WALDEN AND ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. Henry David Thoreau

our weakness as to our strength. The

      incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well nigh incurable form of

      disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do;

      and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick?

      How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid

      it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our

      prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and

      sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying

      the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are

      as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is

      a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place

      every instant. Confucius said, “To know that we know what we know, and

      that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” When

      one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his

      understanding, I foresee that all men at length establish their lives

      on that basis.

      Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which

      I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be

      troubled, or, at least, careful. It would be some advantage to live a

      primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward

      civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life

      and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over

      the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most

      commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the

      grossest groceries. 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.

      By the words, _necessary of life_, I mean whatever, of all that man

      obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use

      has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from

      savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.

      To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life,

      Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable

      grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest

      or the mountain’s shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than

      Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may,

      accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food,

      Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are we

      prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a

      prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and

      cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth

      of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the

      present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the

      same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately

      retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel,

      that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not

      cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the

      inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were

      well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these

      naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great

      surprise, “to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a

      roasting.” So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity,

      while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine

      the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the

      civilized man? According to Liebig, man’s body is a stove, and food the

      fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold

      weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a

      slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too

      rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the

      fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with

      fire; but so much for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above

      list, that the expression, _animal life_, is nearly synonymous with the

      expression, _animal heat_; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel

      which keeps up the fire within us,—and Fuel serves only to prepare that

      Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from

      without,—Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the _heat_ thus

      generated and absorbed.

      The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the

      vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our

      Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our

      night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this

      shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves

      at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is

      a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer

      directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes

      possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food,

      is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are

      sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various,

      and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half

      unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my

      own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a

      wheelbarrow, &c., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and

      access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be

      obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side

      of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves

      to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live,—that is,

      keep comfortably warm,—and die in New England at last. The luxuriously