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Chapter 2:
Reading

With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits,

all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for

certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In

accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a

family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in

dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor

accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner

of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling

robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did,

since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that

now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time

has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we

really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present,

nor future.

My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to

serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the

range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come

within the influence of those books which circulate round the world,

whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely

copied from time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mr

Udd, "Being seated, to run through the region of the

spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be

intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this

pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines." I

kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked

at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands, at

first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same

time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the

prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books

of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me

ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.

The student may read Homer or AEschylus in the Greek without

danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in

some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to

their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of

our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate

times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and

line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of

what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and

fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring

us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as

solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and

curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and

costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language,

which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be

perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the

farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length

make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous

student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be

written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics

but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles

which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern

inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well

omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to

read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that

will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the

day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent,

the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books

must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that

nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval

between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and

the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a

tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it

unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the

maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this

is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too

significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in

order to speak. The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and

Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were not entitled by the accident

of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages; for

these were not written in that Greek or Latin which they knew, but

in the select language of literature. They had not learned the

nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on which

they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead

a cheap contemporary literature. But when the several nations of

Europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their

own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then

first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from

that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman and

Grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few

scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading it.

However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of

eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or

above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars

is behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may

read them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe them.

They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous

breath. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to

be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a

transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who

can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his

occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd

which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and health of

mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his

expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of

relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more

universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest

to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not

only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;—not be

represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the

breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man's thought

becomes a modern man's speech. Two thousand summers have imparted

to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a

maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own

serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them

against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of

the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on

the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to

plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common

sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and

irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or

emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and

perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his

coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of

wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still

higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is

sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and

insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense

by the pains which be takes to secure for his children that

intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is

that he becomes the founder of a family.

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the

language in which they were written must have a very imperfect

knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable

that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern

tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a

transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor

AEschylus, nor Virgil even—works as refined, as solidly done, and

as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say

what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the

elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary

labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never

knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the

learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and

appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics

which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic

but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still

further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas

and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares,

and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited

their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may

hope to scale heaven at last.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by

mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been

read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not

astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry

convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep

accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble

intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is

reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and

suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to

stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours

to.

I think that having learned our letters we should read the best

that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and

words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on

the lowest and foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied

if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the

wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives

vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy

reading. There is a work in several volumes in our Circulating

Library entitled "Little Reading," which I thought referred to a

town of that name which I had not been to. There are those who,

like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even

after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer

nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide this

provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine

thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as

none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true

love run smooth—at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get

up again and go on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a

steeple, who had better never have gone up as far as the belfry; and

then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings

the bell for all the world to come together and hear, O dear! how he

did get down again! For my part, I think that they had better

metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man

weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes among the constellations,

and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not come

down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. The next time

the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house

burn down. "The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the Middle

Ages, by the celebrated author of `Tittle-Tol-Tan,' to appear in

monthly parts; a great rush; don't all come together." All this

they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and

with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no

sharpening, just as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent

gilt-covered edition of Cinderella—without any improvement, that

I can see, in the pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more

skill in extracting or inserting the moral. The result is dulness

of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general

deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. This

sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure

wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer

market.

The best books are not read even by those who are called good

readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this

town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very

good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and

spell. Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men

here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the

English classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the

ancient classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will

know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become

acquainted with them. I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who

takes a French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that,

but to "keep himself in practice," he being a Canadian by birth; and

when I ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this

world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to his English.

This is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to

do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who has

just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will

find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he

comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose

praises are familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find

nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed,

there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has

mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionally

mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and

has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as

for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town

can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that any nation

but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go

considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are

golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and

whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of;—

and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers

and class-books, and when we leave school, the "Little Reading," and

story-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our

conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only

of pygmies and manikins.

I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord

soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I

hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my

townsman and I never saw him—my next neighbor and I never heard

him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually

is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie

on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are underbred and

low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not

make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my

townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who

has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects.

We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by

first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and

soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns

of the daily paper.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There

are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we

could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the

morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on

the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in

his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us,

perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The

at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These

same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their

turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and

each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and

his life. Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality. The

solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has

had his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and is

driven as he believes into the silent gravity and exclusiveness by

his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands of

years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience; but

he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors

accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established

worship among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and

through the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with Jesus

Christ himself, and let "our church" go by the board.

We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making

the most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this

village does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my

townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance

either of us. We need to be provoked—goaded like oxen, as we

are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent system of common

schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved

Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library

suggested by the State, no school for ourselves. We spend more on

almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental

aliment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not

leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is

time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants

the fellows of universities, with leisure—if they are, indeed, so

well off—to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.

Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever?

Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under

the skies of Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to

us? Alas! what with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we

are kept from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected.

In this country, the village should in some respects take the place

of the nobleman of Europe. It should be the patron of the fine

arts. It is rich enough. It wants only the magnanimity and

refinement. It can spend money enough on such things as farmers and

traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose spending money

for things which more intelligent men know to be of far more worth.

This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house,

thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so much on

living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred

years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed

for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum

raised in the town. If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why

should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century

offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial? If we

will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the

best newspaper in the world at once?—not be sucking the pap of

"neutral family" papers, or browsing "Olive Branches" here in New

England. Let the reports of all the learned societies come to us,

and we will see if they know anything. Why should we leave it to

Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading? As the

nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever

conduces to his culture—genius—learning—wit—books—

paintings—statuary—music—philosophical instruments, and the

like; so let the village do—not stop short at a pedagogue, a

parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our

Pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock

with these. To act collectively is according to the spirit of our

institutions; and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more

flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman's. New England

can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and

board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. That is

the uncommon school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble

villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the

river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the

darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

Walden

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