And since you were bitching about farming before, here's some on that:
"Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber."
Ah look here he is on clothing:
"As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe.... No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience."
Ah you'll love this one, it's about division of labor and private property:
"What sort of a country is that where the huckleberry fields are private property? When I pass such fields on the highway, my hearts sinks within me. I see a blight on the land. Nature is under a veil there. I make haste away from the accursed spot. Nothing could deform her fair face more. I cannot think of it ever after but as the place where fair and palatable berries are converted into money, where the huckleberry is desecrated. It is true, we have as good a right to make berries private property as a thousand other practices which custom has sanctioned; but that is the worst of it, for it suggests how bad the rest are and to what result our civilization and division of labor naturally tend.
It has come this, that A___, a professional huckleberry pickers, has hired B___'s field and, we will suppose, is now gathering the crop with a patent huckleberry rake. C___, a professed cook, is superintending the boiling of a pudding made of some of the berries, while Professor D___, for whom the pudding is intended, sits in his library writing a book -- a work on the Vaccinieae, of course. And now the result of this downward course will be seen in that work, which should be the ultimate fruit of the huckleberry field. It will be worthless. It will have none of the spirit of the huckleberry in it, and the read of it will be a weariness of the flesh. I believe in a different kind of division of labor: that Professor D___ should be encouraged to divide himself freely between his library and the huckleberry field."
Would you like to continue, dear one
The search for understanding?
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