Life without principle

Title

Creator

Thoreau, Henry David

Language

English

Year

1967

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

A great man tells us what qualities and attitudes a truly conscientious and productive worker should develop and possess.

Fulltext

■ A great man tells us what qualities and attitudes a truly conscientious and productive worker should develop and possess. LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. The community has no bribe tha,t will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a. man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are selfsupporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planning-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied. Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born, but to be still born, rather. To be supported by the charity of friends, or a governmentpension, — provided you continue to breathe, — by what8 Pa n o r a ma ever fine synonyms you describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse. On Sundays the poor debtor goes to church to take an account of stock, and finds, of course, that his outgoes have been greater than his income. In the Catholic Church, especially, they go into chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think to start again. Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up. To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. We select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fenses of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granite truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and subtilest truth? I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other. Those things which not most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are in/ra-human, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called. It is as if a thinker submitted himself to be rasped by the great gizzard of creation. Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves, — sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but states, have Ma r c h 1967 9 thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering, of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the everglorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand, surely. — By Henry David Thoreau, from the Atlantic Monthly, 1863. HOW GOOD ARE CATHOLIC SCHOOLS? How good are Catholic schools and how do they compare with public schools? On the basis of comparative records, students in Catholic schools are “superior” both in academic achievement and in learning potential — even though the Catholic schools are almost scandalously overcrowded, their teachers have less academic preparation, and they operate on a much lower budget. The Notre Dame authors modestly point out that the superiority they found can be attributed to the “relatively selective” admissions policies of the schools. Unruly and undisciplined pupils often end up in the public schools because the nuns are in a position to demand a certain standard of behavior. — From Catholics and their Schools in Saturday Review, Oct. 15, 1966. 10 Pa n o r a ma

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