'… books which could become the subject of conversation among strangers.'

'How dare you disturb me!'

Mark Woods, longtime proprietor of wood s lot, a true weblog, has died.

I took the train, it was good, it was empty.

The heavy weight of many a weary day / Not mine, and such as were not made for me.

'When was the last time you saw yourself at your best?'

And again: 'One may almost doubt if the wisest man'—say, Socrates—'has learned any thing of absolute value by living' (i, 10), meaning: if he has, it is not by living, but by, say, dying, or preparing to. But the practical, know-howsy flavor of Thoreau's comments in these paragraphs (the example, styled proverbially: knowing enough 'to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going') alludes to problems of survival, uncertain subsistence, preparation and provision, or as he'll style it later, 'getting a living'. So, to philosophize is to learn not to die?

The first of Thoreau's paragraphs on learning and being taught by others, or experience, quietly includes a criterion: 'what every body echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow' (i, 10). 'Truths' unspoken because untested, or spoken too much though never tested, contrast here with a possibility of not being told, of not being tellable-to, by others. Your experience, like your experiments, are yours, your findings never settled or overturned by what they report of theirs. So what you can say of yours must be somehow limited, conditioned.

'… seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him' (i, 7): the odd note in this persuading-to-let sounding, perhaps, because the money that would ordinarily mediate it has already been mentioned, and the transaction between craftsman and customer, seller and buyer, has been redescribed as if each party stood to do the same thing, to make the shoes or import the groceries, if not for the choice to have it done by the other. But without the money in the picture, 'persuade your neighbor to let you make his…' sounds like a task with no evident motivation—why would you want to? why would he want to? why would he have to be persuaded to want to?—calling attention to the moment of persuasion, of persuasive self-presentation, somewhere between civility and generosity, by which a business-doing man makes and keeps himself 'useful' to others, gets into and stays in his trade, generally. In particular, when it is part of his task not because he wants to persuade this buyer, this man, but because he's gone in on shoes, or coats, or groceries, and needs to keep persuading buyers to keep being his buyers, to let themselves be sold to. Thoreau's phrasing suggests that your choice is (so far) already made, but it is to see that your neighbors' be made accordingly. The coin for which you work is an alienated choice, stands for two or several choices, all those that circulate between men who let themselves be done for.