My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning.
I frequently awake with an atmosphere about me as if my unremembered dreams
had been divine, as if my spirit had journeyed to it's native place, and,
in the act of reentering it's native body, had diffused an elysian fragrance
around.
We are enabled to criticize others only when we are different from,
and in a given particular, superior to them ourselves. By our aloofness
from men and their affairs we are enabled to overlook and criticize them.
There are but few men who stand on the hills by the roadside. I am
sane only when I have risen above my common sense, when I do not take the
foolish view of things which are commonly taken, when I do not live for
the low ends for which men commonly live. Wisdom is not common.
To what purposes do I have senses, if I am thus absorbed in affairs ?
My pulse must beat with Nature. After a hard day's work without a
thought, turning my brain into a mere tool, only in the quiet of the evening
do I so far recover my senses as to hear the cricket, which in fact has
been chirping all day. In my better hours I am conscious of
the influx of a serene and unquestionable wisdom which partly unfits, and
if I yielded to it more rememberingly would wholly unfit me, for what is
called the active business of life, for that furnishes nothing on which
the eye of reason to rest.
What is that other kind of life to which I am thus continually allured
? which alone I love? Is it a life for this world ? Can a man
feed and clothe himself gloriously who keeps the truth steadily before
him ? who calls in no evil to his aid ? Are there duties which
necessarily interfere with the serene perception of the truth ? Are
our serene moments mere foretastes of heaven,....joys gratuitously vouchsafed
to us a consolation, ....or simply a transient realization of what might
be the whole tenor of our lives ?
Here I am thirty-four years old,(July l9th l85l) and yet my
life is
wholly unexpanded. How much is in the germ! There is such an
interval between my ideal and the actual in many instances that I
may say I am unborn. There is the instinct for society, but no society.
Life is not long enough for one success. Within another thirty-four
years that miracle can hardly take place. Methinks my seasons revolve
more slowly than those of nature; I am differently timed. I
am contented. This rapid revolution of nature, even of nature in
me, why should it hurry me? Let a man step to the music which he
hears, however measured. Is it important that I should mature as
soon as an apple tree? aye, as soon as an oak? May not my life in
nature, in proportion as it is supernatural, be only the spring and infantile
portion of my spirit's life? Shall I turn my spring to summer?
May I not sacrifice a hasty and petty completeness here to entireness there?
If my curve is large, why bend it to a smaller circle? My spirit's
unfolding observes not the pace of nature. The society which I was made
for is not here. Shall I, then, substitute for the anticipation of
that, this poor reality? I would rather have the unmixed expectation
of that, than this reality. If life is a waiting, so be it.
I will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Thoreau.
At the entrance to the Deep Cut, I heard the telegraph wire vibrating
like an aeolian harp. It reminded me suddenly with a certain pathetic
moderation, of what finer and deeper stirrings I was susceptible.
It told me by the faintest imaginable strain, it told me by the finest
imaginable strain that a human ear can hear, yet conclusively and past
all refutation, that there were higher, infinitely higher, planes of life
which it behooved me never to forget. I instantly sat down on a stone
at the foot of the telegraph pole, and attended to the communication. It
merely said; "Bear in mind, Child, and never for an instant forget,
that there are higher planes, infinitely higher planes, of life than this
thou art now traveling on. Know that the goal is distant, and
is upward, and is worthy of all your life's efforts to attain to."
And then it ceased, and though I sat some minutes longer I heard nothing
more
Sometimes I find that I have frequented a higher society during sleep,
and my thoughts and actions proceed on a higher level in the morning.
I know that I shall sooner or later attain to an unspotted innocence,
for when I consider that state, even now I am thrilled. Will not
this faith and expectation make to itself ears at length.
Would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny
were not equally so?
I feel ripe for something, yet do nothing, can't discover what that
thing is, I feel fertile merely. It is seed time with me.
I have lain fallow long enough.
My desire for knowledge is intermittent; But my desire to commune
with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated even with the fumes,
call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and
over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.
There is something more than association at the bottom of the excitement
which the roar of the cataract produces. It is allied to the circulation
in our veins. We have a waterfall which corresponds even to Niagara
within us.
It is not the invitation which I hear, but which I feel, that I obey.
I hear the sound of Heywood's Brook falling into Fair Haven Pond, inexpressibly
refreshing to my senses.
It seems to flow through my very bones.
I hear it with insatiable thirst. It allays some sandy heat in me.
It affects my circulation's; methinks my arteries have sympathy with
it. What is it I hear but the pure waterfalls within me, in the circulation
of my blood, the streams that fall into my heart? What mists do I
ever see but such as hang over and rise from my blood? The sound
of this gurgling water, running thus by night as by day, falls on all my
dashes, fills all my buckets, overflows my flatboards, turns all the machinery
of my nature, makes me a flume, a sluice-way, to the springs of nature.
Thus I am washed; thus I drink and quench my thirst.
Almost all, perhaps all, our life is, speaking comparatively, a stereotyped
despair; i.e., we never at any time realize the full grandeur of
our destiny.
We must walk consciously only part way to our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success. What we do best or most perfectly is what we have most thoroughly learned by the longest practice, and at length it falls from us without our notice, as a leaf from a tree.
There awaits people when they die, such things as they look not for, nor dream of.
O my friends, there are resources in us on which we have not drawn.
Within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form;
Nature has a higher end, in the production of individuals, than 'security', namely 'ascension', or, the passage of the soul into higher forms.
As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if, in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.
Never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of
the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the
sorceries of drugs or of alcohol. The sublime vision comes to the
pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body.
Our task, then, is to work for our liberation from this sphere, severing
ourselves from all that has gathered about us; the total man is to be something
better than a body ensouled (the bodily element dominant with a trace of
Soul running through it and a resultant life-course mainly of the body)for
in such a combination all is, in fact, bodily. There is another life, emancipated,
whose quality is progression towards the higher realm, towards the good
and divine, towards that Principle which no one possesses except by deliberate
usage but so may appropriate, becoming, each personally, the higher, the
beautiful, the Godlike, and living, remote, in and by It.
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