，除此之外也就是在森林或者山荫寻求一处掩蔽之所而已。野兽需要的仅仅是食物和蔽身之处。对于人类而言，在目前的气候条件下，生活必需品可以确切地分为以下几项：食物、住所、衣服和燃料；因为我们只有获取这些必需品，才能满怀成功的期望，自由地思考人生的真正问题。人类不仅发明了屋舍，而且还发明了衣服和烹饪方法；也许是出于偶然，人类发现火能够带来温暖，于是就开始加以利用，起初是一种奢侈的享受，如今烤火取暖则成了一种必需。据我们观察，猫和狗也同样获得了这个第二天性。有了适当的住所和衣服，我们才能合理地保持体内的温度；如果穿着过多，住所太热，或者取暖的火烧得太旺，也就是说，外面的热度超过了我们体内的热度，那岂不成了炙烤人肉？自然科学家达尔文在提及火地岛居民的时候说，他和一伙人穿戴整齐坐在篝火旁都不觉得暖和，与此同时，他惊奇地发现，远离篝火的那些野蛮人赤身裸体，却还“被烘烤得汗流浃背”。我们还听说，新荷兰人〔12〕赤裸着身体，个个安然无恙，而欧洲人穿着衣服，却冻得浑身颤抖。难道野蛮人的耐性和文明人的智慧就不能结合起来吗？按照李比希〔13〕的说法，人的身体是一个火炉，而食物则是燃料，维持肺部的内燃。寒冷的天气我们吃得多，热天则吃得少。动物体内产生的热量是缓慢燃烧的结果，如果燃烧速度过快，就会产生疾病，造成死亡；反之，如果缺少燃料，或者通风不畅，生命之火就会熄灭。当然，生命的热量和火焰不能混为一谈，我们的比喻就到此为止吧。因此，综上所述，动物生命和动物热量这两个词语几乎是同义词；因为食物可以被看作是维持我们的生命之火经久不息的燃料，而燃料只能煮熟食物或者从身体外部为我们增加御寒的热量；住所和衣服的作用也只是保持由此产生和吸收的热量。

那么，对我们的身体来说，最大的需求是保持温暖，维持体内的热量。如此一来，我们不辞辛苦地获取食物、衣服和住所，还有床铺——那是我们夜晚的衣服，为此，我们从鸟儿的巢窠和它们的胸部攫取羽毛，来营造这个遮蔽所中的遮蔽所，就像鼹鼠在洞穴的尽头用杂草和树叶铺设一张床！穷苦人总是抱怨这是个冷冰冰的世界；我们总是把自己的大部分疾痛直接归咎于寒冷——身体的冰冷和社会的冷漠。在某些气候条件下，夏天有可能让人过上一种天堂般的生活。除了煮熟食物之外，燃料并非是必需之物；太阳就是他们的火，许多果实在阳光的照射下已经熟透了；一般来说，食物的种类更加丰富，也更容易获得，衣服和住所则完全成了多余之物，或者说只有一半的用处了。我从自己的经历中发现，目前，在这个国家，除了生活必需品以外，人们还需要几件工具、一把刀、一柄斧子、一把铲子、一辆手推车，就足够了，对于勤奋好学的人，还需要灯盏、文具，再加上几本书，这些东西的花费也是微不足道的。然而，有些人却不够明智，他们跑到地球的另一边，死心塌地地在不益于身体健康的荒蛮之地做起生意，足足在那里度过十年二十年，目的就是为了谋生——也就是说，能够生活得温暖舒适一点，到头来，却死在了新英格兰。奢侈的有钱人不单是追求温暖舒适，而是不合乎自然规律的炎热；正如我在前面所说的那样，他们是被炙烤着，那当然是一种时尚的炙烤。

大多数奢侈品，以及许许多多所谓使生活更加舒适的物品，非但不是必不可少的，而且还会阻碍人类精神的提升。要论奢侈和舒适，最明智的人反倒比穷人的生活过得更简单，更朴素。古代中国、印度、波斯和希腊的哲学家都是这样一类人，他们物质财富最为贫乏而精神财富最为丰富。我们对他们了解得固然不多，但令人惊叹的是，我们了解得竟然也还不少。近代的改革家和各个民族的造福者亦是如此。唯有我们可以称之为安贫乐道的人，只有处在这种优势地位来观察人类生活，才是不偏不倚、而又充满智慧的观察者。奢侈生活产生的结果是奢侈，不论是在农业、商业，还是文学艺术方面，都是如此。当下有的是哲学教授，却没有哲学家。教授是令人仰慕的，因为教授的生活曾经一度令人羡慕不已。做一名哲学家不仅仅要有深邃的思想，也不仅仅要创建一个学派，而是要热爱智慧，并且按照智慧的指引，过一种简单、自立、宽厚大度和彼此信任的生活。做一名哲学家，不仅要从理论上，而且要在实践中解决生活中的某些问题。那些卓越的学者和思想家，他们的成就通常类似于朝臣的功绩，而不是帝王或者男子汉创立的丰功伟业。他们因循守旧，借此来应付生活，可以说，他们的所作所为和父辈别无二致，绝不会成为更为高尚的人类先驱。但是，人类为什么会退化？究竟是什么致使家道衰落？奢侈具有何种本性，能够使国家萎靡不振，走向衰亡？我们能够肯定在我们的生活中不存在这种奢侈吗？即使在生活的外在表现形式上，哲学家也领先于他所处的时代。他的饮食起居、穿衣取暖都有别于同代人。一个人既是哲学家，怎会没有更好的方法来维持其生命的热量呢？

当一个人通过上述几种方法获得了维持生命的热量，接下来他想要些什么？当然不会是获得更多的热量，比方说，更多更丰盛的食物、更宽敞更华美的屋舍、更漂亮更丰富的衣着、更持久更炽热的炉火，诸如此类。一旦得到了这些生活必需品，一个人就不会再求取更多同样的东西，而是有了另一种选择，那就是，摆脱卑微的辛苦劳作，可以开始人生的探险了。土壤看来是适合种子发育的，因为它已经让根向下延伸，现在可以信心十足地向上萌发幼苗了。人为什么要牢牢地根植于土壤，不就是为了能够同样向空中蓬勃生长吗？——因为更高贵的植物，其价值就在于最终在远离地面的空气和阳光中结出果实，人们不会把它们同比较低级的食用植物相提并论，尽管这些植物可能是两年生的，即便如此也只会被培植到生好根之后，为此还常常被割去顶端的枝叶，所以，到了开花时节，人们大多都认不出它们来了。

我无意给勇敢坚毅之人订立什么条条框框，他们无论身处天堂还是地狱，都会应对裕如，独善其身，或许他们的屋舍比大富大贵之人的住所还要富丽堂皇，花起钱来更是肆意挥霍，但从来不会落得穷困潦倒，真不知道他们是怎样生活的——如果诚如人们梦寐以求的那样，确实有这样的人存在；我也无意给那些从现实事物中获得鼓舞，汲取灵感的人制定什么规则，他们对现实倍加珍爱，怀有情人一般的爱恋和热情——在某种程度上，我自忖也属于这一类人；那些无论身处何种环境都能安居乐业的人，也用不着我说些什么，他们对自己的生活状况心中有数；我的话主要是说给那些不甚满足的多数人听的，他们无所事事，总是抱怨命运蹇劣，生不逢时，而他们的命运和时代本来是有可能改善的。有些人遇事叫苦不迭，让人无可奈何，因为，如他们自己所言，他们做到尽职尽责了。我还想到了一类人，他们从表面上看仿佛十分阔绰，而实际上却最为贫穷，他们积累了大量无用之物，却不知道如何使用，或者如何舍弃，如此一来，反倒给自己铸造了一副金银制成的镣铐。

如果我试图将自己在过去几年中希望如何度过生命岁月的愿望说出来，恐怕对我的实际情况有所了解的读者会感到惊奇，而对我一无所知的读者则会惊讶万分。因此，我只略提几件我珍藏于心的事情吧。

在任何天气，任何时候，无论是黑夜还是白昼，我都殷切地希望改善目前的状况，在自己的手杖上刻下它的印记；我渴望站在过去和未来这两个永恒的交汇点上，那就是此时此刻，站在这道起跑线上。请原谅我说得有些晦涩难懂，因为我的职业比大多数人的职业都有着更多的秘密，并非我刻意保守秘密，而是这个职业的性质所决定的。我很乐意将我所知晓的一切全盘托出，绝不会在门口涂上“不得入内”的字样。

很久以前，我曾丢失了一条猎犬、一匹栗色马，还有一只斑鸠，至今我还在寻找它们的下落。我曾向许多来来往往的人说起过它们，描述它们的踪迹，还提到它们会对什么样的呼唤声作出回应。我遇到过一两个人，他们曾听到猎犬的吠声和栗色马的蹄音，甚至看见过那只斑鸠隐没在云朵里。他们看上去也急切地希望能够尽快将它们找回来，就好像是他们自己丢失的一般。

我们不仅要期待日出和黎明，如果可能的话，我们要期盼整个大自然！多少个清晨，无论是严冬还是盛夏，所有的邻居还没有起身开始操持生计的时候，我就已经开始为自己的事情忙碌了。毫无疑问，许多和我住在同一个镇子里的人都曾经在我回来的路上遇到过我，他们中间有天刚蒙蒙亮就赶往波士顿的农民，也有去干活的樵夫。不错，我并没有在旭日东升的时候切切实实助它一臂之力，不过，在太阳冉冉升起的时候身临其境，其重要意义无疑是仅次于前者的。

有多少个秋日，哦，还有冬天，我都是在镇子外面度过的，我试图听出风声带来的讯息，并且立刻传播开去！为此，我几乎投入了所有的资本，为了这笔交易，我迎风奔跑，气喘吁吁。如果是和两大政党相关的消息，一定会最先在报纸上刊登。还有些时候，我守在某个山崖或者树顶的了望台上，一有新来的人就发电报传递信息；黄昏时分，我守候在山顶上，等待夜幕降临，好捕获点儿什么，虽然所得不多，而且这不多的东西也和天赐的食物〔14〕一样，会在阳光下消融殆尽。

有很长一段时间，我给一家发行量不大的杂志当记者，我写的大部分稿件，在编辑看来都是不适合刊载的，所以，正如作家通常遇到的情况那样，我的一番辛苦换来的是自己的劳动。然而，在这件事情上，我的辛苦本身就是回报。

许多年来，我自封为视察员，留意观察暴风雪和暴风雨，可谓忠于职守；我还兼任检查员，不是检查公路，就是检查林间小径和所有的交叉信道，保持道路畅通无阻，让架设在沟壑上的桥梁一年四季都可以通行，人来人往的足迹证明了它们的作用。

我还照看过镇子里那些容易受惊的家畜，它们常常跳出栅栏，给尽职尽责的牧人带来不少麻烦；我时时留意农场上人迹罕至的角角落落；约那斯或所罗门今天是否在哪块田地里干活，对此我并非总是一清二楚，因为那与我毫不相干。我浇灌过红色的黑果木、沙樱、荨麻树、红松、黑枘树和白葡萄，还有黄色的紫罗兰，要不然在干旱季节它们有可能会枯萎凋残。

简而言之，可以毫不夸口地说，我这样度过了很长一段时间，兢兢业业尽自己的本分，直到后来事情越来越显而易见，那就是，和我住在同一个镇子里的人终究不会把我算入市政官员的行列，也不会给我一个挂名的职务，奉送一份不多不少的津贴。我可以信誓旦旦地说，我的账目一向记得准确无误，不过从来没有人审查过，更不用说有人认可并且照单付钱结账了。话说回来，我也从来没有如此奢望。

不久前，一个四处游荡的印第安人来到我的住所附近一位著名的律师家兜售篮子。“你们想要篮子吗？”他问道。对方回答说：“不要，我们一个也不要。”“什么？！”印第安人一边往外走，一边大声嚷道：“你们打算让我们活活饿死吗？”这个印第安人亲眼目睹了他那些勤劳的白人邻居生活得何等富裕，那些人只需要把辩词编排好，财富和地位就会随之而来，简直像变魔术一般，于是他心里暗想，我也去做生意，我要编篮子，这件事我能干得来。他以为编好篮子就大功告成了，接下来白人自会买去。可是，他却疏漏了一点，那就是，他的篮子要想卖给别人必须物有所值，或者至少让对方认为如此，要么就做点儿别的什么让人家觉得物有所值的东西。我也曾经编织过一种精巧细致的篮子，但是却没有使任何人感觉值得购买。然而，就我而言，我并不觉得自己编织这些篮子是枉费功夫，我没有去研究如何让人感觉物有所值，而是去研究如何避免迫不得已去兜售篮子。人们大加赞誉、谓之成功的人生只不过是生活中的一种。我们为什么要夸大任何一种生活方式而无视其他呢？

眼见我的市民同胞们不大可能在县政府大楼里为我谋得一席之地，也不会给我一个助理牧师的职位，或是其他什么可以赖以谋生的位置，我于是只好自己设法安身立命，比过去更加一心一意地将目光转向森林，那个我更为人所知的地方。我决定立刻开始自己的营生，不等拿到通常所需的资金，就用现有的微薄财力着手进行。我到瓦尔登湖的目的，既不是为了过花费低廉的生活，也不是贪图奢侈，而是为了从事自己的私人营生，最大限度地减少各种麻烦，免得因为略微缺乏常识，稍稍欠缺进取精神和经营才能而一事无成，结果是显得愚蠢至极更甚于可悲。

我一直坚持不懈地努力养成严谨的商业习惯；这对任何人来说都是必不可少的。倘若你是和天朝帝国〔15〕做生意，那么只要在海岸边上有一间小小的会计室，比方位于塞勒姆的某个港口，就具备足够的固定设施了。你可以出口本国出产的物品，清一色的土特产，大量的冰块、松木和少批量的花岗岩，统统用本地货轮装运。出口这些货物，生意一定不错。事无巨细，你都要亲自过问；你既是领航员又是船长，既是业主又是保险商；你要买进卖出，还要记账；收到的每一封信都要亲自过目，寄出一封信都要自己起草或审阅；你得日夜监督进口货物卸下船只，仿佛有分身术一般几乎同时出现在沿海的许多地方——最值钱的货物往往卸在泽西的口岸，你自己得像发报机一样，不知疲倦地扫掠地平线，和所有驶向海港的船只通话联络；为了供应这样一个相距遥远、需求极盛的市场，你需要保证货物源源不断地发送；你不仅要对市场行情了如指掌，还要了解各地战争与和平的前景，预期贸易与文明发展的趋势，为此，你要利用一切探险考察的成果，借助于新航线和航海技术的一切进步——研究航海图，查明暗礁和新设灯塔及浮标的位置，时时校正对数表，因为计算稍有疏漏，本应抵达一个友好港口的货船就会在礁石上撞个四分五裂——拉·贝鲁斯〔16〕下落不明就是一个实例；你还要跟上整个世界科学发展的步伐，研究从汉诺〔17〕和腓尼基人时代直到今天的所有伟大的发现者、航海家、冒险家以及商人的生平；最后，你还要随时掌握库存数量，清楚自己处于何种境况。这是一项需要全力以赴的工作，诸如盈亏、利息、净重计算法等各种各样的问题，以及所有相关数据的测量，都需要具备广博的知识。

我认为瓦尔登湖会是一个做生意的好地方，这不仅仅是因为有铁路和冰块生意；瓦尔登湖提供了诸多有利条件，公诸于众恐怕并非明智之举；这是个优良的港口，地基很牢固。虽然所到之处都必须先打桩才能建造住屋，可毕竟没有涅瓦河畔那样的沼泽需要填平。据说涅瓦河涨潮的时候，如果再加上西风和冰块，会将圣彼得堡从地球表面一扫而空。

由于我开始从事这种生意没有通常所需的启动资金，因此，恐怕人们很难推测，我从哪里能够得到每个这样的事业都必不可少的财源。让我们立刻就来谈及实际问题吧，就拿衣服来说，也许人们购买衣物的时候，多半是喜欢新颖奇特的装束，并且还会顾及别人的看法，而很少考虑衣服的真正用途。让那些从事劳动的人不要忘记，穿衣服的目的，首先是要维持生命的热量，其次，是要在目前的社会环境中遮羞蔽体；他还可以判断一下，他可以完成多少必不可少或至关重要的工作，而不必增加衣橱里的衣服。国王和王后的衣装往往只穿一次，尽管有御用裁缝为他们量身定做，他们也不可能体会到穿上合身的衣服有多么舒适自如。他们简直无异于用来挂干净衣物的木头架子。而我们穿的衣服逐日和我们融为一体，打上了穿著者的性格印记，直到我们不舍得弃之一旁，就像对待自己的身体一样赶快求医问药进行补救，视作非同小可之事。在我眼里，衣服上有补丁，并非低人一等；不过我也深信，一般来说，人们更为渴盼的是穿上时髦的衣装，起码要干净整洁，没有补丁，至于是否能够做到问心无愧就是等而次之的问题了。不过，即使衣服上破了的地方没有补好，充其量也不过是显得不够小心而已。有时候，我用这样的方法来测试我熟识的朋友：谁肯穿一条膝盖上打了补丁，或者只多了两条缝线的裤子？从大多数人的反应来看，他们认为，倘若他们如此穿着，一生的前程就会毁于一旦。他们宁可跛着一条腿进城去，也比穿条破裤子来得从容自若。如果哪位绅士的腿意外受了伤，那通常是可以治愈的；不过，如果同样的意外发生在他的裤腿上，那就无法补救了，因为他所关注的，不是真正值得尊敬的东西，而是人们看重的东西。我们熟知的人寥寥无几，我们熟知的衣服和裤子倒是不可胜数。你给稻草人穿上你刚穿过的衣服，自己不着衣衫站立一旁，谁不会甘愿向稻草人行礼致敬呢？某一天，我经过一片玉米地，见有一人站在一根戴着帽子穿着上衣的木桩近旁，我认出他正是农场的主人。和上次见到他相比，他只不过是多了几许饱经风霜的痕迹。我听说有一条狗，凡是看到穿着衣服的陌生人走到主人的屋舍前，就会大声狂吠，但是，一个赤身裸体的盗贼却能轻而易举地让它一声不响。如果人们被剥夺了衣衫，他们在多大程度上还能保持相对的地位？——这是个有趣的问题。在这种情况下，你能否确切地告诉我，在任何一群文明人之中，谁当属于最尊贵的阶层？菲菲夫人〔18〕从东到西环游世界，在她的冒险旅行中，当她来到俄罗斯的亚洲区域，自己的故乡已经近在咫尺的时候，她说，她觉得去拜见地方长官之时，有必要换下旅行服，因为她“现在身处一个文明的国度，人们是靠穿着来判断一个人的。”即使在我们这个具有民主精神的新英格兰城镇里，但凡有人发了意外之财，于是便尽显奢华，哪怕仅仅表现在穿着和用具上，也能为其赢得众人的敬慕。不过，这些敬慕之人虽然为数众多，却全都是异教徒，需要为他们派去一名传教士。此外，衣服需要缝纫，而缝纫可谓是一件无休无止的工作；至少可以说，女人的衣服从来没有做完的时候。

