To the Libraries
February 3, 1852
I have been to the libraries
(yesterday) at Cambridge and Boston . It would seem as if all things
compelled us to originality . How happens it that I find not in the
country, in the fields and woods, the works even of likeminded
naturalists and poets. Those who have expressed the purest and
deepest love of nature have not recorded it on the bark of the trees
with the lichens ; they have left no memento of it there ; but if I
would read their books I must go to the city, - so strange and
repulsive both to them and to me, - and deal with men and
institutions with whom I have no sympathy. When I Have just been
there on this errand, it seems too great a price" to pay for
access even to the works of Homer, or Cliaucer, or tamixus. Greece
and Asia Minor should henceforth bear Iliads and Odysseys as their
trees lichens .
But no! if the works of nature are to
any extent collected in the forest, the works of man are to a still
greater extent collected in the city . I have sometimes imagined a
library, i . e . a collection of the works of true poets,
philosophers, naturalists, etc., deposited not in a brick or marble edifice in a crowded and
dusty city, guarded by cold-blooded and methodical officials and
preyed on by bookworms, in which you own no share, and are not likely
to, but rather far away in the depths of a primitive forest, like the
ruins of Central America, where you can trace a series of crumbling
alcoves, the older books protecting the most modern from the
elements, partially buried by the luxuriance of nature, which the
heroic student could reach only after adventures in the wilderness
amid wild beasts and wild men. That, to my imagination, seems a
fitter place for these interesting relics, which owe no small part of
their interest to their antiquity, and whose occasion is nature, than the well-preserved edifice, with its
well-preserved officials on the side of a city's square. More
terrible than lions and tigers these Cerberuses. Access to nature for
original observation is secures:
by one ticket, by one kind of expense,
but access to the works of your predecessors by a very different kind
of expense. All things tend to cherish the originality of the
original. Nature, at least, takes no pains to introduce him to the
works of his predecessors, but only presents him with her own Opera
Omnia.
Is it the lover of nature who has
access to all that has been written on the subject of his favorite
studies ?
Source: Walden.org
Also found in The Journal: 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau, Damion Searls, ed. NYRB Classics, 2009. (pp 110-11)
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