What kind of gift is life unless we have spirits to enjoy it and taste its true flavor?

August 10. 

Monday. 

P. M. —In Clintonia Swamp I see a remarkable yellow fungus about the base of some grass growing in a tuft. It is a jelly, shaped like a bodkin or a pumpkin’s stigma, two inches long, in vesting the base of the grass blades, a quarter to a half inch thick, tapering to the grass each way and covered _ with a sort of moist meal. It was strong-scented and disagreeable. 

Cat-tail commonly grows in the hollows and boggy places where peat has' been dug. 

How meanly and miserably we live for the most part!

We escape fate continually by the skin of our teeth, as the saying is. We are practically desperate. But as every man, in respect to material wealth, aims to be come independent or wealthy, so, in respect to our spirits and imagination, we should have some spare capital and superfluous vigor, have some margin and leeway in which to move. 

August 10, 2019, 8:41 PM

What kind of gift is life unless we have spirits to enjoy it and taste its true flavor? 

if, in respect to spirits, we are to be forever cramped and in debt? In our ordinary estate we have not, so to speak, quite enough air to breathe, and this poverty qualifies our piety; but we should have more than enough and breathe it carelessly. Poverty is the rule. 

We should first of all be full of vigor like a strong horse, and beside have the free and adventurous spirit of his driver; i. e., we should have such a reserve of elasticity and strength that we may at any time be able to put ourselves at the top of our speed and go beyond our ordinary limits, just as the invalid hires a horse. 

Have the gods sent us into this world, — to this muster, — to do chores, hold horses, and the like, and not given us any spending money? 

The poor and sick man keeps a horse, often a hostler; but the well man is a horse to himself, is horsed on himself; he feels his own oats. Look at the other’s shanks. How spindling! like the timber 'of his gig! 

First a sound and healthy life, and then spirits to live it with. 

I hear the neighbors complain sometimes about the peddlers selling their help false jewelry, as if they themselves wore true jewelry; but if their help pay as much for it as they did for theirs, then it is just as true jewelry as theirs, just as becoming to them and no more; for unfortunately it is the cost of the article and not the merits of the wearer that is considered. The money is just as well spent, and perhaps better earned. I don’t care how much false jewelry the peddlers sell, nor how many of the eggs which you steal are rotten. What, pray, is true jewelry? The hardened tear of a diseased clam, murdered in its old age. Is that fair play? If not, it is no jewel. The mistress wears this in her ear, while her help has one made of paste which you cannot tell from it. False jewelry! Do you know of any shop where true jewelry can be bought? I always look askance at a jeweller and wonder what church he can belong to. 

I heard some ladies the other day laughing about some one of their help who had helped herself to a real hoop from off a hogshead for her gown. I laughed too, but which party do you think I laughed at? Isn’t hogshead as good a word as crinoline?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 10, 1857

August 10. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau , August 10

 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021