一个最终找到营生的人，去做事情的时候本无需让衣装焕然一新；对他来说，有一套在阁楼里不知放了多久的落满灰尘的旧衣服就足矣。一位英雄穿旧鞋子的时间，倒比他的侍从穿旧鞋子的时间更长——如果英雄有侍从的话；他赤足而行的岁月比穿鞋子的年头还要久远，而且英雄就是不穿鞋子也未尝不可。只有那些要去赴晚宴或者到立法院去的人才有必要身着新装，他们经常更换衣服，正如穿衣服的人也频繁更替一般。但是，只要我的上衣和裤子，帽子和鞋子，穿戴整齐后正适于敬奉上帝，那就足够了，难道不是如此吗？有谁会去注意他的旧衣服呢？他那件旧外套其实已经破旧不堪，褴褛毕露，因此，就是将它送给一个穷苦的孩子也算不得什么善行，也许那个孩子还会把它转送给比自己更穷的人，或许应该说是更富有的人，因为哪怕生活再匮乏他都能够安身立命。听我说，对那些要求衣冠簇新而不是要求穿衣服的人是新面孔的所有企业一定要小心提防。如果没有新人，又怎么可能把新衣服做得合体呢？如果你正面临着某项事业，尽管穿着旧衣服去尝试吧。人所需要的，不是去应对什么，而是去做什么，或者说，是成为什么。也许，无论旧衣服有多脏多破，我们也根本不该添置新衣服，直到我们致力于自己的事业，锐意进取，或者扬帆远航，那时即使身着旧衣，整个人也会感觉仿佛焕然一新，犹如旧瓶装上了新酒。人的更新季节，如同飞禽换羽一般，必定是生命的转折关头。正当其时，潜鸟会隐没到僻静的池塘。蛇蜕皮，虫破茧，都是凭借内在的努力和扩展；衣装之于我们，不过是最外层的护膜和尘世的烦恼而已。否则，我们就会被认为是披着一层伪饰招摇撞骗，最终难免被我们自己以及整个人类的看法所唾弃。

我们穿了一件又一件衣服，就仿佛我们是外生植物，得靠外部添加才能得以生存。我们穿在外面的衣物通常很薄，并且花里胡哨，它们是我们的表皮或假皮，和我们的生命并非一体，可以随处剥下而无致命的伤害；我们经常穿在身上的较厚的衣服是我们的细胞壁，或皮层；但我们的衬衫却是我们的韧皮，或者说真皮，如要剥去定会连皮带肉，令人痛不欲生。我相信，在某些季节，所有物种都要穿上相当于衬衫的东西。理想的状况是：一个人应该穿得简简单单，这样就能够在黑暗中触到自己；他生活的方方面面都应该以简约为要，做到有备无患，假如敌人攻占了这个城镇，他能像古代哲学家那样无牵无挂地空手走出城门。多数情况下，一件厚衣服相当于三件薄衣服，顾客能够以合适的价格买到便宜的衣物；5美元就能买下一件厚外套，而且可以穿好多年，2美元可以买一条厚裤子，1.5美元可以买一双牛皮靴，25美分可以买一顶夏天的帽子，62.5美分可以买一顶冬天的帽子，或者花上微不足道的一点儿钱自己在家里做一顶更好的帽子；当他穿上自己靠辛劳得来的衣服，难道睿智之人会因为他贫穷至此而不向他表示敬重吗？

当我定做一件特别款式的衣服时，女裁缝一本正经地告诉我，“眼下他们已经不时兴这个款式了”，言语中丝毫不强调“他们”这个字眼儿，就仿佛在引用和命运三女神一样超然于物外的权威之辞；我发现很难得到自己想要的款式，仅仅因为她不相信我说的话是当真的，不相信我竟会如此轻率。听到她这神谕一般的话语，我一时陷入深思，反复掂量她说的每一个字，以便悟出其中的含意，找出“我”和“他们”之间究竟有何种程度的亲缘关系，以及在这件与我紧密相关的事情上，他们究竟有何种权威；最后，我想用同样充满奥秘的语言来回答她，而且也不强调那个“他们”——“不错，他们这阵子不时兴这个款式，不过现在又开始流行了。”如果她为我量体裁衣，只是量我的肩宽，而不去量我的品格，仿佛我是个衣服架子，这又有何用？我们所崇拜的不是美惠三女神〔19〕，也不是命运三女神〔20〕，而是时尚女神。她纺纱、织布、剪裁，威力十足。巴黎的猴子王戴上了一顶旅游帽，美国的猴子全都纷纷效仿。有时候，我深感绝望，不相信在这个世界上，有什么简单明了的事情能够在人们的帮助下顺利做成。首先，务必要用一个强有力的压榨机，把他们头脑中的陈腐观念榨出来，让那些旧观念不能即刻复苏，在这之后，他们中间总有人脑子里有什么怪念头蠢蠢欲动，从不知何时就存在那里的一个卵壳里孵化出来，即使用烈火焚烧也难以断绝，你的努力因此而前功尽弃。不过，我们也不要忘记，埃及有一种小麦，据说就是一具木乃伊传下来的。

总而言之，不论是在本国还是异国，都不能断言服饰已经上升到在艺术上备受尊崇的地位。目前，人们通常是有什么就穿什么，就像遇难的水手漂到岸边，在海滩上随便找到什么就穿在身上，为各自的衣着在时间和空间的差异而彼此取笑。每一代人都会嘲笑老式样的装束，而虔诚地追随新潮款式。看到亨利八世或伊丽莎白女王的服装，我们会像看到食人岛上的国王和王后的衣着一样，禁不住哑然失笑。任何服饰一旦离开人就会显得可怜巴巴，滑稽古怪。任何人的衣着，唯有透射出的严肃的目光，经历过真诚的生活，才能抑制人们的嘲笑，从而显得神圣起来。衣着色彩斑斓的小丑突然腹内一阵绞痛，他的服饰也会表现出那种痛苦万状的情态。当士兵被炮弹击中，他那身破烂不堪的军装会显得如同王袍一般尊贵。

男男女女对于新款式的追求是那样幼稚而疯狂，有多少人摇晃着万花筒，眯着眼睛向里面观瞧，希望能够发现这一代人眼下所需要的那种独特的图案。生产者早已意识到人们的品味是反复无常的。譬如说，两种款式的区别仅在于某一种颜色的丝线深浅不同，其中之一会畅销一时，而另一种则摆在货架上无人问津，不过等到闲置了一季之后，后者反倒成了流行时尚，这种情况屡见不鲜。相比之下，文身倒算不得人们所谓的丑陋习俗。不能仅仅因为刺花深入皮肤，无法改变，就称之为野蛮。

我并不认为我们的工厂体制是人们获得衣装的最佳方式。技工的状况一天比一天更接近英国技工的状况；这一点也不足为奇，因为就我迄今为止耳闻目睹的情况而言，服装厂的主要目的不是为了让人们可以穿得舒适体面，而是为了赚钱，这是毫无疑问的。从长远来看，人最终达到的是他们预先设定的目标。因此，尽管他们一时受挫，但仍不妨把目标定得高远些。

至于住所，我并不否认现在已经成为一种生活必需品，尽管有实例说明，在气候更加寒冷的地区，人们长期没有住所也照样能够生活下去。塞缪尔·莱恩〔21〕说过：“拉普兰人〔22〕穿着皮衣，头和肩膀罩着皮袋，夜复一夜睡在雪地上，那种严寒就是身穿羊毛衣服也会被冻僵。”他亲眼看见拉普兰人就那样安然入睡。他还说：“他们并不比别的民族更耐寒。”但是，大概自从人类生活在地球上，没过多久就发现了住屋的便利，还有家庭的舒适，这种说法的原意可能是指住所带来的满足感，而不是其乐融融的家庭生活；然而，在某些气候地带，一提到住屋，人们就首先联想到寒冬和雨季，一年之中三分之二的时间根本用不着住屋，一把遮阳伞就足够了，因此，上述说法未免有失偏颇，而且只是偶尔适用罢了。在我们这里的气候条件下，以往到了夏天，只要有个遮盖就可以过夜。印第安人的表意符号中，一座棚屋代表一天的行程，树皮上刻画出的一排棚屋表示他们宿营的次数。人类的肢体并没有被造就得硕大强健，因此必须力求缩小自己的世界，用墙壁隔出一个适合自己的空间。起初人类赤身裸体，风餐露宿；赶上晴朗温暖的天气，白天还是很惬意的，但是到了雨季和冬天，更不要说炎炎烈日之下，如果不及早找个住所蔽护自己，人类恐怕早就灭绝在萌芽时代了。传说中的亚当和夏娃，在没有衣服可穿的时候用枝叶蔽体。人需要一个家，一个温暖舒适的地方，起初是寻求身体的温暖，然后是情感的温暖。

我们可以想象一下人类的幼年时代，某个富有冒险精神的人爬进岩洞去寻求遮蔽。从某种程度上说，每个孩子都会重复一遍人类的发展历程，他们喜欢待在户外，哪怕是阴雨和寒冷的天气。孩子们玩过家家和骑木马的游戏，都是出于人的本能。有谁不曾记得，自己小时候是怎样兴趣盎然地观看层层叠叠的岩石或是走近一个岩洞呢？这是一种出自本能的渴求，是我们最原始的祖先遗留在我们身上的烙印。从穴居开始，我们发展到用棕榈叶、树皮和树枝，用编织和绷紧的亚麻，用草叶和禾秆，用木板和木瓦，以及用石板和砖瓦建造屋顶。久而久之，我们忘记了露宿旷野的生活是何种感受，我们的生活远比自己想象的更加家庭化。壁炉和旷野，二者相去甚远。日日夜夜，如果我们能够更多地和宇宙天体毫无阻隔地彼此相望，如果诗人不是一味地在屋檐下吟唱，如果圣人不是久居在屋舍之内，也许一切都会好起来。鸟儿不在岩洞里歌唱，鸽子也不在笼舍里呵护自己的纯真无瑕。

然而，如果有人打算建造一座住所，他理所当然会表现出一点儿新英格兰人的精明，免得到头来发现自己住在一个劳教所、一座没有线索的迷宫、一家博物馆、一个救济院、一座监狱，或是一座富丽堂皇的陵墓里。首先要考虑到，这样的住所，其绝对必要性是微乎其微的。就在这个城镇里，我曾经见过佩诺布斯科特印第安人〔23〕居住在薄棉布帐篷里，四周的积雪竟然厚达一英尺，我想他们倒是希望雪能更深一些，好给他们遮风挡寒。如何能够真诚地生活，无拘无束地从事自己的正当事业，比之于现在，这个问题过去更是令我困惑不已，而如今我已经变得有些麻木了，真是不幸之至。以前，我经常看到铁路边上有一个6英尺长3英尺宽的大箱子，夜里工人们把工具锁在里面，我由此想到，每一个生活艰辛的人都可以花上1美元买一个这样的箱子，钻上几个孔，至少可以透透气，这样一来，下雨天和晚间就可以钻进去，把箱盖关拢，随心所欲地爱己所爱，享受灵魂的自由。这似乎并不是一个糟得不能再糟的办法，也绝对不是一个令人鄙弃的选择。你可以长坐不眠，完全听从自己的意愿，你可以随时起身而去，也不会有店主或者房东追着你讨要房租。有多少人租用一只更大、更奢华的箱子，为了支付租金被折磨得精疲力竭、苦不堪言，而住在这样一个箱子里人是冻不死的。这绝非戏言。简朴生活是一门学问，你可以轻视它，但却不能置之不理。一个身体强健、吃苦耐劳的民族，曾经一度大部分时间过着露天生活，他们过去在这里建造起舒适的住所，用的几乎完全是大自然提供的现成材料。马萨诸塞州殖民地管辖下的印第安人总督古金在1674年这样说道：“他们最好的房子用树皮做屋顶，搭盖得干净齐整、严实暖和，树皮是在干燥季节从树身上剥落下来，然后趁树皮尚且呈绿色的时候用沉重的原木压成大片大片的……差一些的房子，用一种灯芯草编成的草席做屋顶，也同样密实暖和，只是没有前者美观耐用……我见过的一些房子有60或100英尺长，30英尺宽……我也经常在他们的棚屋里过夜，感觉跟英国最好的房子一样暖和。”他还说，棚屋里的地面上和墙上通常铺着或挂着镶饰花纹的毯子，还有各式各样的器皿，一应俱全。印第安人已经有了如此进步，他们在屋顶的敞口处挂上一张草席，用一根绳子控制草席开合，调节通风效果。建造这样一个住所，起初顶多需要一两天功夫，而且仅需几个小时就能拆除并重新搭好；每个家庭都拥有一个这样的棚屋，或者其中的一个房间。

在蛮荒时代，每个家庭都拥有一处最好的遮蔽所，足以满足他们粗陋而简单的需求；天空中的飞鸟有自己的巢窠，地上的狐狸有自己的洞穴，原始人有自己的棚屋，但在现代的文明社会中，却只有半数不到的家庭拥有自己的住所，我认为此言是恰如其分的。在文明尤为发达的大城镇和大城市里，自己拥有住宅的人只占全体居民的一小部分。其余的人则年年交付房租，以换取这最外层的蔽体之物，在夏季和冬季更是必不可少；那笔房租本可以买下一个村子里所有的印第安棚屋，而现在却使他们有生之年一直生活在贫困之中。我在这里并无意强调租房和拥有自己的房子相比有何种劣势，但是，显而易见，野蛮人拥有自己的住所，是因为花费甚少，而文明人普遍租房住是因为无力购买；从长远来看也未必付得起房租。然而，有人会辩驳道，穷苦的文明人只要付一笔租金，就能得到住所，和野蛮人的棚屋相比，简直如同宫殿一般。按照乡镇的价格水平，每年支付25到100美元的房租，就能享受几个世纪以来人类进步的成果——宽敞的房间、干净的油漆和壁纸、拉姆福德〔24〕式的壁炉、内涂灰泥的墙面、软百叶帘、铜质水泵、弹簧锁、宽大的地窖，还有许许多多别的东西。但是，享受这些成果的据说通常是贫穷的文明人，而野蛮人虽然并不享有这些东西，却有着自己的富足生活——这一切究竟做何解释呢？如果有人断言，文明意味着人类状况的真正改善——我也认同这种说法，虽然只有智者能够使其有利条件有所增益——倘若真是如此，就必须让人们看到，完全可以建造出更好的住所而无需更多的花费；一件物品的价格，我称之为需要用以交换物品的生命时光的价值，需要即刻或长期付出。在这一带，一座普通住屋的造价是800美元左右，而要积攒下这笔钱，一个劳动者即使没有家室拖累，也需要10年到15年的时间——这是以一个人一天的劳动价值为1美元的标准来计算的，因为人们的收入总会有多有少——如此一来，一个人得耗费大半辈子的生命光阴，才能挣得自己的棚屋。如果我们假设他改为租房子住，这也只是在两难之间做出一个疑虑重重的选择。在这种条件下，如果野蛮人拿自己的棚屋去交换一座宫殿，难道会是个明智的选择吗？

或许有人会猜测，我几乎把拥有这份多余房产的全部好处都贬得一文不值，把其作用说成仅仅是以备将来的不时之需而已，就个人而言，主要是支付丧葬费用。但是，一个人恐怕并不需要安葬自己。不过，这倒显示出了文明人和野蛮人之间的一个重要差别；使文明人的生活成为一种制度，最大限度地把个人生活纳入其中，以便使整个种族的生活得以保存并日渐完善，这毫无疑问是为了我们的利益而设计的。但是我想说明的是，为了获得目前的好处，我们付出了怎样的牺牲，我还想指出，我本可以得到所有的益处，而不必承受任何损失。你说，穷人永远跟随着你，还说，父亲吃了酸葡萄，子女的牙齿就会发酸，这些话是何用意〔25〕？

“主耶和华说，我指着我的永生起誓，你们在以色列中必不再有用这俗语的理由。”

“看啊，世人都是属于我的，为父的怎样属我，为子的也照样属我：犯罪的他必死亡。”〔26〕

我的邻居，这些康科德的农人，他们的日子过得至少和其他阶层一样好，每念及此，我就会想到，他们大多已经含辛茹苦地劳作了二十、三十或者四十年，为的就是成为农场真正的主人，通常这些农场是附带着抵押权继承来的，要么就是借钱买下的——他们三分之一的劳动可以被看成是住屋的代价——但是他们往往还没有付清房款。不错，抵押权有时候已经超出了农场的价值，因此农场本身就成了一个大累赘，但是依然有人要继承，因为，用那人自己的话来说，这农场对他来说真是太熟悉了。向估税员询问此事的时候，我惊奇地发现，他们竟然无法一口气说出镇子里十二个拥有自己的农场，并且无债务之累的人来。如果你想了解这些农庄的历史，尽可以到抵押银行去问个究竟。切切实实靠劳动来偿还农场债务的人，真是少之又少，任何一个邻居都可以指给你看。我怀疑，在康科德，这样的人能否找出三个来。说到商人，其中的绝大多数，甚至一百个人中有九十七个，注定都会失败，这话同样也适用于农人。不过，就商人而言，他们中间曾经有人一针见血地指出，大部分商人的落败并不是真的亏钱蚀本，而仅仅是没有履行合约，因为当时手头不便，换言之，就是道德品质的沦丧。但是，如此这般，会让事情变得越来越不可救药，而且还会让人联想到，也许连那剩下的三个人也拯救不了自己的灵魂，也许和那些老老实实败落了的人相比，他们在更糟糕的意义上失败了。破产啦，拒付债款啦，都是一块块跳板，我们的大部分文明就在上面翻转腾挪，但野蛮人却站在饥饿这块没有弹性的木板上。不过，一年一度的米德尔塞克斯牛展却总是热闹非凡，大获成功，看起来，农业这部机器的所有接合点仿佛都处于良好的运转状态。

农人一直在努力解决生计问题，但他们采取的方法却比问题本身更复杂。为了弄到鞋带，他们投机做起了畜牧生意。他们凭借娴熟的技艺，用细弹簧丝设下一个陷阱，想捕捉安逸的生活和足以安身立命的收入，结果刚一转身要走，自己的腿却陷了进去。这就是他贫困的原因所在；同样，尽管我们处在奢侈品的包围之中，但和野蛮人享有的上千种舒适相比，我们仍然贫困不堪。正如查普曼〔27〕所吟咏的——

这虚伪的人类社会——

——为了尘世间的崇高伟大，

把一切天堂的安乐变得如空气般淡薄。

当农人得到了屋舍，他有可能并未因此而变得富足，反倒落得更加贫穷，正是房子左右了他。按照我的理解，这正是莫摩斯〔28〕强烈反对密涅瓦〔29〕建造住屋的恰当理由，莫摩斯说她“没有建成可移动的住屋，否则的话，就可以避开不与人为善的邻居了”；我们还可以振振有词地说，由于房子这种财产如此不灵便，我们与其说是居住在里面，不如说是常常囚禁其中；要退避三舍的恶邻其实正是卑劣的自己。据我所知，在这个镇子里，至少有一两户人家，一直希望将城郊的房子卖掉，好搬到村子里去住，他们足足盼了一辈子也未能如愿以偿，看来只有死亡才能使他们得到解脱。

就算大多数人最终能够拥有或租用具有各种先进设施的现代住屋，然而，文明在不断改善我们的住宅的同时，却没有相应地改进住在里面的人。文明创造了宫殿，却难以如此轻而易举地造就贵族和君王。况且，如果文明人的追求并不比野蛮人更有意义，如果他的大半生都用于获取最基本的生活必需品和安逸的生活，那么，他的住所为什么要比野蛮人更胜一筹呢？

