I am
a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.
A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I'm fixed.
A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.
And here I bloom for a short hour
unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.
Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they're rife.
But now I see I was not plucked for
naught,
And after in life's vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.
That stock thus thinned will soon
redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.
- Henry David Thoreau.
Mohandas
Gandhi on Thoreau:
Credited Thoreau's essay with being “the
chief cause of the abolition of slavery in America” and wrote, “Thoreau was a great
writer, philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught
nothing he was not prepared to practice in himself. He was one of the greatest
and most moral men America has produced. At the time of the abolition of
slavery movement, he wrote his famous essay "On the Duty of Civil
Disobedience". He went to gaol for the sake of his principles and
suffering humanity. His essay has, therefore, been sanctified by suffering.
Moreover, it is written for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable.
—For
Passive Resisters (1907)
Dr
Martin Luther King Jr. on Thoreau:
“During my student days I read Henry
David Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience for the first time. Here, in this
courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail
rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I
made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by
the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved
that I reread the work several times.
I became convinced that noncooperation
with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other
person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than
Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are
the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive
in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before.
Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into
Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in
Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil
must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice. -The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Thoreau
on society and State:
“What old people say you cannot do you
try and find that you can.” – Economy.
“The mass of men serve the state thus,
not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing
army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, &c. In most
cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense:
but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden
men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well.
Such command no more respect than men
of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and
dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.” – Civil Disobedience.
“How does it become a man to behave
toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without
disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that
political organisation as my government
which is the slave’s government also.”
– Civil Disobedience.
“Thus the State never intentionally
confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses.
It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical
strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let
us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me
who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not
hear of men being forced to live this way or that by
masses of me. What sort of life were that to live?" – Civil Disobedience.
The
Transcendentalists:
“The Transcendentalists were eclectic
rather than systematic, any brief description of their views tends to be
reductive… …As James Freeman Clarke observed about himself and his
contemporaries, the Transcendentalists were ‘a club of likeminded, I suppose because
no two of us thought alike.’
The unity within this diversity was a
feeling that American literature, philosopy, and religion, as well as
government, society, and individuals, were not fulfilling the potential that
they believed was possible. Although Thoreau refused to be a member of any
collective movement, he did occasionally refer to himself as a
Transcendendalist (partially because this self-description could be counted on
to confuse and dismay people)…
…Indeed their primary activities were
forms of self-expression rather than the kinds of social, economic, or
political actions that the bustling 19th century would have been
likely to comprehend.” – Introduction to
Walden and Civil Disobedience.
Thoreau
on the human condition:
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet
desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the
desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself
with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair
is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.” –
Economy.
