Walden | Page 4

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 Iolaus 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 woodlot! 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 plowed 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 qua 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 anything 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