但是，贫穷的少数人是如何过活呢？也许人们会发现，从表面上看，有多少人比野蛮人的境况优越，就有多少人比野蛮人的境况恶劣，二者是成正比的。某个阶层的骄奢淫逸意味着另一个阶层的贫穷匮乏。一边是宫殿，另一边则是贫民院和“沉默寡言的贫苦人”。给法老建造金字塔陵墓的工匠不计其数，他们以大蒜为食，死后恐怕连个体面的丧葬都不会有。石匠白天给宫殿造好飞檐，晚上回到自己那兴许连棚屋也不如的茅舍里。有人认为，在一个处处显示出文明的国家里，大多数居民未必会落魄到野蛮人的境地，这种想法是大错特错的。我在这里所说的是境况恶劣的穷人，暂且不论那些境况恶劣的富人。要弄明白这一点，无需看得多远，只要把目光投向铁路旁随处可见的简陋棚屋就足矣，这是文明进程中最落后的东西；我每日散步之时，都会看到有人住在那污秽不堪的棚屋里，为了透进亮光，他们整个冬天都开着门，里面看不到任何木柴堆，那东西只存在于他们的想象之中；由于寒冷和穷困，他们长期以来惯于蜷缩成一团，无论老幼，身躯都已经收缩变形，成了永久的模样，四肢和器官功能的发育也受到了抑制。关注这个阶层是理所当然的，正是他们的劳动造就了这一代人独具特色的成果。在英国这个世界大工场里，各种名目的技工，生存状况大抵如此。或者我可以让你们看看爱尔兰，在地图上，那里被标为白色地带或文明地区之一。我们不妨将爱尔兰人的身体状况和北美洲的印第安人、南太平洋岛民，或任何其他尚未与文明人接触，因而未曾堕落的野蛮人的状况作一番比较。我毫不怀疑，野蛮人的统治者和一般的文明人统治者同样聪明。他们的状况只能说明，与文明并存的是何等污秽不堪的东西。我无需提及美国南方各州的劳工了，他们生产出这个国家主要的出口产品，而自己本身就是南方的一种主要产品〔30〕。我在此只说说那些所谓处于中等状况的人吧。

大多数人似乎从未考虑过房子是什么，实际上，他们原本没有必要贫困一生，而其终生贫穷的原因，就在于总觉得必须拥有一座和邻居们一样的房子。这恰如一个人总是穿裁缝为他做好的各种衣服，或者逐渐舍弃了棕榈叶或旱獭皮做成的帽子，但还一味抱怨时日艰难，因为他买不起一顶王冠！我们有可能设计一座更便利更奢华的房子，但所有人都会承认，那笔开销可是无力偿付的。难道我们应该不断考虑如何获取更多的这类东西，而不能有时满足于有所欠缺的现状吗？难道那些高尚体面的公民，应该如此郑重其事地言传身教，教导年轻人在他们终老之前，必须备下若干多余的套靴、雨伞和空空如也的客房，好招待那些并不存在的客人吗？我们的家具为什么不能做得和阿拉伯人或印第安人的一样简单呢？我们把造福于民族的人奉为天国的使者，他们为人类带来神圣的礼物，当我想到他们的时候，脑海中并没有浮现出，他们身后跟着亦步亦趋的侍从，还有满车的时髦家具。如果容许我这种说法，就是说，我们在道德和智力上优于阿拉伯人，因而我们的家具也应该制作得更加复杂，这种容许是不是太不可思议？如今，我们的房子里塞满家具，弄得脏乱不堪，一个称职的家庭主妇宁愿把大部分家具扫进垃圾坑，也不会大清早忙个没完没了。清晨的劳作！在奥罗拉〔31〕面颊上的红晕的映衬下，在曼侬〔32〕的美妙乐声里，世人该从事何种“清晨的劳作”呢？我的写字台上摆放着三块石灰石，当我发现需要每天擦拭上面的灰尘时，我惊骇不小，厌烦地把它们扔到了窗外——我心灵上蒙受的灰尘还没有清除呢，那么，我怎么能拥有一所带家具的房子呢？我宁愿坐在户外，因为草地上一尘不染，除非人类在那里破土动工。

往往是骄奢淫逸之人开创时尚，让众人趋之若鹜。在所谓最好的旅店里住宿的旅人很快就会发现这一点，因为旅店老板会把他当成撒丹纳帕鲁斯〔33〕，如果他听之任之，不多时就会失去阳刚之气。我认为，在火车车厢里，我们往往把更多的钱花在奢侈物品上，而不是花在安全和方便上，结果安全和方便不可得，车厢却成了一个现代客厅，里面有长沙发、软垫凳、百叶窗，此外还有数以百计来自东方的物件，这些原本是为天朝帝国的六宫嫔妃和没有男子气概的当地人设计的，反而被我们引到西方来，单是听了这些物品的名称，乔纳森〔34〕也会感到羞愧难当。我宁愿坐在南瓜上一个人自得其乐，也不愿挤坐在天鹅绒垫子上。我宁愿乘坐牛车在大地上行进，呼吸自由流通的空气，也不愿坐在观光火车那无比华丽的车厢里，一路呼吸着污浊的空气驶往天堂。

在原始时代，人类的生活简单至极，无遮无掩，这至少显示出一个好处，那就是，人不过是大自然中的一名过客。当他吃饱喝足，精神焕发之后，便又开始考虑重返旅途。可以说，他把整个世界当作自己的帐篷，四海为家，不是穿过峡谷，就是越过平原，攀上山峰。然而，呜呼！人竟然成了他们的工具的工具。过去饥饿时独自采摘果子的人，现在成了农人；过去在树下寻求荫蔽的人，如今成了管家。眼下，我们不再露营过夜，而是在地球上安顿下来，忘记了还有天堂。我们信奉基督教，无非是因为这是促进农业的一种方法。我们已经为尘世建造了家宅，为来世建造了家墓。最杰出的艺术品应该表现人类如何使自己摆脱这种境况，而我们的艺术所起到的作用，却只是让这种低级的状态显得安逸舒适，而使高级的状态被抛到脑后。实际上，在这个村庄里，卓越的艺术品根本没有容身之地，如果有什么艺术品传到我们手里，我们的生活，我们的住屋和街道，也无法为其提供一个合适的基座。这里没有一枚钉子可以用来挂画，也没有一个架子可以放置英雄或圣徒的半身雕像。当我思忖我们的住屋是如何建造起来，是如何支付钱款，或者尚未付款，以及住屋内部的经济状况是如何管理和维持这一类问题时，我禁不住感到纳闷，在客人盛赞摆在壁炉台上的那些华而不实的小玩意儿的时候，地板竟然没有塌陷下去，让他跌到地窖里，落在那虽为泥土却坚实可靠的地基上。我不能不看到，所谓富足而高雅的生活，无非就是人们争相一跃去获取的东西，我素不欣赏那些粉饰生活的艺术品，我的全部心神都集中在那奋力一跃上；因为我记得，人类单凭肌肉能够做到的、最伟大的、真正的跳跃记录，是某些流浪的阿拉伯人保持的，据说他们能够从平地跳过25英尺的高度。没有人为的力量做支撑，即使跳到那个高度以外，也必定会落回地面。对于那些行为不端的业主，我想问的第一个问题是，是谁在支撑着你？你是九十七个失败者中的一员，还是三个成功者中的一个？等回答了我这些问题之后，也许我会看看你那些华而不实的小玩意儿，觉得颇具装饰性。马车套在马儿前面，既不美观，也不实用。在用漂亮的饰品装点房间之前，我们必须把墙壁剥个一干二净，我们的人生也是如此，要用良好的家务管理和美好的生活做底子：要知道，对美好事物的品味大多是在户外培养起来的，那里既无住屋，也无管家。

老约翰逊〔35〕在《神奇的造化》一书中，谈到了这个城镇最早的移民，也就是和他同时代的人，他告诉我们说：“他们最初在山坡之下掘洞而居，把泥土高高地堆在木头上，在最高一侧的泥地上生起烟火。”他们并没有“为自己建造房子”，他还说，“直到在上帝的祝福下，土地带来面包养活他们”，头一年的收成如此微薄，“他们在那个漫长的季节里，不得不把面包切得薄薄的，聊以煳口”。新尼德兰州〔36〕的总督，为了给想移居那里的人提供信息，曾在1650年用荷兰文写下这样一段更为详尽的介绍：“在新尼德兰，尤其是新英格兰地区，有些人起初无法按照自己的意愿建造农舍，于是他们就在地上挖一个方形的坑，像地窖一样，有六七英尺深，长宽则视需要而定，坑的四周墙壁嵌上木板，缝隙处钉上树皮之类的东西，免得泥土塌落下来；地窖的底部还要铺上厚木板，上面用护壁板做天花板，架起一个斜梁屋顶，其上覆以树皮或草皮，这样一来，他们全家人就可以住在里面，温暖而干爽地过上两年，三年，或者四年，可以推想，这样的地窖还会隔出若干个小间，完全取决于家中人口的多寡。在殖民时期之初，有钱有势的英格兰人以这种方式建造自己的住所，原因有两个：首先是为了不把时间浪费在建造住屋上，免得下一个季节口粮不足；其次是为了不让他们从本国带来的大批穷苦劳工感到灰心丧气。等过了三四年，这个地区已经适合农业生产之后，他们才为自己建造起漂亮的住宅，不惜花上几千块钱。”

在这个过程中，我们的先辈至少表现出了他们的谨小慎微，似乎他们秉承的原则就是首先满足当务之急。然而，更为迫切的需要现在得到满足了吗？一想到为自己置办一处豪华的住所，我就不禁感到万分踌躇，因为，说起来，这个地区尚未适应人类文化，我们迫不得已还要把精神面包切得薄薄的，比先辈的小麦面包还要薄得多。这倒不是说所有的建筑装饰都应该统统舍弃，即使在最原始的阶段也并非如此，而是说，应该首先让住屋与我们的生活息息相关的地方美观一些，就像贝类动物的内壁一般，但也要适可而止。我曾走进过一两所房子，知道里面装饰成了何等模样。

虽然我们今天没有沦落到栖身于山洞和棚屋，身穿兽皮御寒的境地，但毫无疑问，我们最好还是接受人类的发明创造和辛勤努力所带来的种种好处，为此，人类已经付出了高昂的代价。在我们这一带，木板和木瓦、石灰和砖头，要比适宜居住的山洞、整根圆木、应有尽有的树皮，或做好的泥坯和平整的石块更容易得到，价格也更便宜。我这么说是深有体会的，因为我既通晓理论，又有实践经验。只要多动动脑筋，我们就有可能利用这些材料，使自己比当下那些最富有的人更胜一筹，从而让我们的文明成为一种福祉。文明人是经验更丰富，更富有智慧的野蛮人。不过，我还是赶快讲述自己的试验吧。

1845年3月底，我借来一柄斧子，走进瓦尔登湖边的森林，来到我打算建造住屋的地方，在近旁开始砍伐一些高大笔直、年头不长的五针松做木料。一开头难免不借点儿东西，不过，这也许不失为一个最好的办法，让你的左邻右舍对你的事业产生兴趣。斧子的主人把那柄斧子交给我的时候说，这是他最珍爱的东西；但是，当我归还的时候，斧子比借的时候还要锋利。我干活的地方是一个长满松树的山坡，令人心旷神怡，透过松林，我可以望见湖水，还有一小片林中空地，松树和山核桃正焕发着勃勃生机。湖里的冰还没有完全融化，仅有几处现出水面，整个湖呈现出黝黑的色泽，水汪汪的。我在那儿干活的日子里，偶尔飘过几阵微雪；但是，每当我回家经过铁路的时候，眼里的景象大多是黄色沙堆绵延不绝，在弥漫的烟雾中闪烁着微光，铁轨在春天的阳光下闪闪发亮，我还能听到云雀、小鹟和别的什么鸟儿已经开始欢唱，和我们一起迎接新的一年。这是令人愉悦的春日，人们在冬天的不快正像冰封的大地一样开始消融，蛰伏一冬的生命也开始尽情舒展。有一天，我的斧柄掉了，我就砍了一节青绿的山核桃木做楔子，用石块把它砸进去，然后把整个斧子浸在一汪湖水里，好让木头膨胀，恰恰在这个时候，我看见一条带条纹的蛇窜进水中，躺在湖底，足足过了一刻多钟，跟我待在湖边的时间一样长，那份悠然自得显而易见；也许是还没有从蛰伏状态中恢复过来吧。我由此想到，人类目前之所以处在低级、原始的状态，原因大概也是如此；不过，如果他们感受到万物之春的力量在召唤他们，他们必然会上升到一个更高级、更超凡脱俗的生活状态。以前，在寒冷的清晨，我总在路旁发现一些蛇，它们身体的一部分处于麻木、僵硬状态，等待阳光把它们暖和过来。4月1日，天下起了雨，冰融化了，但清晨时分雾气蒙蒙，我听到一只离群的孤雁在湖上四处摸索，苦苦哀鸣，仿佛迷失了方向，又好像是雾的精灵。

我一连几天都在伐倒树木，砍削木料、立柱和椽子，全靠手里这把窄小的斧子，我没有多少可以交流的想法或学者般的思想，只是自吟自唱——

人们自诩博学多才，

可是，看啊！艺术和科学，

还有千般技艺——

全都插上了双翅；

只有吹动的风儿，

是他们知道的一切。

我把主要的木料砍成6英寸见方，大部分立柱只砍两边，椽子和地板只砍去一边，其余部分的树皮统统保留着，这样一来，它们和锯出的木料一样直，而且也结实得多。这时候，我又借到了另外一些工具，在每一根木料上都仔细地凿出榫眼，并在桩上留了榫头。我每天在林中度过的时间并不很长；即便如此，我还常常带着黄油面包当午餐，中午时分，坐在自己砍下来的青翠松枝间读那份裹面包用的报纸，面包也浸染了松树的芳香，因为我的双手沾上了厚厚一层松脂。虽然我砍伐了几棵松树，但是还没等我完工，我就已经和它们成了朋友而不是敌人，因为我对松树愈发亲近起来。我伐木的斧声有时会吸引来一位林中漫步的过路人，于是我们就站在砍下的木屑上愉快地攀谈起来。

我并不急于求成，只是尽力而为，因此到4月中旬才做好屋架，可以立起来了。我已经买下了詹姆斯·柯林斯的简陋木屋，为的是利用现成的木板。詹姆斯·柯林斯是个爱尔兰人，在菲茨堡铁路上工作。据说他的小木屋盖得好极了，非比寻常。我去看那所木屋的时候他恰巧不在。我在外面四处走动，起初屋子里的人没有注意到，因为那窗子又深又高。房子很小，屋顶尖尖的，别的就没什么可看的了，房子周围垃圾堆得足有5英尺高，像是一堆肥料。屋顶虽然被太阳晒得翘了起来，而且变得焦脆，但仍然是最完好的部分。没有门槛，门板下面有一条信道，母鸡一年四季可以随意进进出出。柯林斯太太来到门口，让我到屋里去看看。我一走进去，母鸡也随着一涌而入。屋内光线很暗，大部分地面都是泥土，阴湿寒冷，潮腻腻，冷冰冰的，木板东一块西一块，经不起搬动。她点起一盏灯，让我看屋顶和墙壁，还有延伸到床下的木板，并提醒我不要踏进地窖，看上去那是个约摸两英尺深的土坑。用她的话说，“顶上是好木板，四周是好木板，窗户也是好的”——原先是两个方形的洞，最近只有猫从那里进出。屋子里有一个炉子、一张床、一个坐的地方、一个就在这木屋里出生的婴儿、一把丝绸阳伞、一面镀金框的镜子，还有一个崭新、式样别致的咖啡豆研磨机，钉在小橡木板上，这就是他们的全部家当。詹姆斯这当儿回到了家里，所以我们的交易很快就谈妥了。我当晚付给他们4美元25美分，他们明天早晨5点钟把房子腾空，而且不能再卖给别人，6点钟就归我所有了。他说，我最好还是早点儿到，省得有人在地租和燃料方面提出一些不明不白而且完全不合情理的要求。他让我尽管放心，这是唯一的麻烦。第二天清早6点钟的时候，我在路上遇见了他们一家人。一个大包裹里装的是他们全部的家产——床、咖啡豆研磨机、镜子、母鸡——只是少了那只猫，它熘进森林，成了只野猫，后来我又得知，它踩上了捕旱獭的夹子，最终成了一只死猫。

当天上午，我就拆了木屋，拔除钉子，用小推车将木板运到湖边，摊在草地上，让太阳把弯曲变形的木板晒干，恢复原状。我推着小车行走在林间小道上，一只早起的画眉时不时地为我送上几声啼鸣。一个名叫帕特里克的年轻人别有用心地向我告密说，有个叫西里的爱尔兰邻居，趁我装运东西的间隙，把那些还能凑合用的、直的、可以钉的钉子、U形钉和大钉全都拣到了自己的口袋里，我回来后跟他寒暄几句，他正站在那儿，一脸的满不在乎，昂着头，得意洋洋地看着那被拆毁的烂摊子；正如他所说的，已经没有什么事儿可做了。他在那儿是作为观众，把这件仿佛无足轻重的小事儿，渲染得如同众神从特洛伊撤离一般〔37〕。

我在一座小山的南坡挖了个地窖，一只旱獭曾经在那里打过洞，我挖去漆树和黑莓的根，还有植物在土壤最深处的痕迹，地窖有6英尺见方，7英尺深，一直通到细砂土层，这样一来，无论遇上怎样的冬天，土豆都不会被冻坏。地窖的四壁稍稍倾斜，没有砌上石块，不过因为阳光根本照不进来，所以沙土不会滑落。这项工作只花了两个小时。我特别喜欢这种破土动工的活儿，因为几乎在任何纬度，人们通过挖掘都可以得到稳定的温度。就是在城市里最豪华的住屋下面也可以找到地窖，人们依旧和过去一样把块茎植物储藏在里面，哪怕上层建筑消失许久之后，后人仍然能够在地面上发现它留下的凹陷痕迹。房子只不过是地洞入口处的门廊而已。

在一些熟人的帮助下，时值5月初，我终于把房子的框架立了起来，其实，与其说需要帮手，倒不如说是利用这样一个好机会和邻居增进友谊。能够有如此品格的人〔38〕帮我立起屋架，对我来说真是莫大的荣幸。我相信，有朝一日，他们定会为树立起更宏伟的建筑添砖加瓦。7月4日，木板和房顶刚一完工，我就住了进去，木板的边缘处事先经过仔细削薄，相互搭接在一起，防雨完全不成问题；在铺木板之前，我在房子的一端打好了烟囱的地基，石块是我从湖边用双手抱上山来的，足有两车。秋天，我锄好地之后，就着手造烟囱，在此之前，还不需要生火取暖，那段时间，我一大早就在露天的地上做饭；至今想来，我仍然觉得，从某些方面来说，这比人们惯常的方式更方便，更惬意。如果在面包烤好之前暴风雨不期而至，我就把几块木板架在火的上方，坐在下面照看自己的面包，就这样，我度过了一些愉快的时光。在那段日子里，每逢手头的活计很多，无暇读书，地上、垫子上或桌布上散落的零星纸片都给我带来了诸多乐趣，实际上不亚于我读《伊利亚特》。

建造房子的时候，如果比我再多一点儿深思熟虑，比方说，考虑一扇门、一个窗子、一孔地窖、一间阁楼，在人的本性中有着什么样的根基，那么我们也许根本不该建起什么上层建筑，除非我们找到了比满足暂时需要更好的理由。人类建造住所与鸟儿筑巢一样，都要有其合情合理的地方。谁知道呢，倘若人类用自己的双手建起了自己的住所，用简单而正当的方式养活自己和家人，他们的诗歌才能兴许能够得到普遍的发展，就像鸟儿在筑巢觅食的时候总会不住欢唱一般。可是啊，我们倒像是牛鹂和杜鹃，把蛋下到别的鸟儿搭的窝里，吱吱喳喳的叫声也毫无乐感，何以让旅人感到些许快乐？难道我们应该永远把建造屋舍的乐趣让给木匠吗？在多数人的生活经历中，建筑有着多大的意义呢？我散步的时候，从未遇到过一个人，从事着为自己建造住屋这样简单而又自然的工作。我们都属于一个群体。并不仅仅是裁缝位列第九，牧师、商人和农人也不例外。这种劳动分工到什么程度才能有个了结？其最终目的究竟是什么？毫无疑问，别人可以代替我思考；但倘若这种代替排除了我自己的思想，那就并非我所愿了。

