헨리 데이비드 소로우 - 나는 어디서 살았으며 무엇을 위해 살았는가
At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer’s premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry1 with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging2 it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on it,—took everything but a deed3 of it,—took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk,—cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat?—better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed4 to lay out the land into orchard, woodlot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
소로우는 사는 곳 인근의 땅들이 집터나 농장으로 적합할지 두루 조사하고 다님. 상상 속에서 농장을 사고 부지를 걷고 과실을 맛보고 농장주와 담소도 나눔. 모든 것을 인수했지만 증서는 안 받고 땅주인과 교류함. 소로우에게 집은 sedes(앉는 자리)임. 마을에서 먼 곳의 집터도 몇 개 찾아냄. 땅을 어떻게 구성할 것인지 상상만 하고 경작하지 않고 남겨 둠. 손대지 않고 남겨둔 것이 많은 사람일수록 대체로 부유하기 때문임.
My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal5 of several farms,—the refusal was all I wanted,—but I never got my fingers burned by actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual possession was when I bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife—every man has such a wife—changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes,—
농장의 선매권을 얻는 상상도 하는데 선매권은 소로우가 간절히 바란 것이긴 했으나 실제로 농장을 구입하는 위험한 짓을 해본 적은 없음. 농장을 소유할 뻔한 적은 있는데 할로웰 농장을 사서 씨앗을 고르고 수레 제작을 위한 재료를 모으기 시작했으나 땅주인의 아내가 마음을 바꾸어 땅을 못 사게 됨. 땅주인은 10달러를 줄 테니 계약을 파기하자고 했고 전 재산이 10센트였던 소로우는 10달러를 거절하고 농장도 받지 않음. 이로써 소로우는 농장의 경치와 10센트, 씨앗, 수레 재료를 가지게 됨.
“I am monarch of all I survey6,
My right there is none to dispute.”
경치에 관한 한 소로우는 그가 바라보는 모든 것의 군주이고 그러한 권리에 반박하는 이는 아무도 없음.
I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.
소로우는 어떤 시인이 농장의 가장 값진 부분을 눈으로 즐기고 돌아오는 모습을 봄. 농장주는 시인이 사과 서리를 해간다고 생각하지만 소로우가 볼 때 시인은 시 속에서 농장을 마음껏 취하는 것임.
The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were; its complete retirement, being, about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark. I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was ready to carry it on; like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders,—I never heard what compensation he received for that,—and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it; for I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted if I could only afford to let it alone. But it turned out as I have said.
소로우에게 할로웰 농장의 매력은 외진 곳에 있다는 점임. 농장주는 주변의 모든 풍경을 실용의 측면에서 바라보아 이를 개선하려 하지만 소로우는 풍경 자체를 즐겼기에 농장주가 환경을 개선하기 전에 얼른 농장을 사들여야겠다고 생각했었음. 소로우에게 농장 구매는 값을 치름으로써 방해받지 않고 농장을 내버려두어 상상 속에서 작물을 수확하는 것이었음. 그러나 농장구매가 엎어지면서 불가능하게 됨.
All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale, (I have always cultivated a garden,) was, that I had had my seeds ready. Many think that seeds improve with age. I have no doubt that time discriminates between the good and the bad; and when at last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed. But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.
소로우는 동료 인간들에게 가능한 한 자유롭고 얽매이지 않는 삶을 살기를 당부하고자 함. 농장 일에 치여 사는 것이나 교도소에 갇혀 사는 것이나 얽매여(committed) 있다는 점에서는 별 차이가 없음.
Old Cato7, whose “De Re Rusticâ”8 is my “Cultivator,” says, and the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage, “When you think of getting a farm, turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good.” I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last.
대 카토는 농장을 구하고자 한다면 탐욕스레 달려들어 사들이지 않고 여러 번 둘러보며 숙고해야 한다고 말했음. 소로우는 사는 동안에는 거듭해서 둘러본 후 처음으로 그곳에 묻힌 사람이 되어 살아있을 때보다 더 큰 기쁨을 느끼고자 함.
The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose to describe more at length; for convenience, putting the experience of two years into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.
같은 방식으로 2년간 수행한 실험을 편의상 1년으로 줄여 소개하고자 함.
When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on Independence Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough, weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night. The upright white hewn9 studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited the year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth every where.
소로우는 1845년 7월 4일 독립기념일에 숲에 자리를 잡고 살기 시작했음. 집은 완전치 못해서 추웠지만 깨끗하고 동화 속 집 같았음. 집은 상상 속에서 매우 아름다웠고 아침에는 창조의 시가 들렸으나 많은 사람들이 그것을 듣지 못함. 밖으로 나가면 사방이 올림포스와 같음.
