ive him of your company
and he laughs to himself. Take away his possessions and he tells you he
is rich because he wants so little, whilst you are poor, for you have
surrounded yourself with a hundred unnecessary wants. Like Antaeus, the
mythical giant, he derives his strength and his power to overcome
enemies from contact with the earth. He discovers a mode of being,
behind and beyond ordinary existence. He says to the busy crowds of
industry and commerce, to the men and women who wear out their lives in
the joyless chase of success: "You will die before you know satisfaction
and rest. Come and be human, come and grow in the sunshine and the
rain." He finds that two-thirds of the reforms for which men labour
would not be needed if the artificialities of society were abandoned. He
is, of course, unpractical and self-centred. Listen to Thoreau, the
arch-enemy of the social treadmill, and to his scorn of reformers:

Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If
anything ail a man so that he does not perform his functions,
if he have a pain in his bowels even--for that is the seat of
sympathy--he forthwith sets about reforming--the world. Being a
microcosm himself, he discovers--and it is a true discovery, and
he is the man to make it--that the world has been eating green
apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green
apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children
of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his drastic
philanthropy seeks out the Esquimaux and the Patagonian, and
embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus by a
few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile
using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his
dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its
cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its
crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live.

And whilst thus branding those who set out to reform others, he shows
his adherence to the great order of self-reformers by the following
conclusion:

I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I
never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

Thoreau cultivates simplicity with an intense regard for the effect on
himself. He is--in spite of his seclusion--above all a prophet amongst
men. He made great discover