不错，在我们这个国家有所谓的建筑师，我至少听说有那么一位，他仿佛得到了上天的启示，一心希望使建筑装饰具有真理的本质，成为一种需要，进而呈现为一种美。从他的观点来看也许一点儿不错，但其实无非是比一般的浅尝辄止的艺术爱好者高明那么一丁点儿而已。作为一个感情用事的建筑学改革者，他首先从飞檐着手，而不是地基。这只不过是考虑怎样让装饰物包含真理的本质，就如同使每一个蜜饯李子里面都有一粒杏仁或葛缕子籽——我倒认为杏仁不加糖更有益于健康——而不是考虑居住者，也即住在住屋里面的人，如何把住所的里里外外真正建好，而让那些装饰物顺其自然。有哪个理智的人会认为装饰不过是外在的东西，皮毛而已？会认为乌龟具有带斑点的甲壳，贝类动物生有珍珠母的光泽，是和百老汇大街上的居民一样，得签份合同才能建造他们的三一教堂？然而，一个人和自己住屋的建筑风格没有什么关系，正如乌龟和自己身上的纹饰不大相干一样；同样，士兵也不必闲来无聊，试图把显示自己英勇无畏的色彩准确地涂画在旗帜上。敌人自会明了。等到考验到来的时刻，他可能会被吓得面容失色。在我看来，这样的人仿佛俯身于飞檐之上，胆怯地向居于屋内的粗莽之人说着半真半假的话，殊不知那屋内的人比他更通晓事理。我现在所领略到的建筑之美，我感觉都是由内向外逐渐延伸的，是从居住者的需要和品格中产生的，他们才是唯一的建筑师：美源自某种下意识的真实感和崇高感，丝毫不顾及外表；如果增添这种美感势在必行，无论是何种形态，那么之前一定已经有人们浑然不觉的、类似的生命之美存在。在画家眼里，这个国家最富有意趣的住所莫过于穷人们朴实无华的简陋木屋和村舍；住宅是居民生活的外壳，使这些住宅显得别具一格的并不仅仅是其表面特征，而是居民的生活；同样富有生趣的要算市民们建在郊外的箱形木屋，他们在那里的生活有多么简单和惬意，可以任凭想象，而且他们也极少追求什么住宅的风格效果。建筑装饰大多徒有其表，这并非言过其实，九月的一阵大风就能把它们统统剥落，像借来的羽毛一样吹得踪迹全无，而主体部分却丝毫无损。不需要用地窖来储藏橄榄和葡萄酒的人也不需要什么建筑学。如果在文学中，人们也同样煞费苦心地追求文体修饰，如果《圣经》的创造者也和教堂的建筑师们一样，把大量心思花在飞檐上，结果会是怎样？纯文学和艺术，以及讲授这些学问的教授，就是这样产生的。的确，和一个人休戚相关的是，几根木条究竟是斜放在他上面还是下面，以及他的箱形住屋该涂成什么颜色。如果是他自己特地斜放这几根木条，并且涂上颜色，那还是具有某种意义的；但是，如果精神已经离开了躯壳，那就无异于给自己做一具棺材了——也就是坟墓建筑学，所谓“木匠”，不过是“棺材匠”的别称而已。有人说，在对生活感到绝望或者漠不关心的时候，抓起一把脚下的泥土，就把房子涂抹成那种颜色吧。他头脑中想的是自己生命最后时刻那个狭窄的屋子吗？不妨抛一枚铜币来决定吧。他手里一定有大把的闲暇时间！你为什么要抓起一把泥土？最好把房子涂成你自己的肤色；让它为你而面色苍白或是两颊绯红好了。这不失为改进农舍建筑风格的创新之举！等你为我准备好了装饰物，我会欣然采用的。

入冬之前，我造好了烟囱，虽然房子原本也不会漏雨，我还是在四周加上了一层木板，木板是从圆木上砍下的第一层木头，多有瑕疵，主要是边材，我不得不用刨子把边缘修平整。

就这样，我拥有了一座严严实实、钉好了木板、抹上了灰泥的木屋，10英尺宽，15英尺长，立柱高8英尺，带阁楼和壁橱，屋子两侧各有一扇大窗户，此外还有两扇活板门，以及位于房子一端的大门，正对着砖砌的壁炉。下面是这座房子的确切成本，只包括我按一般价格购买所用材料的花费，因为是我自己一手搭建，人工费用可略去不计；我在此详细列出各项费用，原因在于很少有人能够准确说出他们的房子造价几何，即便有人能够分别说出建造住屋的各种材料花费，也是屈指可数——

木板　　　　　　　　　8.035美元

（大多是旧木屋上拆下的木板）

屋顶和四壁的废旧木板　4.00美元

板条　　　　　　　　　1.25美元

两扇带玻璃的旧窗户　　2.43美元

1000块旧砖　　　　　　4.00美元

两桶石灰　　　　　　　2.40美元（买贵了）

毛织物　　　　　　　　0.31美元（买多了）

壁炉家用铁　　　　　　0.15美元

钉子　　　　　　　　　3.90美元

铰链和螺丝钉　　　　　0.14美元

门闩　　　　　　　　　0.10美元

粉笔　　　　　　　　　0.01美元

运费　　　　　　　　　1.40美元（大多自己背）

合计　　　　　　　　　28.125美元

以上就是全部材料，其中不包括木料、石头和沙土，这些是我作为政府公地上的定居者有权免费使用的。我还在房子边上搭建了一个柴棚，主要用料都是盖房子剩下的。

我想给自己建一座豪宅，比康科德主街上的任何一座房子都更气派，更奢华，只要它能和我现在的房子一样令我心满意足，而且花费也不会有所增加。

由此我发现，想要得到栖身之所的学子，可以付一笔不高于目前每年所付房租的费用，得到一个终身的住所。如果我有自吹自擂、言过其实之嫌，我的理由是，我是在为人类，并非为自己而夸夸其谈；我个人的缺点和前后不一之处并不影响我这些言论的真实性。尽管其中有不少单调无味的说教和虚伪之辞——犹如麦粒上的麸皮，我感觉很难分离开来，不过，对此我和任何其他人一样感到遗憾——但我还是要畅快地呼吸，舒展自己的躯体，这对人的精神和肉体都是极大的宣泄；我决心不卑躬屈膝去做魔鬼的代言人。我要尽己所能为真理进益言。在剑桥学院〔39〕，一个学生住的房间仅比我的屋舍稍大一点儿，可光是房租一年就要30美元，况且房产公司在同一个屋檐下并排建了32间宿舍，从中捞到了巨大的好处，而房客却要忍受人多嘈杂带来的不便，说不定还得住在四楼。我不由得想到，如果我们在这些方面能够多一些真知灼见，那么人们对教育的需求就会有所减少，因为，说真的，人们受到的教育比起自己的需要已经绰绰有余了，而且受教育的花费也会大大减少。在剑桥或别的什么地方，为了得到所需的种种便利，学生要付出自己或他人巨大的生命代价，如果双方处理得当，那么需要付出的生命代价只要十分之一就足够了。花钱最多的东西往往并不是学生最需要的东西。譬如说，学费在一个学期的费用中是重要的一项，而学生和同时代的人当中最有修养的人交往，从中得到的教益价值之大不可同日而语，但却分文不付。创建一所学院的方式通常是募集捐款，不拘多少，然后就开始盲目地遵循劳动分工的原则，而实施这一原则是需要谨慎行事的——总之招来了承包商，承包商于是做起投机生意，雇用爱尔兰人或其他具体干活儿的人来打地基，而未来的学子们就得让自己适应这一切；一代代学子不得不为这些失策之举付出代价。我想，如果学生，或者那些希望从中受益的人，自己动手奠基，情况会好得多。故意逃避对人类来说必不可少的任何劳动，从而获得自己渴求的闲暇和安逸，这样的学生所得到的不过是可耻和无益的休闲，而使休闲富有成效的经验则与他失之交臂。“但是，”有人说，“你该不是主张学生应该用双手，而不是用头脑去工作吧？”我的本意并非如此，但我认为他们应该在这方面多多思考；我的意思是，他们不应该游戏人生，或者仅仅是研究人生，由社会来供养他们从事这花费昂贵的事业，而是要一贯认真热诚地体验人生。年轻人如果不立即投身于生活实践中，又如何能够更好地学会生活呢？我认为这会像数学一样训练他们的思维。譬如说，倘若我希望一个孩子学点艺术和科学，我不会墨守陈规，按老一套的办法，把他送到某个教授身边，那里倒是无所不学，无所不练，但唯独不教授生活的艺术；——只通过望远镜和显微镜来观察世界，却从来不用肉眼；研究化学，却不学习自己吃的面包是如何制成，研究机械学，却不了解这一切由何而来；探索海王星的新卫星，却对自己眼中的尘埃视而不见，也无从发现自己就是一颗卫星，环绕着一颗行踪不定的行星运转；观察一滴醋里的怪兽，却被云集在周身的形形色色的怪兽所吞噬。假如一个孩子用自己开采、冶炼的金属矿石制作出一把折刀，同时广泛阅读自己所需要的知识，而另一个孩子则在学院里上冶金学课程，从父亲那里得来一把罗杰斯牌袖珍折刀——一个月下来，谁会有更大的进步？谁最有可能割破自己的手指？……令我大吃一惊的是，在我离开大学之际，居然被告知已经学习过航海术了！——其实，我只要到港口去转一遭就能学到更多的相关知识。即使是贫穷的学生也要求学，所学的课程也无非是政治经济学，而在我们的学院里，与哲学同义的生活经济学却从来没有实实在在地教过。结果是，他在研究亚当·斯密〔40〕、李嘉图〔41〕和扎伊尔〔42〕，却因此无可挽回地导致自己的父亲负债累累。

和我们的学院一样，上百种“现代化的先进事物”亦是如此；人们对它们抱有某种幻想；而实际上进步并不总是具有积极的意义。魔鬼早就入了股份，随后又不断增加投资，接着就没完没了地索取复利，一直到最后。我们的发明往往是些漂亮的玩具，分散我们的注意力，使我们无法关注重要的事情。这些发明不过是一些改进了的方式，达到的却是毫无改进的目标，其实这个目标的实现是轻而易举的；恰如通往波士顿或纽约的铁路。我们十万火急地在缅因州和得克萨斯州之间铺设了一条磁性电报线，可是，缅因州和得克萨斯州之间兴许根本没有什么重要的信息需要传递。这种情形使两者都不无尴尬，就像是一名男子，急切地希望被介绍给一位耳聋的高贵女士，但是等到他如愿以偿，那位女士的号角状助听器的一端放在他手里的时候，他却无话可说了。交流的主要目的仿佛是要说得迅速，而不是要说得合情合理。我们急不可耐地想在大西洋底修筑一条隧道，为的是让旧大陆提早几个星期到达新大陆；但是，也许传到美国人翕动张大的耳朵里的第一条新闻是阿德莱德公主得了百日咳。归根结底，一个人骑着一分钟跑一英里的快马，未必带来最重要的信息；他不是福音传教士，也不是来吃蝗虫和野蜂蜜的。我怀疑飞毛腿齐尔德斯曾经把一粒玉米驮到磨房去过。

有人对我说，“我很奇怪你为什么不攒点儿钱；你喜欢旅行；你今天就可以坐车到菲茨堡去开开眼界嘛。”但我比这要来得明智。我很清楚，最快的旅行家莫过于步行者。我对朋友说，我们试试看谁先到那里。路程是30英里；车费90美分。几乎是一天的薪水。我记得就在这条路上，工人一天的工资曾经是60美分。好吧，我现在步行出发，天黑之前就能赶到；我曾经整个星期以这个速度旅行过。而你呢，在这段时间却要把车钱挣出来，得到明天什么时候才能到达，如果你碰巧及时找到了活计，也许今晚就能抵达。你大半天时间没有去成菲茨堡，而是在这里干活。因此，如果铁路能绕地球一周，我想我一定能领先于你；至于说见见世面，多一点诸如此类的人生阅历，那我还是和你断绝往来为好。

这就是普遍规律，任何人都无法逾越，就连我们甚至可以称之为四通八达的铁路也不例外。要为全人类修筑一条环球铁路，无异于铲平地球的整个表面。人们稀里煳涂地认为，只要他们坚持不懈地实行合股经营，不停地用铁锹挖下去，最终，用不了多长时间，而且分文不花，就能到达某个地点；然而，虽然人们蜂拥而至来到车站，列车员大喊一声“上车啦！”等烟尘消散，蒸汽凝结之后，你们就会看到，上车的只是少数，其余的人则被火车生生碾过——这会被称作“一次令人悲哀的意外事件”，事实也将如此。毫无疑问，那些挣够了车费的人最后还是能上车的，假如到那时他们尚且活在人世，但是，真有那么一天，他们也许已经失去了蓬勃的活力和旅行的渴望。耗费生命中最美好的时光来挣钱，为的是在生命最没有价值的年头享受那靠不住的自由，这种做法使我想起了一个英国人，他到印度去发财致富，以便回到英国过上诗人的生活。他应该立刻爬到阁楼上才对。“什么？！”一百万个爱尔兰人从大地上所有的简陋棚屋里一跃而起，大声问道，“难道我们修筑的这条铁路有什么不好吗？”是很好，我回答说，相比较而言是好的，也就是说，你们的情况有可能会更糟；但是，因为你们是我的兄弟，我希望你们能把时间用在更有意义的事情上，而不是在这里挖掘泥土。

［……］

注释

〔1〕　夏威夷群岛的旧称。

〔2〕　赫拉克勒斯是希腊神话中最伟大的英雄，宙斯与底比斯国王的女儿阿尔克墨涅之子。半人半神的赫拉克勒斯能勇善战，成为众人皆知的大力士，在十二年中完成了十二项英雄业绩，其中之一就是在伊俄拉斯的帮助下杀死九头蛇。

〔3〕　传说中的希腊国王奥吉亚斯养牛三千头,三十年未曾洗过牛圈，赫拉克勒斯引河水于一日之内将其清洗干净。

〔4〕　见《圣经·马太福音》第6章19—20节。

〔5〕　希腊神话中普罗米修斯的一个儿子，他与妻子皮拉制造了诺亚方舟，并乘着它在宙斯引发的大洪水中逃生。洪水过后，二人从头顶向身后扔石头，石头变成男男女女，从而重新创造了人类。

〔6〕　原文为拉丁文，引自罗马作家奥维德的《变形记》。

〔7〕　威廉·威尔伯福斯（1759—1833），英国的政治家。曾在任英国下院议员（1780—1825）期间致力于废除奴隶制。

〔8〕　约翰·伊夫林（1620—1706），英国作家，下文引自他的《森林志》（1664年）。

〔9〕　希波克拉布底（约公元前460—370）,古希腊医师,被称作“医药之父”。

〔10〕　《圣经》中的人类始祖。

〔11〕　引自印度教经籍《毗湿奴往世书》。

〔12〕　澳大利亚土著，据说自17世纪被荷兰人发现后即被称为“新荷兰人”。

〔13〕　尤斯图斯·冯·李比希（1803—1873），德国化学家，对有机化学贡献卓著。

〔14〕　《圣经·旧约·出埃及记》中提到，古以色列人经过旷野时得到天赐的食物，称为“天粮”。

〔15〕　指中国。

〔16〕　拉·贝鲁斯（Compte de la Perouse，1741—1788），法国探险家，1785年率法国探险队从法国出航，探寻西北航道，结果在南太平洋失踪。

〔17〕　汉诺（约公元前500年），迦太基航海家、制图家。

〔18〕　菲菲夫人（1797—1858），环游世界的奥地利旅行家。

〔19〕　希腊神话中欢乐、花朵和灿烂三女神的总称。

〔20〕　希腊神话中命运三女神阿特洛波斯、克罗托和拉切西斯之总称。

〔21〕　塞缪尔·莱恩（1780—1868），英国作家。

〔22〕　居住在北欧等国。

〔23〕　居住在美国缅因州佩诺布斯科特湾和佩诺布斯科特河河谷一带的北美印第安人。

〔24〕　拉姆福德（1753—1814），英国物理学家，创立现代热理论。

〔25〕　见《圣经·马太福音》第26章11节和《圣经·以西结书》第18章第2节。

〔26〕　《圣经·以西结书》第18章3—4节。

〔27〕　查普曼（George Chapman，1559—1634），英国剧作家、诗人。下面的诗句引自《凯撒与庞培》第五幕第二场。

〔28〕　希腊神话中的非难指责与嘲弄之神。

〔29〕　罗马神话中掌管智慧、工艺和战争的女神,相当于希腊神话中的雅典娜。

〔30〕　这里指的是美国南方一些种植园买卖黑奴的勾当。

〔31〕　罗马神话中的曙光女神。

〔32〕　奥罗拉之女，传说底比斯的曼侬雕像在黎明时分会传出乐声。

〔33〕　古亚叙国王，以生活奢侈而闻名。

〔34〕　从殖民时代起，乔纳森就成了新英格兰人的称谓，后来指美国人。

〔35〕　爱德华·约翰逊（Edward Johnson，1598—1672），美国早期的历史学家。

〔36〕　原荷兰殖民地，现美国纽约州一带。

〔37〕　见荷马史诗《伊利亚特》。

〔38〕　这些人包括爱默生（Ralph Waldo Emerson，1803—1882，美国作家、哲学家和美国超验主义的核心人物）、阿尔科特（Amos Bronson Alcott，1799—1888，美国教育家及先验论哲学家）和钱宁（W.E.Channing，1780—1842，美国基督教公理会自由派牧师、著作家）以及居住在康科德的农人。

〔39〕　即现在的哈佛大学。

〔40〕　亚当·斯密（1723—1790），苏格兰经济学家，古典政治经济学的代表。

〔41〕　李嘉图（1772—1823），英国经济学家，古典政治经济学的代表。

〔42〕　扎伊尔（1802—1876），法国经济学家。

我的栖身之所，我的人生目的

在我们生命中的某个时节，我们惯于把每个地方都当作自己可以安家落户的栖身之所。如此一来，我将自己住所周围方圆12英里之内的乡野全都考察遍了。在想象中，我已经接二连三买下了所有的农场，因为所有这些农场终归都会被人买下，而且它们的价钱我也心里有数。我走遍了每一所农舍，尝尝他们的野苹果，和他们聊聊农活儿，在心里盘算着按他开的价钱买下他的农场，不拘价格高低，然后再抵押给他；甚至付更高的价钱——买下这一切，唯独没有立下一纸契约——而是把他的话当作契约，因为我极爱与人谈天说地——我自以为耕耘了那片土地，在某种程度上也耕耘了他的心田；在享受了足够的乐趣之后，我起身离开，留下他一人继续耕耘。由于这番经历，朋友们都把我当成了房产经纪人。无论我走到哪里，都可以在那里生活，无限风景便自然而然地从我身边延伸开去。所谓住所，不就是一个可以驻足的地方，可以坐下歇息的一席之地吗？——如果是在乡村就更好了。我发现不少地方都可以建造住屋，地价似乎在短时间内不会上升，有些人可能会觉得离村子太远了，而在我眼里，是村子离它太远了。我说，嗯，这地方可以住下来；我也的确在那里度过了一个小时，感受了夏日和冬季；我目睹了岁月如何流转，捱过严冬，迎接春天的来临。这个地区未来的居民，无论把住所建在何处，有一点是肯定的，那就是，已经有人先于他们在这里生活过了。只需一个下午，就能在这片土地上辟出果园、林地和牧场，并且定下来该把哪几棵姿态优雅的橡树和松树留在门前，以及每一棵枯萎的树从什么角度来看最妙不可言；然后我就放手不管了，或者说让它休耕一阵子，因为一个人能放得下的东西越多，就表明他越富有。

