Walden | Page 5

business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by
the Latins aes 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, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how
many modes, only not state-prison offenses; 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 everybody 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
anything 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