Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

The Errata Naturae publishing house presents a new edition of the great classic on the defense of the wild and civil disobedience. A book that is an explosion of beauty thanks to the illustrations of Clément Thoby that accompany him and the great format in which he is presented.

In Zenda we offer the first chapter of Walden or life in forests (Mistakes of nature) of Henry David Thoreau.

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ECONOMY

I would not impose my own matters to the care of the readers if I had not received many questions and very specific from my fellow citizens in relation to my way of living. Some of these questions might seem impertinent, but they are not for me, but, taking into account the circumstances, they find it natural and timely. There are those who have asked me what I used to eat, if I felt alone, if I was not afraid and similar things. Others have been curious to know what part of my income was dedicated to charitable works, and some, who have large families, inquired how many poor children I maintained. Therefore, I will start apologizing to those readers who are not particularly interested in me, since in this book I intend to answer some of these questions. In most books, the self or the first person is omitted; in this it will be kept; That is the main difference in egotism. In general, we forget that, after all, it is always the first person who speaks. I would not talk so much about myself if there was another person who knew so well. Unfortunately, I am limited to this matter due to the shortage of my experience. Although, anyway, sooner or later I require every writer a simple and sincere story of his life, and not only what he has found out of the lives of others: a story like the one he would send to his relatives from a distant land, because, from my point of view, if a man has sincerely lived since he has done it in a distant earth for me. In any case, perhaps these pages are written mostly for poor students. As for the rest of the readers, he will stay with those parts that incumbent. I hope that none forced the coat seams when putting it on, because it will only be useful to those who really feel good.

For the rest, my intention is not to talk about the Chinese or the inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands, but of you, who read these pages and live in New England. And I would like to say something about your situation, about your circumstances in this world, in this city, about whether they need to be as bad as they are, if they could not even be improved. I have traveled a lot in Concord, and everywhere, in shops, offices and fields, it seemed to me that its inhabitants were penance in a thousand extraordinary ways. Not even the mortifications that I have heard that the Brahmins do – when they feel exposed to four different fires while looking at the front of the front, or remain suspended head down and on the flames, or look at the sky above their own shoulder “until they find it impossible to recover their natural position and cause the calex With their bodies, as the caterpillars, the width of vast empires do, or rise on a single foot at the top of a column – not even these forms of conscious penance are as incredible and amazing as the scenes I contemplate daily. Hercules’ twelve works are insignificant compared to those who insist on my neighbors, especially since they were only twelve and had an end, but I have never seen that these men have killed or captured a monster or have terminated a work. They do not have a friend like Yolao, capable of causing the root of the head of the hydra with a hot iron, but as soon as a head is crushed, two others arise.

I see young men, who are my fellow citizens, whose main misfortune is having inherited farms, houses, stables, cattle and other tools, because it is easier to provide all this than shed of it. Better would have been born in the middle of the field and have been breastfed by a wolf, maybe they could have clearly distinguish the land they were called to work. Who turned them into servants of the Earth? Why would they have to eat their sixty acres when man is doomed to eat only his portion of dust? Why would they have to start digging their graves at the moment of their birth? They have to live their own lives facing every difficulty and trying to stay in the best possible way. How many poor immortal souls I have found almost completely crushed and suffocated under the weight of their charges, dragging the path of life, pushing a barn of seventy -five feet long by forty wide, unable to clean some stables as dirty as those of King Augias, while waiting for a hundred acres of earth, tillage, mowing and grazing, and a piece of forest! Meanwhile, the dispossessed, who do not have to face such inherited inconveniences, seems sufficient work to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of meat.

Men work from an erroneous perspective. The best part of man is very soon plowed and turned into fertilizer for Earth. Guided by an apparent destiny, commonly called the need, according to an old book, accumulate treasures that corrupt the moth and the rust and end up stealing the thieves. It is a silly life, as each one will understand when it reaches the end of it, if it does not. It is said that Deucalion and Pirra created men by pulling backs on their heads:

Then the kind of hard and experiencing snacks
The documents we give the origin of birth.