我的想象任意驰骋，漫无边际，我甚至想到有几处农场拒绝了我——被拒绝倒是正合我意——但我从来没有因为实实在在拥有农场而吃过苦头。我最接近于真正拥有农场，是买下霍洛威尔农场的那一次，当时我已经开始挑选种子，并且还收集木料准备造一架手推车作装运之用；但在主人把契约交给我之前，他的妻子——每个男人都有这样一个妻子——却改了主意，想留下农场，于是他提出给我10美元，把约定一笔勾销。说实话，当时我在世上的全部财产只有区区10美分，我到底是拥有10美分的那个人，还是拥有一个农场，或者10美元，或许是拥有所有这一切，那可就超出我的算术能力，说不清道不明了。不过我让他留下了那10美元，也让他留下了那农场，因为这次我已经走得够远了；或者不妨说我是个出手大方之人，按买进的原价将农场又卖给了他，而且，鉴于他也并非有钱人，那10美元算是我送给他的礼物，我自己则留有10美分、种子，和准备造手推车的木料。我发现，如此一来，自己当了一回富人，而且无损于原本的贫穷。不过，我把那片风景保留在心里，此后年复一年总能带走那里出产的果实，而且用不着手推车。说到风景——

我目所及皆我臣属，

我权于彼不容置疑。〔1〕

我常常看到一个诗人，他在欣赏了农场最宝贵的部分之后，便径自离去，而执拗的农夫还以为他拿去的只是几枚野苹果而已。诗人其实已经把他的农场写进了诗歌，这是一道绝妙无双的无形栅栏，把农场整个儿围了起来，挤出它的乳汁，脱脂后拿走全部的奶油，只留下脱脂的牛奶，而农场的主人竟然多年来对此一无所知。

在我看来，霍洛威尔农场真正的魅力在于它完全与世隔绝：农场离村子约有两英里，最近的乡邻也在半英里之外，而且还有广袤的田野将它和公路隔开；农场依傍着一条河，据主人说，春天，河上腾起的雾气能使田地免遭霜冻，虽然这对我来说无关紧要；农舍和谷仓呈现出一种灰暗的色调，已是残破不堪，还有那支离破碎的栅栏，犹如在我和先前的居住者之间隔开了一段漫长的岁月；苹果树的树身已经成了空洞，上面布满苔藓，还有兔子啃啮的痕迹，由此可见，我会有些什么样的邻居；但最令我神往的，还是记忆中的情景，那是我最初几次逆流而上的时候，看见屋舍掩映在一簇簇浓密的枫树丛中，听到树丛里传出声声犬吠。我迫不及待地要买下这处农场，不等主人搬走石块，砍倒空心的苹果树，挖掉牧场里刚刚冒出头来的小白桦树，总之，不等他收十停当我就想买下来。为了享受农场的种种便利，我准备把它继续经营下去；就像阿特拉斯〔2〕一样把整个世界扛在肩上——我从未听说他为此得到过什么好处——我甘愿承担这一切，没有任何别的动机或借口，只为付清账款，好安安稳稳地拥有这座农场；因为我一直很清楚，我只要能够做到顺其自然，农场自会如我所期望的那样五谷丰登。但是结果呢，前文已经交代过了。

所以，关于大规模的农耕（我一直在种植一个园子），我唯一能说的就是，我已经准备好了种子。许多人认为，历时弥久，种子则越优良。时间能甄别优劣，我对此深信不疑；因此，等到我最终播种的时候，我就更不可能大失所望了。但我要告诉我的朋友们：尽可能过一种自由自在、无拘无束的生活——这话我仅说一次，也是最后一次。死心塌地地料理一个农场，跟关在县政府的监狱里几乎没有什么分别。

老加图〔3〕的《农书》成了我的“栽培者”，他在书中说，“当你想要买下一座农场的时候，一定要三思而行，不要出于贪婪去买，也不要偷懒不亲自去看，别以为去转上一遭就够了。你去的次数越多，你就会越喜欢它。”——只可惜我见到的那个唯一的译本把这段话译得面目全非。我觉得我不会因为贪得无厌去买农场，而是在有生之年经常去转转，先深深地沉浸其中，而后才能最终获得更大的乐趣。

现在要说的是我接下来的一个类似的试验，我打算更详细地叙述一番；为了方便起见，我把两年的经历合二为一。正如我已经说过的那样，我无意写下一曲沮丧之歌，而要像一只黎明时分的雄鸡，站在栖木上引吭高歌，哪怕只为唤醒我的邻人。

我在林中居住的第一天，也就是说，我开始昼夜生活在那里的第一天，恰巧是1845年7月4日的美国独立日，那时候我的房子还不能抵挡冬季的严寒，只能勉强遮风避雨，既没有抹灰泥，也没有装烟囱，四壁用的是因风雨侵蚀而斑驳变色、粗糙陈旧的木板，缝隙很大，到了晚上屋里极为凉爽。那砍削好的笔直的白色立柱，还有刚刚刨平的门板和窗框，使房子看上去洁净而透气，尤其是在清晨，木头浸透了露水，总使我情不自禁地幻想，到了午间，里面会渗出甜甜的树汁。在我的想象中，房子整整一天都会或多或少带有这种黎明时分的情调，我由此想起了一年前曾经造访过的一座山间小屋。那座小木屋通风良好，而且没有抹灰泥，正适于款待云游至此的神仙，女神也可以拖曳着裙裾翩然而行。吹过我这座木屋的风，恰似那漫卷山嵴的风，带来断断续续的人间音乐的旋律，或者只是其中的仙乐片段。晨风永远都在吹拂，创世的诗篇恒久不断；但侧耳倾听者却寥寥无几。奥林匹斯山〔4〕无非是地球的外表，随处可见。

此前，除了一只小船，我曾拥有过的唯一的屋舍就是一顶帐篷，只是在夏季远足的时候偶尔一用，现在仍然束之高阁；但是那条船，几经转手，已经在时间的长河里消失无踪了。有了这个更为实实在在的栖身之所，我在人世间也就进一步安顿下来。虽说覆盖在屋架上的材料很单薄，却在我周身形成了一层结晶，并给建造者施加了某种影响。这多少使人联想到一幅素描。我不必走到屋外去呼吸新鲜空气，因为室内的空气丝毫没有失去清新之感。与其说我坐在屋里，倒不如说是坐在门后，即使在大雨滂沱的天气亦是如此。《哈利梵萨》〔5〕中有云：“巢之无鸟犹如肉之无味。”我的住所可并非如此，因为我突然间发现自己竟然与鸟雀为邻；不是将一只飞鸟囚禁在笼中，而是把自己关在笼子里，近旁就是鸟儿的栖息之地。我不仅离那些时常光顾花园和果园的鸟儿更近了，而且离森林中那些更加狂野，更加令人心情激荡的鸣禽也更近了，它们从来不向村民鸣唱小夜曲，或者说极为罕见——其中有画眉、威尔逊鸫、猩红比蓝雀、山麻雀、三声夜鹰，还有许许多多其他飞禽。

我的住所坐落在一个小湖滨，在康科德村往南约一英里半的地方，地势比村子略高一些，处于镇子与林肯乡之间那片广阔的树林中，往北约两英里便是我们这里唯一的一处著名场所——康科德战场〔6〕；我住在林中的低处，视野之所及最远也就是半英里以外的湖对岸，那里也和其他地方一样被森林所覆盖。头一个星期，每当我从屋里遥望湖面，它给我的印象好似一泓高踞在山坡之上的天池，湖底远远高出其他湖面，日出时分，我看着小湖脱去夜雾织就的衣衫，渐渐地，它那轻柔的涟漪，或者如镜的湖面，开始在各处闪闪烁烁，而此时的雾霭则像幽灵一般悄无声息地向四面八方消散，隐入林中，仿佛是夜间进行的秘密宗教集会悄然散去。就连挂在树上的露珠也不同寻常，似乎比山坡上的露珠更为持久，直到白天更晚的时候才会消失。

8月里，在并不狂野的暴风雨的间隙，这个小小的湖是我最可贵的邻居，那时候，风平浪静，但天空中仍是乌云密布，午后两三点钟左右却像夜晚一样宁静，而画眉鸟的歌声则四处响起，隔岸相闻。这样的湖，唯有此时此刻才宁静如许；湖面上清朗的空气被乌云渲染得一片暗淡，那波光粼粼、倒影重叠的湖水本身就是一个下界天国，自然弥足珍贵。近处的一个山顶上，林木刚刚被砍伐，从那里向南远眺，目光越过小湖，可以望到一片怡人的风景，群山之间有一个巨大的山坳，恰恰形成了湖岸，两面山坡相对倾斜而下，让人感觉仿佛有一条溪涧穿过林木葱郁的山谷从那个方向流淌而出，但实际上溪流并不存在。就这样，我的视线穿越近处的青山翠谷，一直望到远处地平线上更高的山脉，层层山峦被涂抹上了一层天蓝。其实，如果踮起脚尖，我就能看到西北方向的群山，更远，也更蓝，那是天国的造币厂铸造出来的纯蓝色硬币，此外，我还能瞥见村子的一角。但是换个方向，即使原地不动，在林木的环绕之中，我看不到森林上方或森林以外的任何景致。与水相邻而居确实不错，水可以给大地以浮力，让它漂浮起来。就连最小的一眼井水也值得珍视，当你向井中探看的时候，你会发现地球并不是绵延不绝的陆地，而是一片孤岛。这和井水能够冷藏黄油同等重要。我站在这座山峰上，目光越过湖水向萨德伯里草原远眺，适逢洪水季节，我发现草地仿佛升高了，这大概是雾气蒸腾的山谷里产生了海市蜃楼的幻境，恰如盆底的一枚硬币，湖水之外的大地看上去似乎是薄薄的一层硬壳，被小小的一片介于其间的水域分割开来，托举在水面上，成了孤岛，这使我不由得想到，我居住的这块地方只不过是“干地”而已。

虽然从自家屋门口望出去，视野更为狭窄，但我却丝毫没有拥挤和局促之感。牧场足以让我的想象力任意驰骋。小湖对岸，长满矮栎木丛的高原拔地而起，一直向西部的大草原和鞑靼地方〔7〕的干草原延伸，给人类所有的游牧家庭提供了广袤的天地。达莫达拉〔8〕在他的牧群需要更广大的新牧场的时候这样说道：“世界上，唯有可以自由自在地欣赏广阔地平线的人才是幸福的。”

时间和空间都发生了变化，我的居所更靠近宇宙中最吸引我的地方，更接近历史上最令我神往的时代。我的栖身之地和天文学家每晚观察的众多星体一样遥远。我们常常幻想，在宇宙体系的某个偏僻而更为神圣的角落，在仙后座五亮星的后面那远离尘嚣的地方，有着不同寻常的快乐所在。我发现，我的住所其实就处在宇宙中这样一个遁世之所，亘古常新，而且未曾受到亵渎。如果说住在靠近昴星团或毕星团，金牛座或天鹰座的地方是值得一番努力的话，那么我确确实实已经身临其境了，或者说，我和这些星座一样，将尘世远远地抛在身后，像它们一样将闪闪烁烁的微光照向最近的邻居，只有在没有月亮的夜晚才能被看到。我居住在天地万物中这样一个地方——

从前有个牧羊人，

思想如山一般高，

他的羊群在山上，

时时将他来喂养。

试想一下，如果这位牧羊人的羊群总是游荡到比他的思想更高的牧场上去，他的生活会是怎样一番光景？

每一个清晨，都是一份令人愉快的邀请，要我过一种和大自然一样简朴，也可以说是一样纯真的生活。我如同希腊人一般真诚地崇拜曙光女神奥罗拉。我早早起床，沐浴在小湖之中；这是一种宗教般虔诚的仪式，是我所做的最有益的事情之一。据说成汤王的浴盆上刻有这样的文字：“苟日新，日日新，又日新。”〔9〕我深知其中的道理。清晨为我们重现往昔的英雄时代。晨光熹微之时，我敞开门窗坐在屋子里，一只蚊子在我的房间里漫游，不见行迹，也难以想象，它发出微弱的嗡嗡声，深深打动了我，恰如听到颂扬美名的号角声一样。这是荷马的安魂曲；它本身就是传扬四方的《伊利亚特》和《奥德赛》，吟唱着自己的愤怒心绪和漂泊历程。此中大有宇宙的广大无边之感；只要容许它存在，它就会永远张扬世间万物永恒的活力和生生不息。清晨，一天之中最难忘的时刻，正是万物苏醒之时。那时候，我们没有一丝困倦；至少要一个小时，我们身体中日夜沉睡的部分才会醒来。如果我们不是被自己的禀赋所唤醒，而是被某个侍从用手肘生硬地推醒；如果我们不是被自己内心刚刚滋生出的力量和强烈愿望所唤醒，而且还伴随着悠然飘荡的天籁之音和弥漫在空中的沁人馨香，而是被工厂的铃声所惊扰；如果我们醒来时面对的生活并不比入睡之前有所提升，那么这样的一天是毫无期盼可言的——如果这种日子尚且能够称作一天的话；如此说来，黑夜也能结出果实，证明自己是有价值的，并不比白天逊色。一个人如果不相信，比起他虚度的时光，每天都有一个更早、更神圣的黎明时刻，那他就是一个对生活灰心绝望的人，踏上了一条通向黑暗的堕落之路。每一天，在感官生活中断了一段时间之后，人的灵魂，或者不妨说他的各个器官，又重新焕发出活力，他的禀赋也再一次试图创造高尚的生活。可以说，一切值得记忆的事情，都是清晨时刻，在清晨的氛围中发生的。《吠陀经》〔10〕有云：“一切智慧俱在黎明时分醒来。”诗歌和艺术，以及人类最美好、最值得铭记的行为，都源于此刻。所有的诗人和英雄都和曼侬一样，是曙光女神奥罗拉的儿女，在日出时分传扬出美妙的音乐。对于那些思想活跃而富有活力，与太阳同步的人来说，白天是永恒的清晨。钟表如何报时，人们持何种态度，从事何种劳作，全都无关紧要。清晨是我清醒的时刻，内心经受了一次黎明的洗礼。修心养性就是努力摒弃睡眠。倘若人们不是处在昏昏欲睡的状态，何以把白天说得如此不屑？他们并不是不会算计的人啊。他们如若不是睡意沉沉，就会有所作为。清醒到可以从事体力劳动的人数以千百万；但是一百万人中只有一个清醒到可以进行有效的智力劳动，一亿人中只有一个人能够过一种诗意的生活，或者说是超凡脱俗的生活。清醒就是具有活力。我从未遇到过一个异常清醒的人。如果遇上了，我又怎能泰然自若地直视他呢？

我们必须学会重新醒来，并保持清醒状态，不是借助于机械的方式，而是通过对黎明的无限期盼，即使在我们最酣畅的睡眠中，黎明也不会抛弃我们。毫无疑问，人完全有能力通过有意识的努力来提升自己的生活，我所知道的最令人鼓舞的事情莫过于此。能够描绘出一幅独特的画，或者雕刻出一尊塑像，从而使一些事物得到美化，这的确是不同凡响；但能够雕刻和描绘出我们观察事物的氛围和媒介，就更值得称道了，这一点我们在精神上是能够做到的。能够对时代特征施加影响，才是艺术的最高境界。每个人都有责任使自己的生活，甚至包括生活的细枝末节，都经得起在他最高尚最苛责的时候进行审视。如果我们拒绝，或者用尽了我们得到的这微不足道的一点儿知识，神谕自会清楚地告诉我们如何做到这一点。

我幽居在森林中，是因为我希望生活得从容淡定，只面对生活的基本现实，看看是否能够学到生活教给我的一切，而不是等到弥留之际才发现自己从未真正生活过。我不想过一种不是生活的生活，人生在世如此珍贵；我也不想与世隔绝，除非势在必行。我希望能够深入地生活，吸取生活的所有精髓，过一种坚强的、斯巴达式的生活，去除一切不是生活的东西，刈出一个宽阔的地带，再细细修整，把生活逼入困境，简化到极点，如果事实证明生活是卑微的，那么就把全部的、真实的卑微之处拿出来，公之于众；如果生活是崇高的，那就去亲身体验，这样就可以在下一次旅行时做出真实的记述。在我看来，似乎大多数人对于生活都琢磨不透，不知道它是属于魔鬼，还是属于上帝，这真是不可思议，他们多少有些草率地得出结论，认为人生归根到底是为了“颂扬上帝，永享他的赐福”。

然而，我们还是生活得很卑微，如蚁蝼一般；尽管神话告诉我们，很久以前我们已经变成了人〔11〕，但是我们仍然像俾格米矮人一样和仙鹤奋战〔12〕；这真是错上加错，重创累累，我们最卓越的美德此刻却成了多余的、本可以避免的苦难。我们的生命消磨在琐碎之中。一个诚实的人，数数仅凭十个手指头就足够了，最多再加上十个脚趾，其余的一概不需。简单，简单，再简单！要我说，你的事务只要两三件就足矣，而不是成百上千件；不必数上一百万，半打就够了；账目可以记在你的大拇指指甲上。在文明生活这个波涛汹涌的大海上，时时有阴云蔽日、狂风骤雨、阵阵流沙，还有一千零一件事务需要考虑，如果一个人想要生存下去，不致船只沉没，葬身海底，根本无从抵达目的港，就得依靠精确的航位推测法，能够真正成功的人必定是个了不起的计算高手。简化，再简化。一日不必三餐，如有必要，一餐足以充腹；备上一百道菜大可不必，五道就足够；其余的东西也以此类推，相应减少。我们的生活就像是一个德意志联邦，由许多小邦国组成，边界永远变化不定，甚至于连一个德国人也无法随时说出边界如何划分。附带说一句，国家所谓的内部改进，全都是表面文章，肤浅之极，国家本身就是这样一个艰难运转的庞大机构，里面塞满了家具，无异于作茧自缚，由于缺乏深思熟虑和崇高的目标，由于穷奢极欲和挥霍无度而毁掉了自己，就像这个国家里的上百万户居民一样；对于国家而言，唯一的对策和居民一样，那就是厉行节约，过一种严以律己、比斯巴达人还要简单的生活，树立更高的人生目标。现在人们的生活太放荡不羁了。人们认为商业对于国家是必不可少的，出口冰块，电报往来，一小时行进30英里也是势在必行，毫不怀疑是否有此必要；但是，我们究竟应该活得像狒狒，还是像人，却有点儿模棱两可。如果我们不去铺设枕木，锻造铁轨，不夜以继日地忙于工作，而是得过且过，将就着改善自己的生活，那么谁来修建铁路呢？如果铁路没有修好，我们又如何及时抵达天堂呢？不过，如果我们待在家里心无旁骛，谁又需要铁路呢？其实不是铁路承载我们，而是我们承载着铁路。你们是否想过，那铺在铁路下面的枕木是什么？每一根枕木都是一个人，一个爱尔兰人，或者一个新英格兰人。铁轨就铺设在他们的身躯之上，他们被沙土掩埋，一列列车厢平稳地从他们身上驶过。我敢断言，他们就是沉睡不醒的枕木。每隔几年就会有一批新的枕木用来铺设铁路，让火车从上面碾过；因此，如果有人兴致勃勃地乘坐火车，就会有人不幸地被碾压。当他们从一个梦游者身上驶过，也就是一根错位的、多余的枕木，把他惊醒了，他们就会紧急刹车，大惊小怪地叫嚷起来，仿佛这是一个例外。我听说每隔5英里就需要一帮人负责让枕木平稳地卧在路基上，为此感到甚为欣喜，因为这是一个迹象，表明哪一天他们有可能重新站立起来。

