Another just arriving at the Place
He toiled for, and—the Door shut in his Face:
Whereas Another, scarcely gone a Stride,
And suddenly—Behold he is inside!”
THOREAU
THOREAU
“Whoever will do his own work aright will find that his first lesson is to know what he is, and that which is proper to himself; and whoever rightly understands himself will never mistake another man’s work for his own, but will love and improve himself above all other things, will refuse superfluous employments, and reject all unprofitable thoughts and propositions.”
Montaigne.
It lay at the root of Thoreau’s peculiarity that he insisted upon being himself. Having certain opinions, he held them; having certain tastes, he encouraged them; having a certain faculty, he made the most of it: all of which, natural and reasonable as it may sound, is as far as possible from what is expected of the average citizen, who may be almost anything he will, to be sure, if he will first observe the golden rule of good society, to be “like other folks.” Society is still a kind of self-constituted militia, a mutual protective association,—an army, in short; and in an army, as everybody knows, the first duty of man is to keep step.
What made matters worse in Thoreau’s case was, that his tastes and opinions, on which he so stoutly insisted, were in themselves far out of the common. Not only would he be himself, enough, under present conditions, to make almost any man an oddity, but the “himself” was essentially a very queer person. He liked solitude; in other words, he liked to think. He loved the society of trees and all manner of growing things. He found fellowship in them, they were of his kin; which is not at all the same as to say that he enjoyed looking at them as objects of beauty. He lived in a world of his own, a world of ideas, and was strangely indifferent to much that other men found absorbing. He could get along without a daily newspaper, but not without a daily walk. He spent hours and hours of honest daylight in what looked for all the world like idleness; and he did it industriously and on principle. He was more anxious to live well—according to an inward standard of his own—than to lodge well, or to dress well, or to stand well with his townsmen. A good name, even, was relatively unimportant. He found easy sundry New Testament scriptures which the church would still be stumbling over, only that it has long since worn a smooth path round them.