Or, as Raleight translates in this sound way:

Since then we are a strong species, tanned in pain,
And we give proof of our rock origin.

And all for blindly obeying an unattended oracle, which throws stones behind them without seeing even where they fall.

Most men, even in this relatively free country, for mere ignorance and error, is so concerned with the careful factual but superfluous tasks of life that you cannot collect their best fruits. His fingers, of so much working, are in excess zafios and tremble too much for it. Actually, the working and hard -working man lacks a free time to develop a complete and own daily life, cannot even maintain the most virile relationships with other men, because his work would depreciate in the market. It has no time to be anything other than a machine. How could you remember your ignorance – which requires growth – who has to use their knowledge so often? We should feed it and dress it free from time to time, and comfort it with our spirits, before judging it. The best qualities of our nature, as well as the velvety skin of fruits, can only be kept through delicate manipulation. And yet, neither others, nor ourselves, we deal with that sweetness.

Some of you, we all know, you are poor; Life is arduous, and sometimes you feel asphyxiation that practically prevents you from breathing. I do not doubt that more than one among those who are reading this book you cannot pay you all the meals of the day, or the jackets and shoes you carry and that are already spent or point of spending. And you have reached this page spending a time borrowed or stolen, after stealing your creditors one hour. It seems clear to me that many of you live poor and servile lives, in this regard the experience has looked my eyes well; You always walk to the limit, trying to enter business and get out of debts, an ancient lodazal that Latinos called æs alienum, the bronze of some other, because some of their currencies were made of bronze; Always living, dying, buried by the bronze of this other; Always promising to pay, promising to pay tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; trying to look for favors, to make customers in all possible ways, as long as they do not take you to jail; Lying, adulted, voting, locking you in the civility nut shell or dilating you in an atmosphere of ethereal and vaporous generosity, all in order to persuade your neighbor that you allow you to make your shoes or your hat or your suit or your car or bring your groceries home; Sicking to save something for the day the disease arrives, something that you will keep in the old comfortable or in an average or behind a plaster septum or, for more security, in a brick bank; It doesn’t matter where, not if it’s a lot or little.

Sometimes I am wonderful how frivolous we can become, as far as the uneconorous and somewhat foreign form of service called the slavery of blacks are referred; There are so many cunning and subtle masters that enslave both the north and the south. It is difficult to have a southern foreman, it is worse to have a northern as such, but it is much worse when you become the foreman of your own slavery. And yet there is talk of the divine in man! Look at the coachman on the road, heading to the market, day or night; Is something divine what moves it? Your greatest duty is to fodder your horses! What interest does its destiny have for himself, comparing it to the revenues of shipments? Doesn’t he drive for Mr. Fanfarrón? What does he have of divine and immortal? Look how he bends down and scabulle, without ever getting rid of his little fears, neither immortal nor divine, but a slave and prisoner of the opinion he possesses himself, a fame acquired through his own actions. Actually, public opinion is a weak tyrant if we compare it with our own opinion. The destiny of each man is determined by what he thinks of himself. Get the emancipation of oneself even in the western Indies of fantasy and imagination, is there any Wilberforce that can bring us? Think also of the women of this land, who weave toilet fogs until the last day of their lives, all in order not to reveal an excessive interest in their own destinations! As if time could kill without damaging eternity.

Most men live lives of quiet despair. What we call resignation is nothing more than a confirmation of hopelessness. From the desperate city you go to the desperate countryside, and you have to comfort you with the dignity of the mouths and the musk rats. Even after the so -called games and amusements of humanity there is despair as stereotypical as unconscious. They do not suppose a real recreation, because it only arrives after work. A characteristic of wisdom is not to do desperate things.

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Author: Henry David Thoreau y Clément Thoby. Title: Walden or life in forests. Translation: Marcos Nava. Editorial: Mistakes of nature. Sale: All your books.