Persevere

I was not born with an intuitive sense of rhythm. I was, however, born with a stubborn streak a mile wide. When I decide I want to do something, I attempt it to the degree that luck and forces within my control allow. Like Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, when I see, hear, taste or feel something beautiful or profound, I search for the drawstring to the curtain so that I can pull it back and attempt to understand the mechanism behind the magic.

I am not a passive observer.

When I was a kid, my favorite book was called, My Side of the Mountain. It’s about a kid who runs away from home and lives alone in a cave with a falcon he finds wounded and nurses back to health. He gets discovered by a wandering literature teacher who dubs him “Thoreau.” Upon asking my mom who Thoreau was, she pulled a book called Walden and Other Writings off the bookshelf and handed it to me. Walden was too arcane and tedious for my eight-year-old self to get through, but determined to try, I read and re-read the first couple chapters of it many times. When my mom bought me a set of encyclopedias and dictionaries one at a time every visit to the grocery store, I never divulged that I really just wanted to know what “economy,” the title of Walden’s first chapter, meant. By the time I finally got through the book in junior high, it had already become a seminal influence on me.


Excerpts, in chronological order, from Economy, the first chapter of Walden, by Henry David Thoreau:

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.

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?

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 today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke and 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… 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 had faith left which belies that experience, and that they are only less young than they were.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

…I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have more fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

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.

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think they must have such a one as their neighbors have.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 Institution 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.

A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial.

I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he had fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.

The only cooperation which is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true cooperation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible to men. If a man has faith he will cooperate with equal faith everywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to. To cooperate, in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together…. Above all, as I have implied, the man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait til the other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.

As for doing good, that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good that society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. But I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will.

At doing something,- I will not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good,- I do not hesitate to say that I should be a capital fellow to hire; but what that is, it is for my employer to find out. What good I do, in the common sense of the word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. Men say, practically, “Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go about doing good.” If I were to preach at all in this strain, I would say rather, “Set about being good.”

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,- some of its virus mingled into my blood. No,- in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way.

Be sure that you give the poor the aid that they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make curious mistakes sometimes.

I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.