The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With this more substantial shelter about me, I had made some progress toward settling in the world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go outdoors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather. The Harivansa10 says, “An abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning.” Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder and more thrilling songsters11 of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager,—the wood-thrush12, the veery13, the scarlet tanager14, the field-sparrow15, the whippoorwill16, and many others.
그 집은 소로우가 배와 천막 이후로 가져본 첫 집이었음. 그 집에서 소로우는 새들의 이웃이 되었음. 마을 주민들에게는 노래해줄 일이 없는 많은 숲새들이 소로우에게 노래를 불러 줌.
I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains.
소로우의 집은 콩코드 마을에서 1-1.5마일 정도 떨어진 연못 옆에, 콩코드 전쟁터라는 들판에서는 남쪽으로 약 2마일 위치에 있었음. 집은 숲에서 낮은 지대에 있어서, 숲으로 둘러싸인 호숫가가 그 집에서 가장 먼 지평선이었음. 소로우는 그 연못에서 여러 다양한 인상을 받음.
This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the wood-thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important. From a hill top near by, where the wood had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the north-west, those true-blue coins from heaven’s own mint, and also of some portion of the village. But in other directions, even from this point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. It is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. One value even of the smallest well is, that when you look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was but dry land17.
소로우는 이 작은 호수와 관련하여 보이는 풍광을 감상함. 근처 언덕에 올라가서도 아름다운 풍경을 봄. 이쪽 봉우리에서 호수 건너편의 서드베리 목초지들을 바라보면 호수 때문에 호수 너머 땅은 고립되어 동동 떠 있는 얇은 지표면처럼 보이는데 소로우는 그럴 때 그가 자리잡은 땅이 육지에 지나지 않는다는 사실을 깨달음.
Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my imagination. The low shrub-oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose, stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men. “There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon,”—said Damodara18, when his herds required new and larger pastures.
소로우는 초원을 바라보며 상상함. 다모다라에 따르면 광활한 지평선을 마음껏 누리는 존재 말고는 세상 누구도 행복하지 않음.
Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair19, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades20 or the Hyades21, to Aldebaran22 or Altair23, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such was that part of creation where I had squatted24;—
소로우는 그의 집의 천계처럼 멀리 떨어져 있으면서도 늘 새롭고 깨끗한 장소에 있음을 알게 됨. 그는 여러 별이나 성단 가까이에 사는 셈이었고 칠흑 같은 밤에나 이웃에게 보일 정도로 희미하게 반짝이는 존재였음.
“There was a shepherd that did live,
And held his thoughts as high
As were the mounts whereon his flocks
Did hourly feed him by.”
한 목동이 살았다네 / 그의 생각은 양떼가 매 시간 그를 먹이던 그 산만큼이나 높았다네
What should we think of the shepherd’s life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to this effect: “Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.” I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air—to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.” Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
소로우는 새벽과 아침을 예찬함. 그는 아침의 모기 소리에 감명을 받고, 자신의 능력으로 기상하면 삶이 고귀해진다고 느낌. 탄력 있고 활기 있는 사고를 하는 사람에게 하루는 늘 아침이나 마찬가지이며 진정으로 '깨어 있는' 사람은 거의 없음.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done.
우리는 다시 깨어나서 그 상태로 깨어있는 법을 배워야 함. 인간은 도덕적으로, 의식적인 노력으로 삶을 향상시키려는 인간의 의지로 무언가를 감상할 분위기와 매개를 조각하고 색칠할 수 있다. 인간에게는 자신의 삶에서 많은 것을 얻을 책임이 있다.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
소로우는 삶의 정수를 느끼고 알아내기 위해 숲에서 살게 된 것임. 그가 보기에 인간은 사람이 사는 주된 목적이 신을 영원히 찬미하는 것이라고 성급하게 결론 내림.
Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers25, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irish-man, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.
우리는 하찮은 삶을 살고 사소한 일로 삶을 낭비함. 인간은 간소하게 살아야 함. 오늘날 미국은 통제가 불가능할 정도로 크고 가치 있는 목표 없이 무분별한 소비를 일삼아 황폐해진 조직이 되어버렸음. 이 상황을 타개하기 위해서는 엄하게 절약해야 함.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. As for work, we haven’t any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus’ dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire,—or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, “What’s the news?” as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. “Pray tell me any thing new that has happened to a man any where on this globe,”—and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.
우리는 일을 하면서도 중요한 일은 하나도 하지 못함.
