Thoreau: On Luxuries
One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with’; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.
Henry David Thoreau, Economics (from his book Walden)
I was cleaning out my bookshelf, organizing some of the few remainding books[1] and came across a selection of Thoreau’s essays from Walden. I started reading it tonight and found this quote close to the beginning of his essay on Economics.
Written some 150 years ago, the words remain as relevant as ever.
- I’ve been paring down my collection considerably the past year, donating probably $3–4,000 worth of books to the local University. ↩
