Thoreau Writing, English homework help
Thoreau Writing, English homework help
Timed Writing 2
Following is an excerpt from “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” by Henry David Thoreau. Determine what Thoreau’s assertion is about living, and in a well-organized essay, state whether you agree, disagree, or qualify Thoreau’s assertion, supporting your response with your experiences, observations, and/ readings.
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 the error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of your civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to life, 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.
***It is supposed to be a timed writing in 40 minutes so there is no given length, it is just what you are able to write in the allotted time (with a beginning, middle, and end of course)***
