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Walden& 64
There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the
everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable
season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an
hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.
Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not
awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not
awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by
the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air--
to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove
itself to be good, no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day
contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired
of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his
sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his
Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say,
transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, "All intelligences
awake with the morning." Poetry and art, and the faire stand most memorable of the
actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the
children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous
thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the
clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a
dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor
an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor
calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed
something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is
awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a
poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was
quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an
infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know
of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a
Walden& 65
conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a
statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and
paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make
his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical
hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles
would distinctly inform us how this might be done.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts
of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor
did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and
suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan--like as to put to rout all
that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and
reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and
genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to
know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For
most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil
or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to
"glorify God and enjoy him forever."
Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed
into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout,
and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life
is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten
fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity,
simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a
thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-
nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and
quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he
would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning,
and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of
Walden& 66
three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and
reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of
petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you
how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so--called internal
improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an
unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own
traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as
the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid
economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It
lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export
ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether
they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.
If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but
go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads
are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our
business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did
you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an
Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand,
and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every
few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding
on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man
that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him
up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an
exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the
sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get
up again.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved
before we are hungry. Men say that a stitchin time saves nine, and so they take a
thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow. As for work, we haven't any of any
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