THE ALLEGORY OF THE STONEMASON.
The wise man is restful, never restless or impatient.
He each moment abides there where he is,
as some walkers actually rest the whole body at each step.
Henry Thoreau September 17, 1839
This cold evening with
a white twilight makes us think
of wood for winter.
Every artisan learns positively something by his trade. Each craft is familiar with a few simple, well-known, well-established facts, not requiring any genius to discover, but mere use and familiarity. You may go by the man at his work in the street every day of your life, and though he is there before you, carrying into practice certain essential information, you shall never be the wiser. Each trade is in fact a craft, a cunning, a covering an ability; and its methods are the result of a long experience.
There sits a stone-mason, splitting Westford granite for fence-posts . . . His hammer, his chisels, his wedges, his shims or half-rounds, his iron spoon, I suspect that these tools are hoary with age as with granite dust.
He learns as easily where the best granite comes from as he learns how to erect that screen to keep off the sun. He knows that he can drill faster into a large stone than a small one, because there is less jar and yielding.
He deals in stone as the carpenter in lumber. In many of his operations only the materials are different.
- His work is slow and expensive.
- Nature is here hard to be overcome.
- He wears up one or two drills in splitting a single stone.
- He must sharpen his tools oftener than the carpenter.
- He fights with granite.
- He knows the temper of the rocks.
- He grows stony himself.
- His tread is ponderous and steady like the fall of a rock.
And yet by patience and art he splits a stone as surely as the carpenter or woodcutter a log.
So much time and perseverance will accomplish. See how surely he proceeds. He does not hesitate to drill a dozen holes, each one the labor of a day or two for a savage; he carefully takes out the dust with his iron spoon; he inserts his wedges, one in each hole, and protects the sides of the holes and gives resistance to his wedges by thin pieces of half-round iron (or shims); he marks the red line which he has drawn, with his chisel, carefully cutting it straight; and then how carefully he drives each wedge in succession, fearful lest he should not have a good split!
The habit of looking at men in the gross makes their lives have less of human interest for us. But though there are crowds of laborers before us, yet each one leads his little epic life each day.
There is the stone mason, who, methought, was simply a stony man that hammered stone from breakfast to dinner, and dinner to supper, and then went to his slumbers. But he, I find, is even a man like myself, for he feels the heat of the sun and has raised some boards on a frame to protect him.
And now, at mid-forenoon, I see his wife and child have come and brought him drink and meat for his lunch and to assuage the stoniness of his labor, and sit to chat with him.
There are many rocks lying there for him to split from end to end, and he will surely do it . . .
But how many moral blocks are lying there in every man's yard, which he surely will not split nor earnestly endeavor to split. There lie the blocks which will surely get split, but here lie the blocks which will surely not get split.
Do we say it is too hard for human faculties? But does not the mason dull a basketful of steel chisels in a day, and yet, by sharpening them again and tempering them aright, succeed?
One would say that mankind had much less moral than physical energy, that any day you see men following the trade of splitting rocks, who yet shrink from undertaking apparently less arduous moral labors, the solving of moral problems.
Moral effort! Difficulty to be overcome!!! Why, men work in stone, and sharpen their drills when they go home to dinner!
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 11, 1851
So much time and perseverance will accomplish. See November 8, 1860 ("How persevering Nature is, and how much time she has to work in, though she works slowly."); August 2, 1859 ("There is a certain moral and physical sluggishness and standstill at midsummer.")
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2015
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality."
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