"Life Without Principle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thoreau Henry David)

suspected what I was about. The lecture was as harmless as moonshine
to them. Whereas, if I had read to them the biography of the
greatest scamps in history, they might have thought that I had written
the lives of the deacons of their church. Ordinarily, the inquiry
is, Where did you come from? or, Where are you going? That was a
more pertinent question which I overheard one of my auditors put to
another one- "What does he lecture for?" It made me quake in my shoes.

To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a
world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and
flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. We select
granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build
fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of
granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten.
What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought
with the purest and subtilest truth? I often accuse my finest
acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while there are manners
and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the
lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of
steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly
mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each
other.

That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but
superficial, it was!- only another kind of politics or dancing. Men
were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed
only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man
stood on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual one leaning
on another, and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world
rest on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a
serpent, and had nothing to put under the serpent. For all fruit of
that stir we have the Kossuth hat.

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary
conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward
and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet
a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper,
or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only
difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the
newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our
inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the
post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away
with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive
correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I
have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not
dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees
say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires
more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.