I am currently going through Henry David Thoreau's Walden and highlighting my favorite passages. This serves two purposes. One, is for when I read it again. That way, I can see what I liked best the last time I read it. The second, is for when someone else reads it. Whether it be Julie, or one of our children in 15-20 years. That way they can see Daddy's emotional responses to the book. Hell, maybe they can highlight their own passages in a different color for my grandchildren.
I just came up with a third purpose today. I can post some of the words here on my blog for you fine people. If you don't know what Walden is about, you can read this. Basically, Thoreau lives a life of solitude for two years on the banks of Walden Pond, just outside of Concord, MA. He writes on numerous subjects including solitude, the environment, economics, and living a simple life. What he means by a simple life is not being tied down by anything but your own spirit. This includes possessions, land, money, and employment. Here are some of my personal highlighted passages from the chapter "Economy" (updating as I go along):
-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.
-One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.
-For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.
-Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.
-I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.
-I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes...Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.
-...we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their weaten.
-Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?
-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 most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly.
-When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of my friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries.
-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.
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