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

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
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.
Time is but the stream I go a-shing 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; sh in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly
with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the rst 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.
“The Village”
After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usually bathed
again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the
dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle which study had
made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free. Every day or two I strolled to the
village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating
either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken
in homoeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves
and the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels,
so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the
pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of
muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the
other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairiedogs,
each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor’s to
gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits. The village appeared to me
a great news room; and on one side, to support it, as once at Redding & Company’s
on State Street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other groceries.
Some have such a vast appetite for the former commodity, that is, the news, and
such sound digestive organs, that they can sit forever in public avenues without
stirring, and let it simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian winds, or as if
inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to pain—otherwise it
would often be painful to bear—without aecting the consciousness. I hardly ever
failed, when I rambled through the village, to see a row of such worthies, either
sitting on a ladder sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined forward and their
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