Project Gutenberg #205
Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau
1854Thoreau's Walden chapters plus Civil Disobedience, prepared from Project Gutenberg HTML for section-by-section reading.
Project Gutenberg #205 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for MojiMori from public-domain source metadata
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AI Summary
Chapter 12 — Higher Laws Central question What is the relationship between nature, appetite, and moral law? Main argument Thoreau suggests that a higher moral life requires restraint and a more refined relation to...
his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him,—Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.—But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.