Message #136438

[Mindwarp]

There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be
detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking
for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare
that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted
to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society. Though
he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, he
always had a presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so
primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising
than a merely learned man's, it rarely ripened to anything which can
be reported. He suggested that there might be men of genius in the
lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate,
who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all; who
are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they
may be dark and muddy.

  Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of
my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I
told them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to
lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from the
annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of April,
when everybody is on the move; and I had my share of good luck, though
there were some curious specimens among my visitors. Half-witted men
from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but I endeavored to
make them exercise all the wit they had, and make their confessions to
me; in such cases making wit the theme of our conversation; and so was
compensated. Indeed, I found some of them to be wiser than the
so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen of the town, and thought
it was time that the tables were turned. With respect to wit, I
learned that there was not much difference between the half and the
whole. One day, in particular, an inoffensive, simpleminded pauper,
whom with others I had often seen used as fencing stuff, standing or
sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle and himself from
straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to live as I did. He told
me, with the utmost simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather
inferior, to anything that is called humility, that he was
"deficient in intellect." These were his words. The Lord had made
him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as much for him as for another.
"I have always been so," said he, "from my childhood; I never had much
mind; I was not like other children; I am weak in the head. It was the
Lord's will, I suppose." And there he was to prove the truth of his
words. He was a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a
fellow-man on such promising ground- it was so simple and sincere
and so true all that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he
appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but
it was the result of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis
of truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our
intercourse might go forward to something better than the
intercourse of sages.

  I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the
town's poor, but who should be; who are among the world's poor, at any
rate; guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your
hospitality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal
with the information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to
help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not actually
starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the world,
however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did
not know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my
business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness.
Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating
season. Some who had more wits than they knew what to do with; runaway
slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like
the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their
track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say,

        "O Christian, will you send me back?

One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward
toward the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken,
and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads,
like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens,
all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's
dew- and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas
instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you
crawl all over. One man proposed a book in which visitors should write
their names, as at the White Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a
memory to make that necessary.

  I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors.
Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the
woods. They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved
their time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude
and employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from
something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in
the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless
committed men, whose time was an taken up in getting a living or
keeping it; ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly
of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions; doctors,
lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when I
was out- how came Mrs.- to know that my sheets were not as clean as
hers?- young men who had ceased to be young, and had concluded that it
was safest to follow the beaten track of the professions- all these
generally said that it was not possible to do so much good in my
position. Ay! there was the rub. The old and infirm and the timid,
of whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden
accident and death; to them life seemed full of danger- what danger is
there if you don't think of any?- and they thought that a prudent
man would carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might
be on hand at a moment's warning. To them the village was literally
a com-munity, a league for mutual defence, and you would suppose
that they would not go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest.
The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he
may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as
he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he
runs. Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest
bores of all, who thought that I was forever singing,

        This is the house that I built;

        This is the man that lives in the house that I built;

but they did not know that the third line was,

        These are the folks that worry the man

        That lives in the house that I built.

I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I
feared the men-harriers rather.