Thoreau's Journey

He desired to commit deportment into a corner and reduce it to its lowest damage so that he could determine whether life, at the bottom, were humble or sublime. If it proved to be mean, he stated, he would bulge the self-colored and genuine meanness of it and publish it to the world. On the otherwise hand, if it were sublime, he would know it through his own personal experience (Thoreau 74).

one(a) of the ways in which Thoreau demonstrates fictionically his argument for a full examined life is through the use of John husbandman, who sits one solar day after work thinking about his comprehend (186). Thoreau believes that we essential vigorously examine the things we hold important in life and ask ourselves who has determined that these things are important. He feels that we piddle allowed other people to determine the defining aspects of our life and that, consequently, we bring buzz off alienated from the true meaning of our lives. Thus, as John Farmer thinks about the labor he has performed, the nones of a flute play in the vicinity distract his minds from those thoughts and hint at a greater significance to his life. He begins to score that his labor is "no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off" (Thoreau 186). Thoreau constantly questions the race between men and their labor and the production from such labor because, in a related metaphor, he states that men have become the tools of

their tools (Thoreau 29). They have failed to realize that most of the luxuries and many of the so-called "comforts of life," are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of piece (Thoreau 10). This external labor of man has nothing to do with the teaching of his true self. Rather, as Thoreau's extended metaphor explains, labor serves to deal the better part of man "into the soil for compost" (3).

Thoreau gives the metaphor of the tailoress to demonstrate civilization's emphasis on the outward appearance of things with no concern for the rot that may be forming at the core.

He tells of how when he asked for a particular garment the tailoress responded that "They do not wanton them so now," not emphasizing the "They" but responding as if she quoted "an authority as impersonal as the fates" (Thoreau 19). Thoreau finds it difficult to get what he wants made simply because the tailoress cannot believe that he could mean what he is saying; that he could want a meet that is no longer considered fashionable. Finally, he finds himself "inclined to answer her with equalize mystery, and without any more emphasis on the "`they,'"--"It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now" (Thoreau 19). Of what use this mensuration of me if she does not measure my character? Thoreau asks. He concludes that the event demonstrates that we no longer worship the Graces, but rather Fashion. This shows how far we have come from keeping in touch with our humanity.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden or, living in the Woods. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1948.

In the midst of a gentle come down while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweetly and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and incomprehensible friendliness all at once like an automatic teller sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and
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