Thoreau on the Ills of a Hectic, Frenetic Society

"The mass of humanity leads lives of quiet desperation. People labor under a mistake. The better part of the worker is soon plowed into the soil for compost. They are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools. Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. People spend the best part of their life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it. Money is not required to buy even ONE necessity of the soul! . . . [The railroad is now coming through our town.] But we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us . . . 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 and far away . . . 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. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life."
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Henry David Thoreau 
"Walden," 1854

Photos: (Top) Snow patterns, Snowy Range, WY, November 2, 2015: (Middle) Cottonwood leaf on the Poudre River with Bellvue Dome in the background, November 3, 2015; (Bottom) Wild Rose leaf lying on the snow, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, October 16, 2015

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