Henry David Thoreau • 11 februari 1852

• Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was een Amerikaans essayist, leraar, sociaal filosoof, natuuronderzoeker en dichter - en schrijver van Walden. Fragmenten uit zijn dagboeken zijn hier te lezen. Meer hier.

11 February 1852. Concord, Mass.
  Wednesday. When the thermometer is down to 20° in the morning, as last month, I think of the poor dogs who have no masters. If a poor dog has no master, everybody will throw a billet of wood at him. It never rains but it pours.
  It now rains,—a drizzling rain mixed with mist, which ever and anon fills the air to the height of fifteen or twenty feet. It makes what they call an old-fashioned mill privilege in the streets, i.e. I suppose, a privilege on a small stream good only for a part of the year.
  Perhaps the best evidence of an amelioration [verbetering] of the climate -at least that the snows are less deep than formerly-is the snow-shoes which still lie about in so many garrets, now useless, though the population of this town has not essentially increased for seventy-five years past, and the travelling within the limits of the town accordingly not much facilitated. No man ever cases them now, yet the old men used them in their youth.
I have lived some thirty odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably can tell me nothing, to the purpose. There is life, an experiment untried by me, and it does not avail me that you have tried it. If I have any valuable experience I am sure to reflect that this my mentors said nothing about. What were mysteries to the child remain mysteries to the old man.
It is a mistake to suppose that in a country where railroads and steamboats and the printing press and the church, where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages.... To know this, I should not need to look farther than to the shanties [hutten] which everywhere line our railroads, that last improvement in civilization. -But I will refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of the white, or enlightened spots on the map. Yet I have no doubt that that nation's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers.