The Solitary Summer | Page 7

to it: and every day he sees
the door-mat on which I wipe my shoes on going into the house, in
defiance of his having told me that he had once refused the offer of one
on the ground that it is best to avoid even the beginnings of evil. But
my philosophy has not yet reached the acute stage that will enable me
to see a door-mat in its true character as a hinderer of the development
of souls, and I like to wipe my shoes. Perhaps if I had to live with few
servants, or if it were possible, short of existence in a cave, to do
without them altogether, I should also do without door-mats, and
probably in summer without shoes too, and wipe my feet on the grass
nature no doubt provides for this purpose; and meanwhile we know that
though he went to the woods, Thoreau came back again, and lived for
the rest of his days like other people. During his life, I imagine he
would have refused to notice anything so fatiguing as an ordinary
German woman, and never would have deigned discourse to me on the
themes he loved best; but now his spirit belongs to me, and all he
thought, and believed, and felt, and he talks as much and as intimately
to me here in my solitude as ever he did to his dearest friends years ago
in Concord. In the garden he was a pleasant companion, but in the
lonely dimple he is fascinating, and the morning hours hurry past at a
quite surprising rate when he is with me, and it grieves me to be
obliged to interrupt him in the middle of some quaint sentence or

beautiful thought just because the sun is touching a certain bush down
by the water's edge, which is a sign that it is lunch-time and that I must
be off. Back we go together through the rye, he carefully tucked under
one arm, while with the other I brandish a bunch of grass to keep off
the flies that appear directly we emerge into the sunshine. "Oh, my dear
Thoreau," I murmur sometimes, overcome by the fierce heat of the
little path at noonday and the persistence of the flies, "did you have
flies at Walden to exasperate you? And what became of your
philosophy then?" But he never notices my plaints, and I know that
inside his covers he is discoursing away like anything on the folly of
allowing oneself to be overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool
called a dinner, which is situated in the meridian shallows, and of the
necessity, if one would keep happy, of sailing by it looking another
way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. But he gets grimly carried back for
all that, and is taken into the house and put on his shelf and left there,
because I still happen to have a body attached to my spirit, which, if not
fed at the ordinary time, becomes a nuisance. Yet he is right; luncheon
is a snare of the tempter, and I would perhaps try to sail by it like
Ulysses if I had a biscuit in my pocket to comfort me, but there are the
babies to be fed, and the Man of Wrath, and how can a respectable wife
and mother sail past any meridian shallows in which those dearest to
her have stuck? So I stand by them, and am punished every day by that
two-o'clock-in-the-afternoon feeling to which I so much object, and yet
cannot avoid. It is mortifying, after the sunshiny morning hours at my
pond, when I feel as though I were almost a poet, and very nearly a
philosopher, and wholly a joyous animal in an ecstasy of love with life,
to come back and live through those dreary luncheon- ridden hours,
when the soul is crushed out of sight and sense by cutlets and asparagus
and revengeful sweet things. My morning friend turns his back on me
when I reenter the library; nor do I ever touch him in the afternoon.
Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show
me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read
suits them. If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a drawing-room,
how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the grass by a
pond! Imagine carrying him off in company with his great friend to a
lonely dell in a rye-field, and expecting them to be entertaining. "Nay,
my dear lady," the great man would say in mighty tones of rebuke, "this

will never do. Lie in a rye-field? What folly is that? And who would
converse in a damp hollow that can help it?"