Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/276

 252 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1853,

hours, but cheap weeks and months ; that is, weeks which are bought at the rate I have named. Not that they are quite lost to me, or make me very melancholy, alas ! for I too often take a cheap satisfaction in so spending them, weeks of pasturing and browsing, like beeves and deer, which give me animal health, it may be, but create a tough skin over the soul and intellectual part. Yet, if men should offer my body a maintenance for the work of my head alone, I feel that it would be a dangerous temptation.

As to whether what you speak of as the &quot; world s way &quot; (which for the most part is my way), or that which is shown me, is the better, the former is imposture, the latter is truth. I have the coldest confidence in the last. There is only such hesitation as the appetites feel in following the aspirations. The clod hesitates because it is inert, wants animation. The one is the way of death, the other of life everlasting. My hours are not &quot; cheap in such a way that / doubt whether the world s way would not have been better,&quot; but cheap in such a way that I doubt whether the world s way, which I have adopted for the time, could be worse. The whole enterprise of this nation, which is not an upward, but a westward one, toward Oregon, California, Japan, etc., is totally devoid of inter-