'… a tiny figure carrying a big stick, say, through a valley…'

'… 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.