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1We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn,
2which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of
3man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a
4statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and
5medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
6Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical
7hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how
8this might be done. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of
9life, 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
10did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite
11necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to
12rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its
13lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its
14meanness 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
15next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of
16God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."
17Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight
18with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and
19evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten
20fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let
21your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your
22accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and
23quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the
24bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify,
25simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce
26other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever
27fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so
28called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and
29overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless
30expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it as for
31them is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too
32fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and
33ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men,
34is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to
35tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to
36heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad;
37it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an
38Irish-man, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over
39them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some
40have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that
41is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars,
42and 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
43five 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
44again. Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men
45say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. As for work,
46we haven't any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should
47only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man
48on his farm in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times
49this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to
50save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we,
51be 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,
52even if it were the parish church itself. Hardly a man takes a half hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds
53up his head and asks, "What's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be
54waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After
55a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. "Pray tell me any thing new that has happened to a man
56any where on this globe,"--and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this
57morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world,
58and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.
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