It is not enough to have earned our livelihood.
Either the earning itself should have been serviceable to
mankind, or something else must follow. To live is sometimes
very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and we
must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we
should continue to exist upon this crowded earth.
If Thoreau had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover
of trees, birds, and fishes, and the open air and virtue, a
reader of wise books, an idle, selfish self-improver, he
would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to
metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who
can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private
means, and even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the
necessary amount of it to some six weeks a year, having the
more liberty, have only the higher moral obligation to be up
and doing in the interest of man.
The second passage is this: "There is a far more important
and warming heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning
of the wood. It is the smoke of industry, which is incense.
I had been so thoroughly warmed in body and spirit, that when
at length my fuel was housed, I came near selling it to the
ashman, as if I had extracted all its heat." Industry is, in
itself and when properly chosen, delightful and profitable to
the worker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you have
not, as Thoreau says, "earned money merely," but money,
health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.
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