Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How
could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished
a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not
pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of
some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life;—to
survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural
eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and
not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect
the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be
devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the
monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end
of a month—the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had
dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this—or the boy who
had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had
received a Rodgers penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his
ngers?... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied
navigation!—why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known
more about it. Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy,
while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even
sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading
Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
As with our colleges, so with a hundred “modern improvements”; there is
an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on
exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding
investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our
attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved
end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to
Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph
from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to
communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be
introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one
end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main
object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the
Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance
the rst news that will leak through into the broad, apping American ear will be
that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse
trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an
evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying
Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.
One says to me, “I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel;
you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country.” But I am
wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say
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