compulsive................

 

First Facebook, then the iPhone compulsive communicating and connecting—supported by mysterious, almost magical innovations in radio modulation and fiber-optic routing—swept our culture before anyone had the presence of mind to step back and re-ask Thoreau's fundamental question: To what end?

     The result is a society left reeling by unintended consequences.  We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidentally degrading our humanity.

-Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

just for an instant.....................

 

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

-Thoreau

Transmission.....................

      This American government,—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity?  

-Henry David Thoreau, from his essay Civil Disobedience

secure in his leisure......................

But Thoreau never faltered.  He was a born protestant.  He declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living well.  If he slighted and defied the opinions of others, it was only that he was more intent to reconcile his practice with his own belief.  Never idle or self-indulgent, he preferred when he wanted money, earning it by some piece of manual labor agreeable to him, as building a boat or a fence, planting, grafting, surveying, or other short work, to any long engagements.  With his hardy habits and few wants, his skill in woodcraft, and his powerful arithmetic, he was very competent to live in any part of the world.  It would cost him less time to supply his wants than another.  He was therefore secure in his leisure.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau

On counting the cost.....................

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."


-Henry David Thoreau

Opening paragraphs.................

     The twelfth day of July 1817 saw the arrival of the first of those sultry, sweaty summer days that Concord's farmers knew as dog days.  Their almanacs marked these as beginning July 3 and ending August 11 - the forty-day period preceding the rising of the Dog Star, Sirius - but they knew that the first furnace blase of austral air could come a week or more on either side of the third.  this was good grass-growing weather; red-top, herd's-grass, sheep's fescue, and Canadian bluegrass and the ripening rye and wheat presented a checkerboard of greens, purples, reds, and golds.  Walking the fields were haymakers in white shirts and straw hats, occasionally setting aside their scythes and calling out to one another.

-Kevin Dann,  Expect Great Things:  The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau

On reading the classics..............

Every Chautauqua should have a list somewhere of valuable things to remember that can be kept in some safe space for times of future need and inspiration.  ...

     Books.  I don't know of any other cyclist who takes books with him.  They take a  lot of space, but I have three of them here anyway, with some loose sheets of paper in them for writing.  These are: ...

     3.  A copy of Thoreau's Walden ... which Chris has never heard and which can be read a hundred times without exhaustion,  I try always to pick a book far over his head and read it as a basis for questions and answers, rather than without interruption.  I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two.  Classics read well this way.  They must be written this way.  Sometimes we have spent a whole evening reading and talking and discovered we have only covered two or three pages.  It's a form of reading done a century ago ... when Chautauquas were popular.  Unless you've tried it you can't imagine how pleasant it is to do it this way.

-Robert M. Pirsig, from Chapter 4, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance:  An Inquiry Into Values

On delicate handling.......................

"The finest qualities of our nature, like the blooms on fruits, can only be preserved by the most delicate handling.  Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another this tenderly."

-Henry David Thoreau

photo via

Now or never........................

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.” 

-Henry David Thoreau

via

Dreaming, continued.........................

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment:  that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.  In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." 

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden, from the chapter Conclusion

Ed. Note:  Page for page, Walden has to be one of the all-time most quotable books.  And to think, you can own it for free by following the link to Amazon (and having Kindle).  We live in a most bounteous universe.

A slight moral tinge..................

     All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions;  and betting naturally accompanies it.  The character of the voters is not staked.  I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right;  but I am not vitally concerned that right should prevail.  I am willing to leave that to the majority.  Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it.  It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.  A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.  There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.  When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or  because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote.  They will then be the only slaves.  Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slaver who asserts his own freedom by his vote.
-Henry David Thoreau,  as excerpted from his essay, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Revolutionary................................

Action from principle - the perception and the performance of right - changes things and relations;  it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was.  It not only divides states and churches, it divides families;  ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.
-Henry David Thoreau,   as excerpted from his essay, On The Duty of Civil Disobedience

Dinning.....................................

      Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men.  But what is that to the purpose?  A living dog is better than a dead lion.  Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?  Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.
      Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?  If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.   Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.  It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak.  Shall he turn his spring into summer?   If the conditions of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute?  We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.  Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?
- Henry David Thoreau,   Walden, as excerpted from the chapter "Conclusion"

A little star-dust.....................

If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success.  All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause to momentarily bless yourself.   The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated.  We easily come to doubt if they exist.  We soon forget them.  They are the highest reality.  Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man.  The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.  It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
-Henry David Thoreau,   Walden, as excerpted from Higher Laws

Influx of better thoughts.......................

     A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener.   So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts.  We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty.  We loiter in winter while it is already spring.
-Henry David Thoreau,  as excerpted from Walden

Investing........................

      Our whole life is startlingly moral.  There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.  Goodness is the only investment that never fails.   In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills us.   The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe's Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay.  Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive.   Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it.
-Henry David Thoreau, as excerpted from Walden

Through.......................................

"looking through the stars to see if I could see God beyond them."
-Henry David Thoreau

photo via

I wonder if this is why I have so many......

......................................half read books on my shelves?

“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”

-Henry David Thoreau

Hey, wait a minute..........................

"A civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage."
-Henry David Thoreau

One man's take (as well as the above photo) on civilized savages can be found here.

Thoreau on philanthropy............

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve."
-Henry David Thoreau, from the Economy chapter of Walden