我们为什么要生活得如此匆忙，如此耗费生命？我们决意要在没有感到饥饿的时候忍饥挨饿。人们常说，“一针及时省九针”，因此，他们今天缝上一千针，省得日后缝九千针。至于工作，我们徒劳无益，没有任何结果。我们得了圣维特斯舞蹈病，根本无法让自己的脑袋静止不动。只要我在教区拽几下钟绳，像报火警那样，也就是说不等钟声响彻，我敢说康科德近郊的农场上几乎没有一个男人，尽管早上还几次三番找借口说自己忙得不可开交，也没有一个男孩或女人，不会丢下手头的一切活计，循着钟声跑来；实话实说，他们的主要目的倒不是为了从大火中抢救财产，而是为了一睹火势如何，因为火是一定会烧下去的，况且，要知道，火并不是我们放的——或者，他们是跑来看怎样灭火的，如果可以大显身手，还可以助上一臂之力；说真的，哪怕是教区里的教堂失了火，他们也是如此。人们午餐后小憩了不到半个小时，待睡醒之后，抬头就问：“有什么新闻没有？”仿佛世界上其余的人都在为他站岗。有人吩咐每隔半个小时就把他叫醒，显然别无他意；然后，作为回报，他们把自己的梦境讲述一番。一夜睡眠之后，新闻和早餐一样不可或缺。“请给我讲讲这个星球上任何地方任何人所碰到的新鲜事儿。”——他一边喝咖啡，吃面包卷，一边浏览新闻，从中获悉有一个人当天早晨在瓦奇托河上被挖掉了眼睛；可是他连做梦也没有想到，自己在这个世界上就生活在一个黯淡无光、深不可测的巨大黑洞里，只有先天不足的眼睛。

对我来说，没有邮局也无甚大碍。我觉得，通过邮局进行的重要交流少之又少。严格说来，我一生中只收到过一两封信值得花费邮资——这话是我几年前写下的。所谓便士邮政，一般来说是这样一个机构，你郑重其事地付出一便士，为的是得到他的思想，结果得到的往往是玩笑话。而且我可以肯定地说，我在报纸上从未读到任何值得铭记在心的消息。如果我们获悉有人遭到抢劫，或者惨遭杀害，或者死于非命，或者读到一座房子毁于大火，一艘船失事沉没，一艘汽轮突然爆炸，或者一条奶牛在西部铁路上被碾死，一条疯狗被杀掉，冬天里出现了一大群蝗虫——我们根本就不必再读别的什么。一条就足够了。如果你已经对这个原则了然于心，又何必去关心那些不可胜数的实例和应用呢？对于一个哲学家来说，一切所谓的新闻都是闲言碎语，只有上了年纪的妇女才会一边喝茶一边编辑和阅读这些东西。然而，热衷于这种闲言碎语的却大有人在。我听说，前几天有一大群人蜂拥进一家报社，想了解最新的国外新闻，以至于把报社的好几面方形大玻璃窗都挤破了，——而我则当真认为，这种新闻，一个思维灵敏的人在十二个月或十二年前就能写得八九不离十。比方说西班牙，你只要知道怎样将唐·卡洛斯和公主，以及唐·彼得罗、赛维涅和格拉纳拉这些名字以恰如其分的比例安插进去就行了——有些名字可能和我当年看报的时候有所不同——在拿不出别的娱乐新闻的时候，可以奉上一则斗牛表演的报道，这可是真真切切的新闻，将西班牙的具体状况或者说衰落局面呈现给我们，和报纸上以此为标题的最简洁明了的报道也不相上下；至于英国，来自那里的最后一条重要新闻差不多就是1649年的革命了；如果你了解谷物在英国历史上的平均产量，你就再也不会去留心这类事情了，除非你的目的是为了做投机生意。如果让一个难得看报的人来评判的话，国外很少发生什么新鲜事儿，连法国革命也不例外。

新闻算得了什么！要了解永不过时的事物，那才重要得多啊！“蘧伯玉（卫大夫）使人于孔子。孔子与之坐而问焉。曰：夫子何为？对曰：夫子欲寡其过而未能也。使者出。子曰：使乎，使乎。”〔13〕劳作了整整一个星期的农人，在周末的休息日里个个昏昏欲睡——因为星期日是为糟糕的一周做一个恰当的结尾，而不是为新的一周来一个崭新而大胆的开始，这时候，牧师偏偏不是在他们耳边进行冗长乏味的布道，而是用雷鸣一般的嗓音吼道——“停下！且慢！为什么看起来这么快，实际上却慢得要死？”

虚伪和谬见被推崇为最可靠的真理，而现实却成了虚构。如果人们坚持不懈地只是观察现实，不让自己受到蒙蔽，那么，和我们已知的事物相比，生活就宛如童话和《天方夜谭》里的故事一般。如果我们只尊重不可避免和有权利存在的事物，音乐和诗歌就会回荡在大街小巷。当我们从容不迫、明智审慎的时候，我们就会意识到，只有伟大和有价值的事物才能永久而绝对地存在——微不足道的恐惧和快乐只不过是现实的影子。现实永远使人振奋，令人崇敬。人们闭上双眼，昏昏沉沉，任凭各种假象误导自己，才会形成无处不在的日常生活习俗并且逐日加深，而这些习俗正是创建在纯粹幻想的基础上。嬉戏玩耍的孩童，却能比大人更清晰地认识到生活的真正规律和关系，而那些生活得毫无价值的大人们，却认为自己阅历丰富，因而更为明智，其实所谓的阅历也就是失败。我在一本印度的书里读到：“有一个王子，自幼被逐出故乡，被一个居住在森林里的人收养，就在那种环境下长大成人。王子一直认为自己属于跟他共同生活的原始民族。后来，他父亲手下的一位大臣找到了他，向他揭示了他的真实身份，从此消除了他对自己身世的误解，他这才知道自己是一位王子。”这位印度哲学家继续讲道：“灵魂因受其所处环境的影响而弄错了自己的身份，直到某位神圣的导师向他揭示真相，他才知道自己是梵〔14〕。”我感到，我们这些新英格兰的居民过着现在这种卑微的生活，是因为我们的眼光无法穿透事物的表面。我们把表象看成了事物的本质。假设一个人从镇子里走过，眼中所见只是现实事物，那么你想想看，“磨坊水坝”何在？如果他向我们描述在镇子里眼见为实的东西，这个“磨坊水坝”是我们无从得知的。看看礼拜堂或县府大楼，要么就是监狱、商店、住宅，然后说说你亲眼目睹的事物究竟是什么，它们在你的讲述中都会变得支离破碎。人们总是尊崇遥不可及的真理，体制以外的真理，最遥远的星球之后的真理，在亚当以前和人类灭绝之后的真理。永恒之中确实存在着某种真实而崇高的东西。但是，所有的时间、地点和机会都定格在此时此刻。上帝本身的至高无上就体现于此刻，不会随着时间的流逝而变得更加神圣。我们只有自始至终完全融入并渗透在周围的现实事物中，才能领悟什么是崇高和高尚。宇宙持续不断地、顺从地适应我们的观念，无论我们的步伐是快是慢，轨道已经为我们铺好。让我们把一生都用来构想吧。诗人和艺术家从未有过如此美好和崇高的构思，不过至少他们的子孙后代中有人能够实现。

让我们像大自然一样从容不迫地过上一天，不要因为掉落在轨道上的坚果壳和蚊子的翅膀而脱离轨道。让我们清晨即起，轻手轻脚，平心静气，吃不吃早餐都无所谓；哪管他人来人往，哪管他钟声鸣响，稚子哭啼——下定决心好好过上一天。我们为什么要屈服，要随波逐流呢？我们千万不要在那子午线浅滩处的激流漩涡中倾覆沉没，那可怕的激流和漩涡叫作“午餐”。一旦度过这个险关，接下来你就平安无事，一路顺风了。这时候，要以毫不松懈的意志和清晨的活力，像尤利西斯〔15〕一样把自己捆在桅杆上，眼睛望着另一个方向从它旁边掠过。如果汽笛鸣响，就让它没完没了地鸣叫吧，直到声嘶力竭。如果钟声响起，我们为什么要跑？我们倒要思忖一番那是什么音乐。让我们定下心来，涉足于各种观念、偏见、传统、错觉和表象的泥沼之中——这污浊淤积在整个地球之上；让我们穿越巴黎和伦敦，穿越纽约、波士顿和康科德，穿越教堂和国家，穿越诗歌、哲学和和宗教，直至抵达坚硬的底部和稳固的岩石——我们称之为“现实”，并说，正是这里，没错；有了这个基点〔16〕，就可以在山洪、冰霜和火焰之下的某个地方，开始修建一堵墙或一个国家，或是竖起一根牢固的灯柱，也许是测量仪，不是尼罗河水位测量标尺，而是现实测量仪，这样一来，未来的年代就可以了解到，日积月累的、如洪水泛滥一般的虚伪和表象有多么深不可测。如果你笔直挺立，直面一个事实，就会看到，阳光在它的两面熠熠生辉，仿佛是一把短弯刀，你会感到它那可爱的刀锋正在划开你的心脏和骨髓，此情此景之下，你情愿无比快乐地结束自己的人间经历。不论是生抑或是死，我们渴求的唯有真实。倘若我们真要离开人世，就让我们听到自己临终前发出的喉音，感觉寒冷在四肢蔓延；倘若我们活着，就让我们忙于自己的事情吧。

时间，不过是我垂钓的小溪。我啜饮溪中之水；饮着溪水的时候，我看到了铺着细沙的河底，发现它竟然如此之浅。细细的水流潺潺而过，但永恒长存。我愿开怀畅饮；在天空中垂钓，那上面缀满了鹅卵石一般的星星。我却连一颗也数不出。我连字母表中的第一个字母都不认识。我一直感到懊悔，自己还不如初降人世的时候那般聪颖。智力是一把利刃；待它分辨清楚后，就一路切入事物的秘密所在。我不想让自己的双手为不必要的事情而忙碌。我的头脑就是手和脚。我感到自己的最佳能力都集中于此。由本能而知，我的头脑是用来挖掘的，正如某些动物用鼻子和前爪来打洞，我要用自己的头脑来挖掘，洞穿这一座座山峦。我感觉，蕴藏最丰富的矿脉就在附近；凭着手里的占卜杖和升腾而起的薄雾，我作此判断；我也将在这里开始采矿。

注释

〔1〕　引自英国诗人威廉·柯珀（William Cowper, 1731—1800）的诗《亚历山大·塞尔科克》。

〔2〕　希腊神话中以肩顶天的巨神，比喻身负重担的人。

〔3〕　卡托（Marcus Porcius Cato, 234—149B. C. ），古罗马政治家、作家，拉丁散文文学开创者，着有《史源》、《农书》等。

〔4〕　奥林匹斯山，希腊北部靠近爱琴海海岸的一列山，是希腊境内最高点，也是希腊诸神的家园。

〔5〕　公元5世纪印度的一部史诗。

〔6〕　1775年4月19日美国独立战争第一天作战的战场。

〔7〕　指中世纪时受蒙古人统治的自东欧至亚洲的广大地区。

〔8〕　亦名克利须那，印度教三大神之一毗湿奴的第八代化身。

〔9〕　见《大学》，“汤之盘铭”。

〔10〕　印度婆罗门教最古老的经典。

〔11〕　希腊神话中，宙斯之子说服宙斯，将蚂蚁变成了人。

〔12〕　见荷马史诗《伊利亚特》第三卷第五章。

〔13〕　引自《论语》第十四篇《宪问》。

〔14〕　印度教的三位主神之一，为创造之神，亦指众生之本，或智慧的象征。

〔15〕　希腊神话中，海员们常被半人半鸟的海妖塞壬的美妙歌声所迷惑，以致船只触礁沉没。荷马史诗《奥德赛》第十二卷中提到，尤利西斯为了不受诱惑，把自己捆在了桅杆上。

〔16〕　原文为法语。

冬日里的动物

当湖泊被坚冰覆盖之时，不仅到许多地方去都有了新的捷径，而且站在湖面上朝四下里张望，素日熟悉的风景也会呈现出新奇的景象。尽管我经常在弗林特湖上划着船四处徜徉，也曾在湖面上熘冰，但是，当我走在银装素裹的湖面上，出人意料的是，它显得如此宽广，如此陌生，我心里想到的唯有巴芬湾〔1〕。白雪皑皑的广袤原野被巍巍矗立的林肯乡的群山环绕着，身临其中，我竟仿佛从来没有驻足于此；在不知有多远的冰面上，渔夫们带着狼犬缓慢地移动，颇像是猎捕海豹的人或爱斯基摩人，遇上雾霭迷蒙的天气，他们又如神话中的灵兽一般若隐若现，说不清是巨人还是侏儒。傍晚时分，我到林肯乡去听演讲的时候，走的就是这条路，从我的小木屋到演讲厅之间，不经过任何道路，也不经过什么人家。途中路过的鹅湖是麝鼠的聚居地，它们的窝高踞在冰层上，可在我走过的时候却看不见一只麝鼠在外面。和别的湖一样，瓦尔登湖通常没有白雪覆盖，就是有，也零零落落，仅是薄薄的一层。它成了我的院落，当别的地方积雪将近两英尺厚，村民被困在街道上无处能去的时候，我可以在这里随心所欲地走来走去。这里远离村子的街道，难得听到雪橇上叮当作响的铃声，我在这里滑雪、熘冰，仿佛置身于一个久经踩踏的巨大的麋鹿苑里，头顶上是橡树和黑黢黢的松树，被积雪压得弯弯的，要么挂满了冰柱。

说到声音，在冬天的夜晚，白天往往也是一样，我总能听到从遥远的地方传来猫头鹰那凄清而悦耳的鸣叫；这种声音是冰冻的土地用合适的琴拨子来弹拨时才能发出的，这正是瓦尔登森林特有的语言，久而久之，这声音对我来说已经无比熟悉，虽然我从未在那只猫头鹰鸣叫的时候见过它。冬夜，只要我打开门，往往能听到它的叫声；呼呼呼，呼儿呼，声音圆润响亮，头三个音节听上去有点儿像“你好啊”；有时候则只有呼呼两声。初冬时节的一个晚上，瓦尔登湖还没有完全封冻，约摸9点钟的时候，一只野鹅的高叫使我一惊，我走到门口，只听得一群野鹅扑打着翅膀低低地掠过我的房子，仿佛林中起了一场风暴。似乎是我的灯光使它们不敢停留，于是它们越过湖面，向美港飞去，领头的那只野鹅有节奏地高叫不止。突然，从离我很近的地方传来一只猫头鹰极为响亮刺耳的尖叫，森林的居民当中还从未听到这种声音，这毫无疑问是一只猫头鹰，它仿佛决心要显示一下土生土长的居民具有更宽的音域和更大的音量，羞辱一番这来自哈得孙湾的不速之客，它作出有节奏的回应，用呼呼的叫声把来犯者逐出康科德的地界。在这神圣不可侵犯的夜晚时刻，你来侵扰我的大本营，用意何在？你以为这个时候会发现我打盹吗，以为我没有和你一样的音量和嗓门吗？布——呼，布——呼，布——呼！这当属我听到过的最令人毛骨悚然的嘈杂之音。不过，如果你的耳朵具有敏锐的辨别力，这其中也有和谐的音调，是周遭的原野上见所未见，闻所未闻的。

我还能听到湖上的冰发出的喘息，在康科德那一带，湖是与我同床而眠的巨大伙伴，它似乎在床上难以入睡，很想翻个身，而且还由于肠胃胀气，噩梦连连而不得安宁；要不然就是土地冻裂的声响把我惊醒，仿佛是有人赶着一群牲口撞在我的门上，第二天早上，我会发现地上裂开了一道十分之一英里长、三分之一英寸宽的缝隙。

有时候，在月色皎洁的夜晚，我还能听到狐狸在雪地里跋涉，四处搜寻山鹧鸪或其他猎物，像猎犬一样发出凶狠刺耳的嗥叫，似乎是急不可耐，又像是试图自我宣泄，努力寻求光明，想就此变成狗，在街道上无拘无束地奔跑；因为，如果我们把时代变迁考虑在内，野兽难道不可能和人类一样具有某种文明吗？在我看来，它们像是原始时代掘洞而居的人类，仍然处在自我防卫阶段，等待转化时刻的到来。有时候，会有一只狐狸被我的灯光所吸引，来到我的窗前，向我发出一声狐狸的诅咒，然后转身逃走。

黎明时分，通常是红松鼠（学名Sciurus Hudsonius）将我唤醒，它们在屋顶上蹿来蹿去，在房子四面的墙壁爬上爬下，仿佛它们从林子里出来，是专门被派来吵醒我的。冬天，我把半蒲式耳还没有成熟的甜玉米穗抛在门前的积雪上，看着被吸引来的各种动物的千姿百态，别有一番情趣。到了黄昏时分和夜里，兔子往往会来饱餐一顿。红松鼠一整天都来来去去，它们耍的小把戏给我带来不少乐趣。起初，一只红松鼠会小心翼翼地钻出橡树丛，它在雪地上跑跑停停，像一片被风卷起的落叶，一会儿往这边跑几步，速度之快令人惊叹，耗费了大量体力，小脚的迅疾让人难以置信，好像要一赌输赢，一会儿又往那边跑几步，步数与刚才相仿，但每次都不超过半杆远；然后，它又带着滑稽可笑的表情，毫无来由地翻个跟头，紧接着蓦然停下，仿佛整个宇宙的所有目光都聚焦在它的身上——因为哪怕是在森林最偏僻幽深之处，松鼠的一举一动都跟舞女一样，仿佛在观众的注目之下——它谨小慎微，拖延再三，浪费了不少时间，要不然早就走完了这段距离——我从没见过松鼠行走的样子——接着，说时迟，那时快，它突然跃上一株小油松的树顶，上足了发条一般，开始喋喋不休地斥责自己想象中的所有观众，既像是自言自语，又像是对着整个宇宙发表讲话——我从来弄不明白这究竟是为什么，恐怕连它自己也未必知道。最后，它终于来到玉米跟前，挑出自己中意的一穗来，然后按着原来的不规则三角形路线，轻快地蹦跳着，来到我窗前的木头堆上，它在最顶端的那根木头上一坐就是几个小时，无所畏惧地直视着我，时不时地再给自己捡来一穗玉米，先是狼吞虎咽，把啃了一半的玉米穗扔得到处都是；后来它挑剔起来，开始摆弄手里的食物，只尝尝玉米粒的芯儿，它用爪子抓着一穗玉米搁在木头上保持平衡，一不小心滑落到地上，这时候，它便做出一副半信半疑的滑稽相，仿佛怀疑玉米穗是活的，拿不定主意是要把它十起来，还是去拿一穗新的，还是一走了之；它一会儿想想玉米，一会儿听听风里有什么动静。就这样，这个冒冒失失的小家伙一上午就糟蹋了好多玉米穗；最后，它抓起一根又长又饱满的玉米，比自己的个头儿还大，它巧妙地保持着平衡，拖着那穗玉米向森林里进发，就像老虎拖着一头水牛，它还像先前一样，按照之字形路线，左拐右拐，走走停停，很勉强的样子，似乎玉米穗对它来说分量太重了，老是掉下来，而且每次掉落的轨迹总是沿着垂线和横线之间的斜线，看样子，它决心无论如何也要把玉米穗弄回去——真是个少有的轻浮草率、异想天开的家伙——它就这样把玉米穗弄到自己的住处，兴许还会搬到四五十杆以外的一棵松树顶上，过一阵子我就会发现，玉米芯在森林里扔得到处都是。

