No More Learning

,
"You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing," say the
Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which
we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our
convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate
discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not
know before that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist,--and
with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who
takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of
his relation to the lawmaker. "That is active duty," says the Vishnu
Purana, "which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for
our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other
knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist. "

* * * * *

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories,
how little exercised we have been in our minds, how few experiences we
have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly,
though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,--though it be with
struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It
would be well if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of
this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others appear to have
been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a
kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not
contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a
good deal more to live for, aye, and to die for, than they have
commonly.

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is
walking on a railroad, then, indeed, the cars go by without his
hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and
the cars return.

"Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveler of the windy glens,
Why hast thou left my ear so soon?
"

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few
are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Nature men
appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than
the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of
the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape
there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world
? ? ? ? ? ? , Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and
we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border
life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and
transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state
into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper.
Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a
will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon
nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality
so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The
walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town
sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their
owners' deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the
actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the
word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have
myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still
as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade
from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter
painted stands out dimly from beneath.