Above: Concord in 1839 - by J.W. Barber,
courtesy Concord Free Public
Library
AFTER HOEING,
OR perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I
usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for
a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the
last wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely
free. Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip
which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth,
or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses,
was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping
of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I
walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among
the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there
was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms
and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious
to me as if they had been prairie-dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its
burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. I went there frequently
to observe their habits. The village appeared to me a great news room;
and on one side, to support it, as once at Redding & Company's on State
Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other groceries.
Some have such a vast appetite for the former commodity, that is, the news,
and such sound digestive organs, that they can sit forever in public avenues
without stirring, and let it simmer and whisper
through them like the Etesian winds,(1)
or as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to
pain — otherwise it would often be painful to bear — without affecting
the consciousness. I hardly ever failed, when I rambled
through the village, to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a
ladder sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined forward and their
eyes glancing along the line this way and that, from time to time, with
a voluptuous expression, or else leaning against a barn with their hands
in their pockets, like caryatides,(2)
as if to prop it up. They, being commonly out of doors, heard whatever
was in the wind. These are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first
rudely digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more
delicate hoppers within doors. I observed that the vitals of the village
were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, and the bank; and, as
a necessary part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire-engine,
at convenient places; and the houses were so arranged as to make the most
of mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller
had to run the gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick
at him. Of course, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the
line, where they could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at
him, paid the highest prices for their places; and the few straggling inhabitants
in the outskirts, where long gaps in the line began to occur, and the traveller
could get over walls or turn aside into cow-paths, and so escape, paid
a very slight ground or window tax. Signs were hung out on all sides to
allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling
cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweller's; and
others by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoemaker,
or the tailor. Besides, there was a still more terrible standing invitation
to call at every one of these houses, and company expected about these
times. For the most part I escaped wonderfully from
these dangers, either by proceeding at once boldly and without deliberation
to the goal, as is recommended to those who run the gauntlet, or by keeping
my thoughts on high things, like Orpheus,(3)
who, "loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices
of the Sirens,(4) and kept out
of danger." Sometimes I bolted suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts,
for I did not stand much about gracefulness, and never hesitated at a gap
in a fence. I was even accustomed to make an irruption into some houses,
where I was well entertained, and after learning the kernels and very last
sieveful of news — what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and
whether the world was likely to hold together much longer — I was let out
through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.
[2]
It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself into
the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from
some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian
meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all
tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts,
leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it
was plain sailing. I had many a genial thought by the cabin fire "as I
sailed."(5) I was never cast
away nor distressed in any weather, though I encountered some severe storms.
It is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose. I
frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path
in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart-path, to feel
with my feet the faint track which I had worn, or steer by the known relation
of particular trees which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines
for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the
woods, invariably, in the darkest night. Sometimes, after coming home thus
late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes
could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until I was aroused
by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, I have not been able to recall
a single step of my walk, and I have thought that perhaps my body would
find its way home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its
way to the mouth without assistance. Several times, when a visitor chanced
to stay into evening, and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to conduct
him to the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to him
the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be guided
rather by his feet than his eyes. One very dark night I directed thus on
their way two young men who had been fishing in the pond. They lived about
a
mile off through the woods, and were quite used to the route. A day or
two after one of them told me that they wandered about the greater part
of the night, close by their own premises, and did not get home till toward
morning, by which time, as there had been several heavy showers in the
meanwhile, and the leaves were very wet, they were drenched to their skins.
I have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the
darkness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife, as the saying
is. Some who live in the outskirts, having come to town a-shopping in their
wagons, have been obliged to put up for the night; and gentlemen and ladies
making a call have gone half a mile out of their way, feeling the sidewalk
only with their feet, and not knowing when they turned. It is a surprising
and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods
any time. Often in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a
well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the
village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he
cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it
were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely
greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously,
steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if
we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of
some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round
— for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this
world to be lost — do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature.
Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes,
whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words
not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize
where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
[3]
One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village
to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because,
as I have elsewhere related,(6)
I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the State which
buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle, at the door of its
senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever
a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions,
and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow
society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect,
might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should
run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party. However, I was released
the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season
to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill. I was never molested
by any person but those who represented the State. I
had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a
nail to put over my latch or windows. I never fastened my door night or
day, though I was to be absent several days; not even when the next fall
I spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine.(7)
And yet my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a
file of soldiers. The tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire,
the literary amuse himself with the few books on my table, or the curious,
by opening my closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect
I had of a supper. Yet, though many people of every class came this way
to the pond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and
I never missed anything but one small book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps
was improperly gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found
by this time. I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as
I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only
in communities where some have got more than is sufficient
while others have not enough. The Pope's (8)
Homers would soon get properly distributed.
"Nec bella fuerunt,
Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes."
"Nor wars did men molest,
When only beechen bowls were in request."(9)
"You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ
punishments? Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The virtues
of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like
the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends."(10)
Notes
1. Mediterranean summer winds -
back
2. sculptural figures used as supporting
columns - back
3. in Greek mythology, a musician whose
music had supernatural powers - back
4. in Greek mythology, sea nymphs lured
mariners to destruction by singing - back
5. refrain from "The Ballad of Captain
Robert Kidd" - back
6. in Thoreau's Civil
Disobedience, published in 1849 - back
7. later described in the Ktaadn
section of The Maine Woods - back
8. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) translated
Homers' Iliad and Odyssey - back
9. Homer, with translation by Pope - back
10. Confucius (1551-1477 B.C.) from
Analects
- back
Thoreau Reader: Home - Walden
- Next Chapter
