There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection.
One day it came into his mind to make a staff.
Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life.
He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment.
His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth.
As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him.
Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick.
Before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work.
By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times.
But why do I stay to mention these things?
When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places.
And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain.
The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?
Walden
And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain.
The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?
Walden
See September 17, 1839 ("Nature never makes haste . . . All her operations seem separately, for the time, the single object for which all things tarry. Why, then, should man hasten as if anything less than eternity were allotted for the least deed? Let him consume never so many æons, so that he go about the meanest task well."); September 7, 1851 ("I do not so much wish to know how to economize time as how to spend it"); November 18 1851 ("The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work."); December 13, 1851 ("This varied employment, to which my necessities compel me, serves instead of foreign travel and the lapse of time."); April 29, 1852 (“The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.”); December 15, 1852 ("A man should not live without a purpose, and that purpose must surely be a grand one."); December 28, 1852 ("Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?"); April 8, 1854 ("A day or two surveying is equal to a journey"); February 5, 1852 ("Time never passes so rapidly and unaccountably as when I am engaged in recording my thoughts. The world may perchance reach its end for us in a profounder thought, and Time itself run down."); April 12, 1854 ("It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light."); May 28, 1854 ("To be serene and successful we must be at one with the universe."); October 18, 1855 (“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”); April 30, 1856 ("You would fain devote yourself to the melody, but you will hear more of it if you devote yourself to your work.” ); May 12, 1857 ("If you would have the song of the sparrow inspire you a thousand years hence, let your life be in harmony with its strain to-day.”); November 18, 1857 ("Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of”); January 27, 1858 ("Time never passes so quickly and unaccountably, as when I am engaged in composition, i. e. in writing down my thoughts. Clocks seem to have been put forward."); September 8, 1858 ("It is good policy to be stirring about your affairs, for the reward of activity and energy is that if you do not accomplish the object you had professed to yourself, you do accomplish something else.”); March 8, 1859 ("Such a day as this, I. . . explore the moist ground for the radical leaves of plants, while the storm blows overhead, and I forget how the time is passing"); April 29, 1854 ("Find your eternity in each moment.");September 24, 1859 ("Great works of art have endless leisure for a background, as the universe has space. Time stands still while they are created.")
See also
Walden: Where I lived and what I lived for ("God Himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.");
A Week ("There is always a poem not printed on paper, coincident with the production of this, stereotyped in the poet’s life. It is what he has become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. His true work will not stand in any prince’s gallery.– My life has been the poem I would have writ,/But I could not both live and utter it.")
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, There was an artist in the City of Kouroo
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 © 2009-2022
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