The Blog of Henry David Thoreau: All good things are cheap...Thoreau's Journal: 3-Mar-1841

3.03.2014

All good things are cheap
...Thoreau's Journal: 3-Mar-1841

I thank God for sound; it always mounts, and makes me mount. I think I will not trouble myself for any wealth, when I can be so cheaply enriched. Here I contemplate to drudge that I may own a farm—and may have such a limitless estate for the listening. All good things are cheap; all bad are very dear.

3 comments:

michael jameson said...: music,voice,sounds, all they take from you is time yet give so much. it enriches me, it can stir my emotions and thought far more then all else!, i can buy things to play with of which i soon tire but sounds can thrill me forever be it a sweet voice or a violinist vibrating my very soul, or the calming effect of the river that speaks speaks to all that will listen. michael jameson oldantiqueguy@hotmail.com; Mar 3, 2010, 1:53:00 PM
vanjulio said...: guitar lego

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmAza9nCHXM

I wonder if youtube counts? Free!; Mar 3, 2010, 8:20:00 PM
AuthorMegNorth said...: "All bad things very dear." Haha. I find Thoreau really funny. His wit reminds me of Oscar Wilde or Jane Austen, but his subject matter is, of course, quite different from theirs. I find many bad things very dear, too! He's right about good things being cheap, too. Nature is cheap, birdsong is cheap, trees are cheap, the ocean is cheap. They were always here and always free.; Mar 4, 2010, 7:04:00 PM

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one of the native forces

“Thoreau was a surprising fellow—he is not easily grasped—is elusive: yet he is one of the native forces—stands for a fact, a movement, an upheaval: Thoreau belongs to America, to the transcendental, to the protesters: then he is an outdoor man: all outdoor men everything else being equal appeal to me. Thoreau was not so precious, tender, a personality as Emerson: but he was a force—he looms up bigger and bigger: his dying does not seem to have hurt him a bit: every year has added to his fame.”

~Walt Whitman as recorded by Horace Traubel

the simple print

The text is from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis Allen, 14 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906).

Each blog post is an excerpt from that day's entry in the Journal, and although not necessarily the complete entry, it is an integral and intact section thereof.

"It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.... One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great." -Emerson