After-Orts #38

  A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it. While the fresh water keeps on bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung, and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, remain unstained.
  To have that. Not a cistern but a perpetual spring.
 How? By working to win your freedom. Hour by hour. Through patience, honesty, humility.
​     — Marching Aurelius, Meditations, 8.51

   You participate in a society by your existence. Then participate in its life through your actions—all your actions. Any action not directed toward a social end (directly or indirectly) is a disturbance to your life, an obstacle to wholeness, a source of dissension.
     — ibid., 9.23
 
People who have never read Walden know that Thoreau lived alone for two years in his late 20s in a cabin beside Walden Pond, paring life down to the necessities. Almost as many are familiar with a seeming contradiction: Thoreau went home some weekends to his parents’ house. Ardent defenders respond that young Henry was still a good son, assisting in the family pencil factory. This detail of filial loyalty is so unexpected that it usually ends the conversation.  
  — From a splendid book review by Mark Greif, Emerson Didn’t Practice the Self-Reliance He Preached, in The Atlantic, December 2021,
 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/12/emerson-transcendentalists-concord-robert-gross/620534/