最后，松鸦飞来了，它们从八分之一英里以外小心翼翼地靠近时，那刺耳的聒噪早就让人未见其形先闻其声，它们偷偷摸摸地从一棵树飞到另一棵树，越飞越近，一路上啄食松鼠掉下的玉米粒。然后，它们落在一棵油松的枝头，急不可耐地将玉米粒一口吞下，可是玉米粒太大了，哽在嗓子眼里，它们费了好大的劲儿才把玉米粒吐出来，又花了一个小时，用尖嘴反反复复啄个不停，想把它啄碎。它们显然是一群窃贼，我对它们可没有什么好感；而那些松鼠呢，虽然一开始有点儿羞怯，可不一会儿就好像拿自己的东西一样大大咧咧地干起来了。

与此同时，山雀也成群结队地飞来了，它们捡起松鼠掉落的碎屑，飞到最近的树枝上，然后用脚爪抓住碎屑，用小小的尖嘴啄个不停，好像啄的是树皮里的一只小虫子，直到碎屑小到可以塞进它们那细小的喉咙。每天都会有一小群山雀前来光顾，它们在我的木头堆里寻寻觅觅，享受一顿美餐，或者在我的门前啄食碎屑，一边发出轻微短促、不甚清晰的鸣叫声，就像是草丛里的冰柱发出叮叮咚咚的声响，要么就是欢快的“得——得——得”的叫声，更为难得的是，在春日一样的暖冬天气，它们会在森林边上发出宛如弹奏琴弦一般的叫声：“菲——比”，让人联想到夏日风情。久而久之，它们渐渐和我熟悉起来，有一只竟然跳到我要抱到屋里去的一捆木柴上，毫不畏惧地在柴火上啄来啄去。有一次，我正在村里的菜园锄地，一只麻雀落到了我的肩膀上，停留片刻才展翅飞去，那一刻我倍感荣耀，是佩戴任何肩章都无法相提并论的。松鼠最后也和我熟络起来，有时候，它们为了抄近路，甚至会从我的鞋子上踩过去。

当大地还没有完全被白雪覆盖，或者冬天即将结束，朝南的山坡和我的木堆上积雪已经开始融化的时候，鹧鸪一早一晚会从林中飞来觅食。无论你走在森林的哪一边，都会有鹧鸪拍打着翅膀呼的一声突然飞离，震得高处的枯叶嫩枝上的积雪纷纷飘落，在阳光下像金色的粉末一样亮闪闪的；这勇敢的鸟儿不会畏惧严冬。它们常常会被一层层积雪掩埋起来，据说，“有时候，它们从空中一头扎进柔软的雪里，一待就是一两天”。日落时分，它们从林子里飞出来，到旷野上啄食野苹果树的嫩芽，也常常被我惊得一飞而起。每天傍晚，它们都准时来到特定的几棵树上，狡猾的猎人早已守候在此，远处靠近森林的果园也深受其扰。不管怎样，鹧鸪总能找到食物，我为此感到庆幸。以嫩芽和清水为生的鸟儿乃自然之造化。

在灰蒙蒙的冬日清晨，或者短短的冬日午后，我有时会听到一群猎犬在林中到处奔走，它们按捺不住捕猎的本能，一边追逐着什么一边狂吠不止，猎号声不时鸣响，说明主人就跟在后面。森林里回荡起犬吠和号角声，但却没有狐狸冲到湖畔的旷野上来，也没有猎狗追逐他们的亚克托安〔2〕。也许到了傍晚，我就能见到猎人们纷纷归来，找个地方过夜，一条毛茸茸的尾巴从他们的雪橇上拖下来，算是战利品吧。他们告诉我，如果狐狸一直待在冻土下的洞里，就能平安无事，如果它沿直线飞速逃跑，没有任何一只猎狗能够追得上它；然而，一旦把追踪者远远抛在身后，它就停下来歇息，一面侧耳倾听猎狗的动静，等到猎狗追上来的时候，它又跑动起来，兜个圈子回到自己的老窝，而猎人们正在此恭候。不过，它有时候会在墙顶上跑出几杆远，然后纵身一跃，远远地落到墙的一侧，而且它似乎知道水中不会留下它的气味。一个猎人对我说，有一次，他看到一只被猎狗追逐的狐狸一下子蹿上瓦尔登湖，当时湖面的冰上恰好布满了浅浅的水洼，那只狐狸在冰面上跑了一阵，又转身回到了原来的岸边。不一会儿，猎狗追来了，但却在这里失去了狐狸的气味痕迹。有时候，一群自己出来捕猎的猎狗经过我的门口，围着我的房子转圈，又是狂吠，又是追逐，对我不理不睬，仿佛是得了狂犬病，什么也无法转移它们的注意力，让它们放弃追逐。它们就这样绕着圈子，直到终于发现一只狐狸新近留下的踪迹，因为一只聪明的猎犬为了追踪猎物什么都可以置之不理。有一天，一个人从列克星敦来到我这里，向我打听他的猎狗，那条猎狗走了很远的路，已经独自捕猎一个星期了。不过，就算我把一切都告诉他，恐怕他也未必明白，因为每当我试图回答他的问题，他总是打断我的话，问道：“你在这儿做什么？”他丢失了一条狗，却找到了一个人。

有个老猎人，说起话来干巴巴的，每年到了湖水最温暖的时候，他都会在瓦尔登湖里洗个澡，顺便来看看我。他告诉我说，许多年前的一个下午，他拿着猎枪在瓦尔登森林里转来转去；走在韦兰公路上的时候，他听到猎犬的吠声由远及近，不一会儿功夫，一只狐狸翻墙而入，跳到公路上，转眼间又飞快地跃过另一堵墙，逃离了公路，他举枪就射，却没有打中。一只老猎犬带着自己的三只幼犬随后紧追而来，它们在独自捕猎，接着又隐没在森林里。那天下午临近傍晚的时候，他在瓦尔登湖南面的密林里休息，远远听到从美港方向传来了猎狗的狂吠，它们还在穷追不舍，正向他这边靠近，吠叫声回荡在整个森林里，越来越近，一会儿是来自维尔草场，一会儿是来自贝克农场。他久久地站在那里，一动不动，谛听这天籁之音，在猎人的耳朵里这真是无比美妙的音乐。突然，狐狸出现了，它迈着轻快的步子，急速穿过晦暗的小径，树叶发出沙沙的声响，似乎在表示同情，掩盖了狐狸的动静。那只狐狸动作敏捷，无声无息地贴着地面奔跑，把追逐者远远抛在身后；然后，它跳上林中的一块石头，直直地坐在那里侧耳倾听，背对着猎人。片刻之间，恻隐之心让猎人不忍抬起手臂，但这种心情转瞬即逝，说时迟，那时快，猎人举枪瞄准，“砰”的一声——狐狸滚下岩石，倒地而死。猎人仍旧原地不动，听着猎犬的声音。猎狗还是步步紧逼，这时候，附近的森林里，每一条小径都回荡着它们凶恶的吠声。最后，那条老猎狗首先出现在猎人的视线里，鼻子在地上嗅来嗅去，着了魔似的对着空气狂吠，然后直奔那块岩石而来；不过，一看到那只死狐狸，它就突然停住脚步，仿佛被惊呆了，默默地绕着那只死狐狸转了一圈又一圈；小猎犬也接二连三地赶到了，和它们母亲一样，眼前的谜团使它们一声不响。猎人走上前来，站在它们中间，才算揭开了谜底。猎人剥狐狸皮的时候，它们静静地等着，后来又跟在狐狸尾巴后面走了一会儿，最后才转身跑回森林。那天晚上，一个韦斯顿的乡绅来到康科德，在猎人的小屋里向他打听自己的猎狗，他说，一个星期以来，那些猎狗一直独自在韦斯顿森林里捕猎。康科德的猎人把自己知道的情况以实相告，还要把狐狸皮给他；但对方婉言谢绝，告辞而去。那天夜里，他没有找到自己的猎犬，不过，第二天他得知，他的猎犬已经过了河，在一家农舍过了一夜，第二天一大早，它们吃饱喝足后就离开了。

向我讲述这件事情的猎人还记得一个叫山姆·纳丁的人，此人过去常常在美港岩猎熊，把熊皮拿到康科德村换朗姆酒喝；他告诉猎人，自己甚至还在那里看见过一头驼鹿。纳丁有一条有名的猎狐犬，名字叫做伯格涅——他总是叫成伯金——给我讲这件事情的人经常借用这条猎狐犬。镇子里有位老商人，同时还兼任地方长官、镇文书和议员，我在他的“陈年老账”里看到了这样的条目：1742—1743年1月18日，“约翰·梅尔文，贷方，一张灰狐狸皮，零元二角三分”，如今这里已经见不着灰狐狸了；他的分类账里记录着，1743年2月7日，赫兹基亚·斯特拉顿“用半张猫皮，贷款零元一角四分半”。当然，是猞猁皮，因为斯特拉顿在法兰西战争期间是名中士，不会拿连猞猁都不如的猎物来贷款。鹿皮也能用来贷款，每天都能卖得出去。有个人至今还保留着在这一带射杀的最后一只鹿的鹿角，还有一个人向我详细描述了他叔叔参加过的一次捕猎的情景。先前这里猎人很多，是一群快活的家伙。我清清楚楚地记得，有一个瘦削的猎人，他在路边随手捡起一片树叶，就能吹出曲调来，如果我没记错的话，那旋律比任何猎号的吹奏声都更狂放，也更悦耳。

在有月亮的午夜时分，有时我会在路上碰到几条猎狗，正在森林里四处搜寻，它们总是避开我，好像有些害怕，一声不响地躲在灌木丛里，直到我从旁边走过。

为了我储藏的那些坚果，松鼠和野鼠争吵不休。我的房子周围有几十棵油松，直径从一英寸到四英寸不等，去年冬天被老鼠啃啮过——对它们来说，那是个挪威式的冬季，下雪的日子很长，积雪又深，它们迫不得已，只能靠大量啃食松树皮来弥补食物的不足。尽管树皮被咬掉了一圈，这些树在仲夏时节分明还活着，而且枝繁叶茂，其中不少都长高了一英尺；但是，经过了又一个冬天之后，它们无一例外，全都枯死了。就这样任凭一只老鼠吃掉一棵树，真令人惊叹，这些老鼠不是上下啃，而是绕着圈子啃；不过，要想让林木稀疏一点，这也许是必要的，林子里的树往往长得过于密集。

野兔（学名Lepus Americanus）根本不怕人。有一只野兔整个冬天都把巢穴安在我的地板下面，和我仅有一板之隔，每天早上我起身的时候，它就匆忙逃窜，总是吓我一跳——砰，砰，砰，慌乱之中，它的脑袋撞在地板的木头上。黄昏时分，它们常常到我门口来吃我扔出去的土豆皮，它们的颜色和土地如此接近，静止不动的时候，几乎让人分辨不出来。在黎明或日暮的微光里，一动不动蹲在我窗下的野兔时而看得见，时而看不见。到了傍晚，我一打开门，它们就尖叫着蹦跳而去。近在咫尺的时候，它们只会勾起我的怜惜之情。一天晚上，一只野兔坐在我的门口，离我只有两步远，它起先被吓得瑟瑟发抖，却又不愿意逃开；可怜的小东西，瘦得皮包骨头，耳朵残破不全，鼻子尖尖的，秃尾巴，细脚爪。看它这样子，好像大自然再也没有什么更高贵的品种了，只有拿它来充数。它那大大的眼睛放射出年轻的光泽，但显得不那么健康，简直像得了水肿一样。我向前迈了一步，瞧，它一个灵敏的弹跳，从雪地上飞跑而去，身体和四肢伸展开来，显得无比优雅，转眼之间就逃到了森林的另一边——这自由的、充满野性的动物，表现出了自己的活力和大自然的尊严。它长得如此纤瘦是不无道理的。这是它的天性。（有人认为，野兔的学名Lepus源于levipes，是腿脚灵活的意思。）

要是没有了兔子和鹧鸪，田野何以称之为田野？它们是最普通的土生土长的动物，属于古老而珍贵的科目，从古至今都为人所知；它们的颜色和本体都来自于大自然，与树叶和大地最为息息相关——彼此之间也亲密相依；不是凭借翅膀，就是依靠腿。当一只野兔或一只鹧鸪突然逃走的时候，你看到的似乎不是一只野生动物，而只是大自然的一个组成部分，和沙沙作响的树叶一样是自然而然的事情，早在预料之中。不管发生什么样的革命，鹧鸪和野兔必然会照旧繁衍生息，就像这片土地上真正的土著一样。如果森林被砍伐，重新生长出来的嫩枝和灌木丛会为它们提供遮蔽，它们还会繁殖得更多。连一只野兔都养活不了的乡野，必定是个极度贫瘠的地方。在我们的森林里，这两种动物都大量存在，每一处沼泽的四周，都可以看到野兔或鹧鸪出没其间，周围是牧童用细枝编成的篱笆和用马鬃做的陷阱。

注释

〔1〕　在格陵兰和加拿大的巴芬岛之间。

〔2〕　希腊神话中的一位年轻猎人，因无意中看到月亮和狩猎女神阿耳忒弥斯沐浴而被她变为牡鹿，并最终被他自己的狗群咬死。

结束语

［……］

不要给我爱情，不要给我金钱，也不要给我名誉，给我真理吧。我坐在摆满珍馐美酒的餐桌旁，侍从也极尽巴结逢迎，但我却感受不到诚意和真情；我离开那冷漠的餐桌，依旧饥肠辘辘。这种盛情款待实则冷若冰霜。我觉得不需要冰块就能把他们冷冻起来。他们向我谈起葡萄酒的年份以及产地的名气，而我却想起一种更陈、更新、更纯的酒，其产地也更负盛名，那是他们没有，而且也买不到的佳酿。时尚、豪宅、庭院和“娱乐”对我来说了无意义。我去拜访国王，他却让我在大厅里等候，言谈举止就像是丧失了热诚待客的能力。在我的住所附近，有一个人住在一棵空心的树里。他举手投足颇具王者之风。如果我去拜访他，情形会好得多。

我们要无所事事地在门廊里坐上多长时间，专为实践这穷极无聊、陈腐过时的美德？任何工作都会使这种做法显得荒谬之至。就好像一个人，每一天的开始都是长期忍受痛苦，还要雇人去锄他的土豆地；下午则怀着预先设想好的善心，去施行基督徒的谦恭和仁爱！想一想中国的自负和人类停滞不前的自满。这一代人斜靠在那里，庆贺自己是名门望族的最后一代；在波士顿、伦敦、巴黎和罗马，他们脑子里想着自己那历史悠久的世系血统，心满意足地大谈自己在艺术、科学和文学方面的进步。还有哲学学会的记载，还有大庭广众之下为“大人物”歌功颂德！这就是善良的亚当在思考自己的美德。“确实，我们完成了伟大的事业，也唱过神圣的歌曲，它们将永世长存”——也就是说，只要我们铭记在心。亚述〔1〕的学术团体和伟大人物——现在都到哪里去了？我们这些哲学家和试验家是多么年轻啊！我的读者当中，还没有一个人度过了整个人生。在人类的生命中，这可能不过是春天几个月的光阴。如果我们经历了七年之痒〔2〕，也还尚未看到康科德的十七年蝉〔3〕呢。我们所熟知的仅仅是我们赖以生存的地球上的一张薄膜。多数人从未深入到地面以下6英尺的地方，也从未跳到地面以上6英尺的地方。我们不知道自己身在何处。除此以外，我们几乎有一半时间都在酣睡。然而，我们还以聪明者自居，在地球表面创建起了秩序。我们真可谓是深刻的思想家，而且具有远大抱负。我站在森林里，密切注视一只昆虫在地面上的松针之间爬来爬去，拼命想避开我的视线，看到这里，我不禁问自己，它为何怀有如此微贱的想法，把自己的头藏起来不让我看到，我兴许会施恩于它，给它这个族类带来一些让它们欢欣鼓舞的消息呢，这时，我想到了更伟大的施恩者和智者，他正密切注视着我这只人虫。

在这个世界上，新鲜事物层出不穷，然而我们却忍受着难以置信的愚蠢。我只需指出，在一些最开明的国家，人们还在听些什么样的说教就够了。其中有欢乐和悲伤这类词句，但主题都只是赞美诗，用浓重的鼻音哼唱出来，而我们信奉的却是平庸低劣的东西。我们认为只能改换自己的衣装。据说大英帝国非常之大，而且备受尊崇，而美国只是一个一流强国。我们不相信每个人背后都有潮涨潮落，能让大英帝国像木屑一样漂浮起来，如果他心里存有此念的话。有谁知道，下一次从地下钻出来的，会是什么样的十七年蝉？我生活的这个世界的政府，并不像是英国政府那样，是在晚宴之后喝酒聊天之间创建起来的。

我们的生命犹如河中之水。今年有可能涨到人类闻所未闻的高度，淹没枯焦干裂的高地；这甚至还有可能是个多事之秋，所有的麝鼠都因为洪水而四散逃窜。我们并不总是居住在干地上。在遥远的内陆，我看到过，在没有关于洪水的科学记录之前，自古以来就曾被水流冲刷的那些古老的河岸。有一个故事在新英格兰地区广为流传，每个人都有所耳闻，说的是有一只强壮而又美丽的虫子，从一张旧桌子那干燥的活动面板里爬了出来，而那张用苹果木做成的桌子已经在一位农夫的厨房里放了60年，先是在康涅狄格，后来又搬到马萨诸塞——这虫子是从一个许多年前苹果树还活着的时候就留存在树上的虫卵里孵化出来的，数一数树上的年轮就能知晓；一连几个星期，人们都能听见它在里面啃咬的声音，也许是罐子的热量促使它破卵而出。听了这个故事，有谁不会感到自己增强了复活和永生的信心呢？这枚虫卵起初寄存在一棵活着的树木那青绿的边材上，这棵树慢慢变得如同风干的坟墓，于是，虫卵便年深日久地被埋藏在一圈圈呈同心圆的木层里，置身于死气沉沉、枯燥乏味的社会生活之中——也许它已经在里面啃咬了数年之久，这家人围坐在餐桌旁尽享欢宴的时候，听到这咬啮声感到万分惊奇。谁能料到，从社会中最不起眼的、初次尝试制作的一件家具中，会冒出怎样一只美丽的、生有翅膀的生命，最终享受了自己完美的夏日生活！

我并不是说约翰或乔纳森〔4〕会意识到所有这一切；然而，明天就是这样，时间尽管流逝，却永远无法带来黎明。对于我们来说，使我们的眼睛熄灭的光亮就是黑暗。只有我们醒着的时候，才会迎来拂晓。破晓的日子还会更多。太阳不过是一颗晨星。

注释

〔1〕　亚洲西部底格里斯河流域北部一帝国和文明古国。公元前9世纪至7世纪是它的强盛时期。

〔2〕　指夫妻间在结婚七年后常会出现彼此厌倦和移情别恋的现象。

〔3〕　十七年蝉也叫周期蝉，是北美洲特有的品种，以等待孵化的年数命名。

〔4〕　约翰和乔纳森分别指英国人和美国人。

Henry David Thoreau

Where I Lived, and

What I Lived For

PENGUIN BOOKS — GREAT IDEAS

Contents

from Economy

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

Winter Animals

from the Conclusion

返回总目录

Economy

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and every where, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders 'until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach'; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars — even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolas to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them -

Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,

Et documenta damus quâ simus origine nati.

