To live is to love, and to think, and to dream, and to believe,
and to act as one loves and thinks and dreams and believes, that
is life; and, therefore, no mans life is bounded by physical
confines, no man lives in this place or that, in this house or
that; but every man lives in the world he has conquered for
himself, and no one knows the limits of the domains of another.
The farmers boy who sows the seed and watches the tender blades
part with volcanic force the surface of the earth, making it to
heave and tremble, who sees the buds and flowers of the spring
ripen into the fruit and foliage of autumn, who follows with
sympathetic vision all the mysterious processes of nature, lives a
broader and nobler life than the merchant who sees naught beyond
the four walls of his counting-room, or the traveller whose
superficial eye marks only the strange and the curious.
In the eyes of those about them Hawthorne "lived" a scant mile
from Emerson; in reality they did not live in the same spheres;
the boundaries of their worlds did not overlap, but, like two
far-separate stars, each felt the distant attraction and admired the
glow of the other, and that was all. The real worlds of Thoreau and
Alcott and Emerson did at times so far overlap that they trod on
common ground, but these periods were so brief and the spaces in
common so small that soon they wandered apart, each circling by
himself in an orbit of his own.
Words at best are poor instruments of thought; the more we use
them the more ambiguous do they become; no man knows exactly what
another means from what he says; every word is qualified by its
context, but the context of every word is eternity. How long shall
we listen to find out what a speaker meant by his opening
sentence?--an hour, a day, a week, a month?--these periods are all
too short, for with every added thought the meaning of the first
is changed for him as well as for us.
"Life" in common speech may mean either mere organic existence or
a metaphysical assumption; we speak of the life of a tree, and the
life of a man, and the life of a soul, of the life mortal and the
life immortal. Who can tell what we have in mind when we talk of
life? No one, for we cannot tell ourselves. We speak of life one
moment with a certain matter in mind, possibly the state of our
garden; in the infinitesimal fraction of a second additional cells
of our brain come into activity, additional areas are excited, and
our ideas scale the walls of the garden and scatter over the face
of the earth. If we attempt to explain, the very Police Pursuit | Daihatsu Terios Vs. Volvo V70 R | Holland process implies
the generation of new ideas and the modification of old, so that
long before the explanation of what we meant by the use of a given
word is finished, the meaning has undergone a change, and we
perceive that what we thought we meant by no means included all
that lurked in the mind.
In every-day speech we are obliged to distinguish by elaborate
circumlocution between a mans place of residence and that larger
and truer life,--his sphere of sympathies. Emerson lived in
Concord, Carlyle in Chelsea; to the casual reader these phrases
convey the impression that the life of Emerson was in some way
identified with and bounded by Concord; that the life of Carlyle
was in some way identified with and bounded by Chelsea; that in
some subtle manner the census of those two small communities
affected the philosophy of the two men; whereas we know that for a
long time the worlds in which they really did move and have their
being so far overlapped that they were near neighbors in thought,
much nearer than they would have been if they had "lived" in the
same village and met daily on the same streets.
The directory gives a mans abode, but tells us nothing,
absolutely nothing, about his life; the number of his house does
not indicate where he lives. It is possible to live in London, in
