The elder man had announced the programme, but by 1847 he
was himself almost what Thoreau would call a "committed man,"
with family and household responsibilities, with a living to
earn, and bound, like every professional writer and speaker, to
have some measure of regard for his public. But Thoreau was ready
to travel lightly and alone. If he should fail in the great
adventure for spiritual perfection, it was his own affair. He had
no intimates, no confidant save the multitudinous pages of his
"Journal," from which--and here again he followed Emerson's
example--his future books were to be compiled. Many of his most
loyal admirers will admit that such a quest is bound, by the very
conditions of the problem, to be futile. Hawthorne allegorized it
in "Ethan Brand," and his quaint illustration of the folly of
romantic expansion of the self apart from the common interests of
human kind is the picture of a dog chasing its own tail. "It is
time now that I begin to live," notes Thoreau in the "Journal,"
and he continued to say it in a hundred different ways until the
end of all his journalizing, but he never quite captured the
fugitive felicity.
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