Thoreau meditation: Men as ants, "progress", living awake, and the "news"

I was reading Walden, Chapter Two, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" last night just before drifting off, and I thought these points were especially relevant to the interests of most of us on DU. Any input on what these quote mean to you, or what you think they mean for contemporary America, are very welcome.

* * * * *

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

(snip)

"The Vedas say, 'All intelligences are awake with the morning.' Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour... (snip) ...It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?"

(snip)

"Still we live meanly, like ants, though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes ; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man can hardly need to count more than his his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!"

(snip)

"Men think it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how will we get to Heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on the rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and a cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may some time get up again."

(snip)

"...Hardly a man takes a half hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he hols up his head and asks, 'What's the news?' as if the rest of mankind has stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night's sleep, the news is as indispensible as the breakfast. 'Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on the globe,' - and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself."

(snip)

"...And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers i nthe winter, -we never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip."

(snip)

"I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do beacuse our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be. If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, thiunk you, would the 'Mill-dam' go to? If he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages."

and distributed it to my middle school class. They were tickled by the 30MPH point, but appear to be thinking now. Thinking is good. They don't do it enough!

Hopefully they will wake up, too!

:woohoo:

and not much else - other than my father and now my husband. i don't give a lot of credence to human constructions, physical or mental, since it's all perception anyway.

we're here in st. lucia now - beautiful island with beautiful simple people. not a lot of "stuff". goats and horses freely walking the roads. people walking down the road singing to themselves with a big smile for you as they pass. people seem to get the "kernel" of existence here. i've always been afraid that when "i came to die discovered i had not lived." i feel closer to that core i'm searching for here. but to be able to live in that consciousness in the midst of all the falderal - that's still a mystery to me.

thanks for posting this.

Amen.