For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life—I wrote this some years ago—that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel26 wrecked, or one steamboat27 blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter,—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad28 instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure,—news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand29 with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions,—they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers,—and serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers: and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations30 are of a merely pecuniary31 character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted.
What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old! “Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!” The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week,—for Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one,—with this one other draggle-tail32 of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, “Pause! Avast!33 Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?”
Shams34 and delusions35 are esteemed36 for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence,—that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating37 and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering38, and consenting39 to be deceived40 by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern41 its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, that “there was a king’s son, who, being expelled in infancy42 from his native city, was brought up by a forester43, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father’s ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul,” continues the Hindoo philosopher, “from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme.” I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be. If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think you, would the “Mill-dam44” go to? If he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house45, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts46 of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual47 instilling48/ and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry,—determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of 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-fishing 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; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first 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.
각주
- 농사(특히 세심하게 잘 짓는 농사를 가리킴) [본문으로]
- mortgage: 저당 잡히다 [본문으로]
- (보통 주택·건물의 소유권을 증명하는) 증서 [본문으로]
- 충분한 [본문으로]
- 취사선택(권); 우선권, 선매권(先買權) [본문으로]
- 1. (총괄적으로) 바라보다, 둘러보다, 내려다보다, 전망하다; <사람 등을> 이리저리 뜯어보다 / 2. 살펴보다 / 3. <건물 등을> 검사하다, 조사하다, 사정(査定)하다 / 4. <토지 등을> 측량하다 [본문으로]
- 로마의 정치가 대(大) 카토 [본문으로]
- 《농업론》 [본문으로]
- hew의 과거분사: (도끼 등으로) 베어서 대충 모양을 다듬은, 잘라낸 [본문으로]
- 《하리밤사》: ‘Hari의 족보’를 서술하는 문헌으로, B.C.400~A.D.400년에 걸쳐 성립된 《마하바라타(Mahabharata)》의 부록(Khila)에 해당함 [본문으로]
- songster: 명금(고운 소리로 우는 새) [본문으로]
- 북아메리카 동부산 개똥지빠귀의 일종 [본문으로]
- 비어리: 북아메리카산 개똥지빠귀의 일종 [본문으로]
- 풍금새 [본문으로]
- 멧새과 방울새의 일종 [본문으로]
- 북아메리카 쏙독새 [본문으로]
- 육지 [본문으로]
- 15세기 인도의 천문학자이자 철학자 [본문으로]
- 카시오페이아 자리 [본문으로]
- 플레이아데스 성단 [본문으로]
- 히아데스 성단 [본문으로]
- 알데바란(황소자리 알파) [본문으로]
- 알타이르(견우성) [본문으로]
- squat: 1. 웅크리다, 쪼그리고 앉다(crouch) ((down)) / 2. (남의 땅 또는 공유지에) 무단으로 정착하다, 미개간지에 정착하다 [본문으로]
- 기찻길에 까는 침목. 앞서 깨어남(awakening)에 대해 이야기하다가 자는 사람(sleeper)과 생김이 같은 침목(sleeper)을 비유로 사용하고 있다. 일종의 punning [본문으로]
- (대형)선박 [본문으로]
- 기선 [본문으로]
- 무수히 많은 (것 또는 그러함) [본문으로]
- 사전에, ... 전에 미리 [본문으로]
- speculation: 추측, (어림)짐작; 투기 [본문으로]
- 금전상의 [본문으로]
- 치맛자락을 질질 끄는 여자, 단정치 못한 여자 [본문으로]
- 항해에서, “그만!”이라고 외치는 말 [본문으로]
- sham: 가짜, 엉터리; 사기꾼, 허풍선이 [본문으로]
- delusion: 망상, 착각, 오해 [본문으로]
- esteem: (대단한) 존경(을 하다); (...라고) 여기다 [본문으로]
- 아주 신나는, 매우 즐거운 [본문으로]
- 잠, 수면; 잠을 자다 [본문으로]
- consent: (...에) 동의하다, 승낙하다; 기분이나 의견 등이 일치하다 [본문으로]
- deceive: 속이다, 기만하다 [본문으로]
- 알아차리다, 포착하다; 알아보다, 알아듣다 [본문으로]
- 유아기, (발달의) 초창기 [본문으로]
- 삼림 감독관 [본문으로]
- 물방아용 둑이나 연못. 마을 중심지라는 뜻이기도 함 [본문으로]
- 퀘이커 교도의 예배당 [본문으로]
- (도시의) 변두리, 교외 [본문으로]
- (오랫동안) 끊임없이 계속되는, 빈번한; 종신의 [본문으로]
- instill: 스며들게 하다, 한 방울씩 떨어뜨리다 [본문으로]
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