…Occasionally whole groups of Thoreau’s friends came out together to the pond and swarmed into his little cabin. It became quite the fashion to hold picnics on his doorstep, and when it rained, as many as twenty-five or thirty people took refuge inside the tiny cabin. On August 1,1846, the Women’s Anti-Slavery Society of the town came to the cabin for the annual commemoration of the freeing of the West Indian slaves, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.H. Channing, and Reverend Caleb Stetson spoke to the assembled group.
Image:http://tylerscarletart.blogspot.ca/2011/05/henry-david-thoreau-portrait.html
The only guests Thoreau did not welcome were the curious- and there were plenty of them- who used any excuse to see the inside of the cabin. When they asked for a glass of water, Thoreau, knowing their real intent, would point to the pond and offer to lend them his dipper. Once two young ladies thus borrowed his dipper and failed to return it, and he fumed in his Journal: “I had the right to suppose they came to steal. They were a disgrace to their sex and to humanity…They will never know peace till they have returned the dipper. In all worlds this is decreed.”
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…In his first chapter describing the proper structuring of one’s life, Thoreau discusses the problem of overemphasis on worldly gain:
What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun. . . or chained for life at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires . . . – even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes I daily witness. . . .
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of . . . . But men labor under a mistake. The better part of man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost.
By drawing parallels between legendary acts of penance around the world and the townsmen’s toils to win luxury and comfort, Thoreau conveys the profound degree to which we become overtaken by the world of practical demands and financial success. He even goes as far as to call it a kind of slavery, writing, “[W]orst of all [is] when you are the slave-driver of yourself! Talk of the divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway. . . Does divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses!”…
The confusion that Ethics of the Fathers and Thoreau are warning against is the allure that worldly pleasures have upon us. Rather than using money as a tool to build the foundation for a good life, it is all too easy to treat money and the luxuries it affords as ends in themselves. The result is as described in Ecclesiastes that “one who has one hundred wants two hundred.” In other words, once we start to treat money as the goal, then the demands of physicality will never cease!
This message is especially important to us in our current era of consumerism where status and honor are often perceived as being gained through wealth and worldly achievement rather being based on the integrity of the actual person.Read More:http://www.aish.com/sp/ph/Torah-and-Thoreau.html
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