Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the
track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise
early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come
and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry — determined to make
a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be
upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner,
situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the
rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with
morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like
Ulysses.(23) If the engine whistles,
let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we
run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves,
and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and
prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which
covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and
Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion,
till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call
reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then
begin, having a point d'appui,(24) below freshet and frost and fire, a place where
you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a
gauge, not a Nilometer,(25) but a
Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and
appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face
to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it
were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and
marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or
death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in
our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about
our business.
[23] Time
is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the
sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but
eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly
with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I
have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The
intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things.
I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is
hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct
tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their
snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these
hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the
divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.