The Thoreau
Institute at Walden Woods Library
Thoreau's Life &
Writings: Correspondence
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HDT to H.G.O.
Blake
Concord, 2 May 1848
“We must have our bread.” But what is our bread? Is it baker’s
bread? Methinks it should be very home-made
bread. What is our meat? Is it butcher’s meat? What is that which
we must have? Is
that bread which we are now earning sweet? Is it not bread which has
been suffered to sour, and then been sweetened with an alkali, which
has undergone the vinous, acetous, and sometimes the putrid
fermentation, and then been whitened with vitriol? Is this the bread
which we must have? Man must earn his bread by the sweat of his
brow, truly, but also by the sweat of his brain within his brow. The
body can feed the body only. I have tasted but little bread in my
life. It has been mere grub and provender for the most part. Of
bread that nourished the brain and the heart, scarcely any. There is
absolutely none even on the tables of the rich.
There is not one kind of food for all men.
You must and you will feed those faculties which you exercise. The
laborer whose body is weary does not require the same food with the
scholar whose brain is weary. Men should not labor foolishly like
brutes, but the brain and the body should always, or as much as
possible, work and rest together, and then the work will be of such
a kind that when the body is hungry the brain will be hungry also,
and the same food will suffice for both; otherwise the food which
repairs the waste energy of the overwrought body will oppress the
sedentary brain, and the degenerate scholar will come to esteem all
food vulgar, and all getting a living drudgery.
How shall we earn our bread is a grave
question; yet it is a sweet and inviting question. Let us not shirk
it, as is usually done. It is the most important and practical
question which is put to man. Let us not answer it hastily. Let us
not be content to get our bread in some gross, careless, and hasty
manner. Some men go a-hunting, some a-fishing, some a-gaming, some
to war; but none have so pleasant a time as they who in earnest seek
to earn their bread. It is true actually as it is true really; it is
true materially as it is true spiritually, that they who seek
honestly and sincerely, with all their hearts and lives and
strength, to earn their bread, do earn it, and it is sure to be very
sweet to them. A very little bread,—a very few crumbs are enough,
if it be of the right quality, for it is infinitely nutritious. Let
each man, then, earn at least a crumb of bread for his body before
he dies, and know the taste of it,—that it is identical with the
bread of life, and that they both go down at one swallow.
Our bread need not ever be sour or hard to
digest. What Nature is to the mind she is also to the body. As she
feeds my imagination, she will feed my body; for what she says she
means, and is ready to do. She is not simply beautiful to the
poet’s eye. Not only the rainbow and sunset are beautiful, but to
be fed and clothed, sheltered and warmed aright, are equally
beautiful and inspiring. There is not necessarily any gross and ugly
fact which may not be eradicated from the life of man. We should
endeavor practically in our lives to correct all the defects which
our imagination detects. The heavens are as deep as our aspirations
are high. So high as a tree aspires to grow, so high it will find an
atmosphere suited to it. Every man should stand for a force which is
perfectly irresistible. How can any man be weak who dares to
be at all? Even the tenderest plants force their way up
through the hardest earth and the crevices of rocks; but a man no
material power can resist. What a wedge, what a beetle, what a
catapult, is an earnest
man! What can resist him?
It is a momentous fact that a man may be good,
or he may be bad;
his life may be true,
or it may be false;
it may be either a shame or a glory to him. The good man builds
himself up; the bad man destroys himself.
But whatever we do we must do confidently
(if we are timid, let us, then, act timidly), not expecting more
light, but having light enough. If we confidently expect more, then
let us wait for it. But what is this which we have? Have we not
already waited? Is this the beginning of time? Is there a man who
does not see clearly beyond, though only a hair’s breath beyond
where he at any time stands?
If one hesitates in his path, let him not
proceed. Let him respect his doubts, for doubts, too, may have some
divinity in them. That we have but little faith is not sad, but that
we have but little faithfulness. By faithfulness faith is earned.
When, in the progress of a life, a man swerves, though only by an
angle infinitely small, from his proper and allotted path (and this
is never done quite unconsciously even at first; in fact, that was
his broad and scarlet sin,—ah, he knew of it more than he can
tell), then the drama of his life turns to tragedy, and makes haste
to its fifth act. When once we thus fall behind ourselves, there is
no accounting for the obstacles which rise up in our path, and no
one is so wise as to advice, and no one so powerful as to aid us
while we abide on that ground.
Such are cursed with duties,
and the neglect of their
duties. For such the decalogue was made, and other far more
voluminous and terrible codes.
These departures,—who have not made
them?—for they are as faint as the parallax of a fixed star, and
at the commencement we say they are nothing,—that is, they
originate in a kind of sleep and forgetfulness of the soul when it
is naught. A man cannot be too circumspect in order to keep in the
straight road, and be sure that he sees all that he may at any time
see, that so he may distinguish his true path.
You ask if there is no doctrine of sorrow
in my philosophy. Of acute sorrow I suppose that I know
comparatively little. My saddest and most genuine sorrows are apt to
be but transient regrets. The place of sorrow is supplied,
perchance, by a certain hard and proportionately barren
indifference. I am of kin to the sod, and partake largely of its
dull patience,—in winter expecting the sun of spring. In my
cheapest moments I am apt to think that it is n’t my business to
be “seeking the spirit,” but as much its business to be seeking
me. I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never
had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too
much patience of this kind. I am too easily contented with a slight
and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that
of the woodchucks.
Methinks I am never quite committed, never
wholly the creature of my moods, being always to some extent their
critic. My only integral experience is in my vision. I see,
perchance, with more integrity than I feel.
But I need not tell you what manner of man
I am,—my virtues or my vices. You can guess if it is worth the
while; and I do not discriminate them well.
I do not write this time at my hut in the
woods. I am at present living with Mrs. Emerson, whose house is an
old home of mine, for company during Mr. Emerson’s absence.
You will perceive that I am as often
talking to myself, perhaps, as speaking to you.
A
Note on the Text:
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Source:
Familiar Letters edited by F.B. Sanborn [The Writings of
Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906) p. 164-168.
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