My annual foray into the classics. This one was about about nature so I should love it, right? I LIKE NATURE. And I did for the first bit that was all about the numbers behind building a home, growing x crop, selling it for y dollars, turning profit, rethinking things the following year, etc. etc., but then it got all existential and borderline looney.

I was also expecting a story about a guy who said “f it” and escaped to the woods to live off the land. You know, the hippie bible it’s touted to be. That’s not at all what happened. He had friends over, visited town regularly, barely lived outside of said town, and famously, his mother did his laundry. I’m hardly alone in not being a fan.

I struggled through the last two-thirds of this, but did get through it; more than I can say for 2017’s attempt at A Tale of Two Cities.

My highlights:

  • “Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”
  • “The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm.”
  • “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 mankind.”
  • “I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.”
  • “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”
  • “If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes.”
  • “Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.”
  • “The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another.”
  • “No dust gathers on the grass.”
  • “Men have become the tools of their tools.”
  • “How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.”
  • “Our life is frittered away by detail.”
  • “Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.”
  • “The farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.”
  • “who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?”
  • “We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.”
  • “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”