Chapter 37 Where I Live; Why I Live - 5

I go to the woods because I wish to live discreetly, facing only the essential facts of life, and see if I learn what life has to teach me, lest I die knowing that I have not lived at all.I don't want to live a non-life life, life is so lovely; but I don't want to practice and live a hermit life, unless it is absolutely necessary.I want to live deeply and absorb the essence of life, to live securely, to live Spartan, so as to eradicate everything that is not life, to set aside a mowed area, and to carefully To mow or prune, to compress life into a corner, to reduce it to its lowest condition, and if it proves to be mean, to realize its true meanness in its entirety, and to make its meanness Publish it to the world; or, if it is sublime, experience it personally, and make a true report on my next excursion.For, it seems to me, most people are not quite sure whether their life is that of the devil or of God, and yet, somewhat rashly, judge that the main purpose of life is to "glorify God and receive eternal justice from God." joy there."

However, we still live humblely, like ants; although the myth tells us that we have already become human; like people in Lilliputian, we fight with long-necked cranes; Dirty on top: our best virtues are here superfluous and avoidable doom.Our lives are consumed in trivialities.An honest person needs no more numbers than ten fingers, and in special cases ten toes are added at most, and the rest may be generalized.Simple, simple, simple!I said, it's best to only have two or three things for you, not a hundred or a thousand; you don't have to count a million, isn't half a dozen enough to count? In short, the accounts can be recorded on the thumbnail up.In this stormy sea of ​​civilized life, a man has to live through such storms and quicksands and a thousand and one kinds of events, unless he jumps and goes straight to the bottom of the sea, don't make reckoning to reach the destination port safely , Those who succeed in their careers are really great calculators.Simplify, simplify!There is no need for three meals a day, if necessary, one meal is enough; instead of hundreds of dishes, five is enough; as for other things, just reduce them in the same proportion.Our life is like the German Confederation, made up of small states.The borders of the Confederation are always changing, and not even a German can tell you the borders at any time.The country has so-called internal affairs improvement, but in fact it is all superficial and even superficial affairs. Extravagance and extravagance are wrecked, for it has no calculation and no higher purpose than a million homes on earth; and in this case, as in them, the only remedy is a grim economics, A simple life more austere than the Spartans, and raising the purpose of life.Life is too slutty now.People think that the country must have commerce, that it must export ice, that it must talk by telegraph, and that it must travel thirty miles an hour, without doubting their usefulness; but should we live like baboons, or like men? , this point is not certain.Who wants to build railroads if we don't make sleepers, and roll rails, and work day and night, but just fumble with our lives to improve them?If we don't build railways, how can we get to heaven on time?But who needs railroads as long as we live at home and mind our own affairs?We didn't come to ride the railway, but the railway took us.Haven't you ever wondered what are the sleepers that lie under the railroad?Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee.The rails lay on them, and they were covered with yellow sand, and the train passed them smoothly.I tell you, they were really fast asleep.Every few years, a new batch of sleepers is replaced, and the vehicles are still running on them; if a group of people can ride happily on the rails, there must be another group of unfortunate people who are riding below. overwhelmed.When we passed a dream-walker, a derailed superfluous sleeper, they had to wake him up, stop the car abruptly, and yell like it was an exception.It amuses me to hear that every five miles they send a party to keep the sleepers asleep, and keep them as high as they should be, so that they sometimes stand up.

Why should we live in such haste, in such a waste of life?We made up our minds to starve to death before we were hungry.People often say that one stitch in time can save nine stitches in the future, so they sew a thousand stitches now, just to save nine thousand stitches tomorrow.When it came to work, nothing came of it, we had chorea and couldn't keep our heads still.If under the bell tower of the monastery I have just pulled the rope a few times to make the bell signal the fire, and the bell has not rung loudly, the people in the fields near Concord, despite how many times it is said this morning As busy as he was, no man, or child, or woman, I daresay, would have run toward that sound without laying down his work, not chiefly to save property from the fire, but more, if we be honest. Most people come to see the fire, because it is already burning, and the fire, you know, we did not set it; or to see how the fire was put out, if it doesn't take much effort, you can still help Putting out the fire; that's it, even if the church itself is on fire.A man eats lunch and only takes a nap for half an hour. When he wakes up, he raises his head and asks, "What's the news?" It's as if all human beings are on guard for him.He was also ordered to be woken every half hour, no doubt for no particular reason: then, to repay him, he talked about his dream.After a night's sleep, news is as essential as breakfast. "Tell me the news that happened to anyone, anywhere on the planet,"—and he read the newspaper over coffee and rolls, and learned that there was a man's death on the Ouachito River this morning. His eyes had been gouged out; he didn't care at all that he was living in the unfathomable black hole of this world, and his eyes had long since lost pupils.