Unit 2: Selection Vocabulary 2

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness.

In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.

As for work, we haven't any of any consequence.

"Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe"—and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

My imagination constructed a dilapidated and shaky span of old wooden slats, rotted and narrow and weak with no concrete support anywhere.

No great risks. No more falling down. No more skinned knees. No great failures. I wondered: is all this inevitable?

Dreams are delicate and made of gossamer. They hang lightly on breezes and suspend as if from nothing. The slightest wind can tear them apart.

My dream was buffeted by my friends. What the hell for? they asked me. What are you trying to prove?

Perhaps it is the danger involved, perhaps it is too much an act of desire and determination, an act of passion and volition, or simply too out of the ordinary.

For whatever reasons, my idea met with disapproval, and instead of childish jubilation I approached canoeing the river with doubt and sorrow—sorrow because the glory with which I first came upon this adventure was dashed by friends.

But there is more to America than raw industrial might.

In our eagerness to expand and to improve, we have relegated nature to a weekend role, and we have banished it from our daily lives.

But until the clock strikes the last hour of the time allotted to me as President by vote of all the people of this country, I will never turn away from the duty that my office demands or the vigilance that my oath of office requires.

But we are not going to allow them to intrude their own specialized private objective on the larger public trust.