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way —

From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,

Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be any thing but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance — which his growth requires — who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time; robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins œs alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay; promising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination — what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What every body echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned any thing of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing, to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.

One farmer says to me, 'You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with'; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.

The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to have been cared for. According to Evelyn, 'the wise Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman prætors have decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor.' Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy failures hitherto, 'be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?'

We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology! — I know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of any thing, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can old man - you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind — I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant. Confucius said, 'To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.' When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.

Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be troubled, or, at least, careful. It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest or the mountain's shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, 'to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting.' So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? According to Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us — and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without — Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed.

The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our nightclothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, &c., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live — that is, keep comfortably warm — and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course à la mode.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous incessant and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above? — for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which, though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they have perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering season.

I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live — if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers — and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this number; I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not; — but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint 'No Admittance' on my gate.

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something, though I never caught much, and that, mannawise, would dissolve again in the sun.

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.

In short, I went on thus for a long time, I may say it without boasting, faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. 'Do you wish to buy any baskets?' he asked. 'No, we do not want any,' was the reply. 'What!' exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, 'do you mean to starve us?' Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off — that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed, he had said to himself; I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy or living any where else, but I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had already got. My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish.

I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will be fixture enough. You will export such articles as the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time; — often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore; — to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace every where, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization — taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation; — charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier — there is the untold fate of La Perouse; — universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno and the Phoenicians down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of a man — such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge.

I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good post and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled; though you must every where build on piles of your own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep St Petersburg from the face of the earth.

As this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaintance by such tests as this; — who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the farm. He was only a little more weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master's premises with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men, which belonged to the most respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she 'was now in a civilized country, where — people are judged of by their clothes'. Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect. But they who yield such respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless; a woman's dress, at least, is never done.

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet — if a hero ever has a valet — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soirées and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes — his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.

We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?

When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, 'They do not make them so now,' not emphasizing the 'They' at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the 'they' — 'It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.' Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcæ, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting any thing quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy.

On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry Ⅷ, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it, which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit by a cannon ball rags are as becoming as purple.

The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary of life, though there are instances of men having done without it for long periods in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing says that 'The Laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he puts over his head and shoulders, will sleep night after night on the snow — in a degree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it in any woollen clothing.' He had seen them asleep thus. Yet he adds, 'They are not hardier than other people.' But, probably, man did not live long on the earth without discovering the convenience which there is in a house, the domestic comforts, which phrase may have originally signified the satisfactions of the house more than of the family; though these must be extremely partial and occasional in those climates where the house is associated in our thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of the year, except for a parasol, is unnecessary. In our climate, in the summer, it was formerly almost solely a covering at night. In the Indian gazettes a wigwam was the symbol of a day's march, and a row of them cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified that so many times they had camped. Man was not made so large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world, and wall in a space such as fitted him. He was at first bare and out of doors; but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, by daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve, according to the fable, wore the bower before other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.

We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out doors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with which when young he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth to the field is a great distance. It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.

However, if one designs to construct a dwelling house, it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clew, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night, and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable house for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished ready to their hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, 'The best of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they are green ... The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not so good as the former ... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet broad ... I have often lodged in their wigwams, and found them as warm as the best English houses.' He adds, that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had advanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours; and every family owned one, or its apartment in one.

In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live. I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with owning, but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this tax the poor civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared with the savage's. An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars, these are the country rates, entitles him to the benefit of the improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and paper, Rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. But how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage? If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. An average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life, even if he is not encumbered with a family; — estimating the pecuniary value of every man's labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others receive less; — so that he must have spent more than half his life commonly before his wigwam will be earned. If we suppose him to pay a rent instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils. Would the savage have been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms?

It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the future, so far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying of funeral expenses. But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself. Nevertheless this points to an important distinction between the civilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have designs on us for our benefit, in making the life of a civilized people an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the race. But I wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage. What mean ye by saying that the poor ye have always with you, or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge?

'As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel.'

'Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth it shall die.'

When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at least as well off as the other classes, I find that for the most part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that they may become the real owners of their farms, which commonly they have inherited with encumbrances, or else bought with hired money — and we may regard one third of that toil as the cost of their houses — but commonly they have not paid for them yet. It is true, the encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so that the farm itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is found to inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as he says. On applying to the assessors, I am surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. If you would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged. The man who has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him. I doubt if there are three such men in Concord. What has been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their engagements, because it is inconvenient; that is, it is the moral character that breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. Yet the Middlesex Cattle Show goes off here with éclat annually, as if all the joints of the agricultural machine were suent.

The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair springe to catch comfort and independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it. This is the reason he is poor; and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries. As Chapman sings —

The false society of men —

— for earthly greatness

All heavenly comforts rarefies to air.

And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. As I understand it, that was a valid objection urged by Momus against the house which Minerva made, that she 'had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided'; and it may still be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. I know one or two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation, have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death will set them free.

Granted that the majority are able to last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements. While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?

But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found, that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and 'silent poor'. The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which every where border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization. I hardly need refer now to the laborers in our Southern States who produce the staple exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of the South. But to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances.

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or, gradually leaving off palmleaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man's providing a certain number of superfluous glowshoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab's or the Indian's? When I think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load of fashionable furniture. Or what if I were to allow — would it not be a singular allowance? — that our furniture should be more complex than the Arab's, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors! At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning's work undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a modern drawing room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sunshades, and a hundred other oriental things, which we are taking west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.

The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages imply this advantage at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain tops. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agriculture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantelpiece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but perceive that this so called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and I do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it, my attention being wholly occupied with the jump; for I remember that the greatest genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record, is that of certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. Without factitious support, man is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance. The first question which I am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great impropriety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one of the ninety-seven who fail, or the three who succeed? Answer me these questions, and then perhaps I may look at your bawbles and find them ornamental. The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.

Old Johnson, in his 'Wonder-Working Providence', speaking of the first settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us that 'they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest side.' They did not 'provide them houses', says he, 'till the earth, by the Lord's blessing, brought forth bread to feed them', and the first year's crop was so light that 'they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season.' The secretary of the Province of New Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650, for the information of those who wished to take up land there, states more particularly, that 'those in New Netherland, and especially in New England, who have no means to build farm houses at first according to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth; floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green sods, so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire families for two, three, and four years, it being understood that partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the size of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England, in the beginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling houses in this fashion for two reasons; firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not to want food the next season; secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers from Fatherland. In the course of three or four years, when the country became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses, spending on them several thousands.'

In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now? When I think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to human culture, and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten. Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the shellfish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with.

Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins to-day, it certainly is better to accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak understandingly on this subject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically and practically. With a little more wit we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest now are, and make our civilization a blessing. The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage. But to make haste to my own experiment.

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. It was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark colored and saturated with water. There were some slight flurries of snow during the days that I worked there; but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year with us. They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I staid there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had previously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the 1st of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog.

So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself -

Men say they know many things;

But lo! they have taken wings -

The arts and sciences,

And a thousand appliances;

The wind that blows

Is all that any body knows.

I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this time. My days in the woods were not very long ones; yet I usually carried my dinner of bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my bread was imparted some of their fragance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat of pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having become better acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the chips which I had made.

By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. I had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins' shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he was not at home. I walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window was so deep and high. It was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Door-sill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board. Mrs C. came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside. The hens were driven in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and there a board which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and also that the board floor extended under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust hole two feet deep. In her own words, they were 'good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a good window' — of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed out that way lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent new coffee-mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain was soon concluded, for James had in the mean while returned. I to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents to-night, he to vacate at five the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was but two hours' work. I took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.

At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day. I began to occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to rain; but before boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in the mean while out of doors on the ground, early in the morning: which mode I still think is in some respects more convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way. In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or table-cloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.

It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.

True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugar plum in fact might have an almond or caraway seed in it — though I hold that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar — and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin merely — that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shellfish its mother-o'-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder — out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin — the architecture of the grave, and 'carpenter', is but another name for 'coffin-maker'. One man says, in his despair or indifference to life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that color. Is he thinking of his last and narrow house? Toss up a copper for it as well. What an abundance of leisure he must have! Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better paint your house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! When you have got my ornaments ready I will wear them.

Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to straighten with a plane.

I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work, all of which was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them:—

These are all the materials excepting the timber, stones and sand, which I claimed by squatter's rights. I have also a small wood-shed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house.

I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one.

I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy — chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any man — I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both the moral and physical system; and I am resolved that I will not through humility become the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. At Cambridge College the mere rent of a student's room, which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and perhaps a residence in the fourth story. I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides. Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme, a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection — to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights successive generations have to pay. I think that it would be better than this, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation themselves. The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. 'But,' says one, 'you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?' I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where any thing is professed and practised but the art of life; — to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this — or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the mean while, and had received a Rogers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers? ... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! — why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements'; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.

One says to me, 'I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg to-day and see the country.' But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the mean while have earned your fare, and arrive there some time to-morrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should have to cut your acquaintance altogether.

Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts 'All aboard!' when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over — and it will be called, and will be, 'A melancholy accident'. No doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once. 'What!' exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, 'is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?' Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt [...]

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on it — took every thing but a deed of it — took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk — cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat? — better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several farms — the refusal was all I wanted — but I never got my fingers burned by actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual possession was when I bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife — every man has such a wife — changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes —

I am monarch of all I survey,

My right there is none to dispute.

I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.

The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were; its complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark. I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was ready to carry it on; like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders — I never heard what compensation he received for that — and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it; for I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted if I could only afford to let it alone. But it turned out as I have said.

All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale (I have always cultivated a garden) was, that I had had my seeds ready. Many think that seeds improve with age. I have no doubt that time discriminates between the good and the bad; and when at last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed. But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.

Old Cato, whose 'De Re Rusticâ' is my 'Cultivator', says, and the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage, 'When you think of getting a farm, turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good.' I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last.

The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose to describe more at length; for convenience, putting the experience of two years into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.

When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on Independence day, or the fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night. The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited the year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth every where.

The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With this more substantial shelter about me, I had made some progress toward settling in the world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go out doors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather. The Harivansa says, 'An abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning.' Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager — the wood-thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field-sparrow, the whippoorwill, and many others.

I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains.

This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the wood-thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important. From a hill top near by, where the wood had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the north-west, those true-blue coins from heaven's own mint, and also of some portion of the village. But in other directions, even from this point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. It is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. One value even of the smallest well is, that when you look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of intervening water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was but dry land.

Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my imagination. The low shrub-oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose, stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men. 'There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon' — said Damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures.

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such was that part of creation where I had squatted —

There was a shepherd that did live,

And held his thoughts as high

As were the mounts whereon his flocks

Did hourly feed him by.

What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to this effect: 'Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.' I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air — to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, 'All intelligences awake with the morning.' Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done.

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 practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever'.

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldly and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it as for them is a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. As for work, we haven't any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire, — or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. Hardly a man takes a half hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, 'What's the news?' as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. 'Pray tell me any thing new that has happened to a man any where on this globe' — and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life — I wrote this some years ago — that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure — news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions — they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers — and serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.

What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old! 'Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!' The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week — for Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one — with this one other draggletail of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice — 'Pause! Avast! Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?'

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence — that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit every where, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, that 'there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father's ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul,' continues the Hindoo philosopher, 'from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme.' I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be. If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think you, would the 'Milldam' go to? If he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry — determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

Winter Animals

When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flints' Pond, after it was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and skated over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could think of nothing but Baffin's Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stood before; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers or Esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. I took this course when I went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road and passing no house between my own hut and the lecture room. In Goose Pond, which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it. Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard, where I could walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers were confined to their streets. There, far from the village street, and except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, I slid and skated, as in a vast mooseyard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles.

For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it; Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented somewhat like how der do; or sometimes hoo hoo only. One night in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o'clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping to the door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods as they flew low over my house. They passed over the pond toward Fair Haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmistakable cat-owl from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice I ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this intruder from Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and boo-hoo him out of Concord horizon. What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have not got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! It was one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as these plains never saw nor heard.

I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.

Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men? They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defence, awaiting their transformation. Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and then retreated.

Usually the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius) waked me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose. In the course of the winter I threw out half a bushel of ears of sweetcorn, which had not got ripe, on to the snow crust by my door, and was amused by watching the motions of the various animals which were baited by it. In the twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manœuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his 'trotters', as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him — for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl — wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance — I never saw one walk — and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time — for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, brisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the top-most stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a fore-noon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate; — a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow; — and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various directions.

At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard long before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mile off, and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch-pine bough, they attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes them; and after great labor they disgorge it, and spend an hour in the endeavor to crack it by repeated blows with their bills. They were manifestly thieves, and I had not much respect for them; but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they were taking what was their own.

Meanwhile also came the chicadees in flocks, which, picking up the crums the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig, and, placing them under their claws, hammered away at them with their little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently reduced for their slender throats. A little flock of these tit-mice came daily to pick a dinner out of my wood-pile, or the crums at my door, with faint flitting lisping notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly day day day, or more rarely, in spring-like days, a wiry summery phe-be from the wood-side. They were so familiar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in, and pecked at the sticks without fear. I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped upon my shoe, when that was the nearest way.

When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end of the winter, when the snow was melted on my south hill-side and about my wood-pile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to feed there. Whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting down in the sun-beams like golden dust; for this brave bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently covered up by drifts, and, it is said, 'sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow, where it remains concealed for a day or two'. I used to start them in the open land also, where they had come out of the woods at sunset to 'bud' the wild apple-trees. They will come regularly every evening to particular trees, where the cunning sportsman lies in wait for them, and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a little. I am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. It is Nature's own bird which lives on buds and diet-drink.

In dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, I sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding cry and yelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note of the hunting horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear. The woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the pond, nor following pack pursuing their Actæon. And perhaps at evening I see the hunters returning with a single brush trailing from their sleigh for a trophy, seeking their inn. They tell me that if the fox would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe, or if he would run in a straight line away no fox-hound could overtake him; but, having left his pursuers far behind, he stops to rest and listen till they come up, and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, where the hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he will run upon a wall many rods, and then leap off far to one side, and he appears to know that water will not retain his scent. A hunter told me that he once saw a fox pursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, run part way across, and then return to the same shore. Ere long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. Sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door, and circle round my house, and yelp and hound without regarding me, as if afflicted by a species of madness, so that nothing could divert them from the pursuit. Thus they circle until they fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a wise hound will forsake every thing else for this. One day a man came to my hut from Lexington to inquire after his hound that made a large track, and had been hunting for a week by himself. But I fear that he was not the wiser for all I told him, for every time I attempted to answer his questions he interrupted me by asking, 'What do you do here?' He had lost a dog, but found a man.

One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to！！come to bathe in Walden once every year when the water was warmest, and at such times looked in upon me, told me, that many years ago he took his gun one afternoon and went out for a cruise in Walden Wood; and as he walked the Wayland road he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and ere long a fox leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped the other wall out of the road, and his swift bullet had not touched him. Some way behind came an old hound and her three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own account, and disappeared again in the woods. Late in the afternoon, as he was resting in the thick woods south of Walden, he heard the voice of the hounds far over toward Fair Haven still pursuing the fox; and on they came, their hounding cry which made all the woods ring sounding nearer and nearer, now from Well-Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. For a long time he stood still and listened to their music, so sweet to a hunter's ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemn aisles with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed by a sympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the ground, leaving his pursuers far behind; and, leaping upon a rock amid the woods, he sat erect and listening, with his back to the hunter. For a moment compassion restrained the latter's arm; but that was a short-lived mood, and as quick as thought can follow thought his piece was levelled, and whang! — the fox rolling over the rock lay dead on the ground. The hunter still kept his place and listened to the hounds. Still on they came, and now the near woods resounded through all their aisles with their demoniac cry. At length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock; but spying the dead fox she suddenly ceased her hounding, as if struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in silence; and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother, were sobered into silence by the mystery. Then the hunter came forward and stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. They waited in silence while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush a while, and at length turned off into the woods again. That evening a Weston Squire came to the Concord hunter's cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told how for a week they had been hunting on their own account from Weston woods. The Concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him the skin; but the other declined it and departed. He did not find his hounds that night, but the next day learned that they had crossed the river and put up at a farmhouse for the night, whence, having been well fed, they took their departure early in the morning.

The hunter who told me this could remember one Sam Nutting, who used to hunt bears on Fair Haven Ledges, and exchange their skins for rum in Concord village; who told him, even, that he had seen a moose there. Nutting had a famous fox-hound named Burgoyne — he pronounced it Bugine — which my informant used to borrow. In the 'Wast Book' of an old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town-clerk, and representative, I find the following entry. Jan. 18th, 1742—3, 'John Melven Cr. by 1 Grey Fox 0—2—3'; they are not now found here; and in his leger, Feb. 7th, 1743, Hezekiah Stratton has credit 'by a Catt skin 0—1—'; of course; a wild-cat, for Stratton was a sergeant in the old French war, and would not have got credit for hunting less noble game. Credit is given for deer skins also, and they were daily sold. One man still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told me the particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. The hunters were formerly a numerous and merry crew here. I remember well one gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a leaf by the roadside and play a strain on it wilder and more melodious, if my memory serves me, than any hunting horn.

At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met with hounds in my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had passed.

Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. There were scores of pitch-pines around my house, from one to four inches in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter — a Norwegian winter for them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they were obliged to mix a large proportion of pine bark with their other diet. These trees were alive and apparently flourishing at mid-summer, and many of them had grown a foot, though completely girdled; but after another winter such were without exception dead. It is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down it; but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are wont to grow up densely.

The hares (Lepus Americanus) were very familiar. One had her form under my house all winter, separated from me only by the flooring, and she startled me each morning by her hasty departure when I began to stir, — thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry. They used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the potato parings which I had thrown out, and were so nearly the color of the ground that they could hardly be distinguished when still. Sometimes in the twilight I alternately lost and recovered sight of one sitting motionless under my window. When I opened my door in the evening, off they would go with a squeak and a bounce. Near at hand they only excited my pity. One evening one sat by my door two paces from me, at first trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move; a poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. It looked as if Nature no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods, but stood on her last toes. Its large eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost dropsical. I took a step, and lo, away it scud with an elastic spring over the snow crust, straightening its body and its limbs into graceful length, and soon put the forest between me and itself — the wild free venison, asserting its vigor and the dignity of Nature. Not without reason was its slenderness. Such then was its nature. (Lepus, levipes, light-foot, some think.)

What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground — and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. The partridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numerous than ever. That must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp may be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and horse-hair snares, which some cow-boy tends.

Conclusion

[...] 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 reclines 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 hide 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.

Table of Contents

目录

扉页

版权页

中文目录

简朴生活

我的栖身之所，我的人生目的

冬日里的动物

结束语

英文扉页

Contents

from Economy

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

Winter Animals

from the Conclusion