Adventures in Contentment | Page 7

poignant feeling of possession. I can
understand why the miser enjoys the very physical contact of his gold.
Every sense I possessed, sight, hearing, smell, touch, led upon the new
joy.
At one corner of my upper field the fence crosses an abrupt ravine upon
leggy stilts. My line skirts the slope halfway up. My neighbour owns
the crown of the hill which he has shorn until it resembles the tonsured
pate of a monk. Every rain brings the light soil down the ravine and
lays it like a hand of infertility upon my farm. It had always bothered
me, this wastage; and as I looked across my fence I thought to myself:
"I must have that hill. I will buy it. I will set the fence farther up. I will
plant the slope. It is no age of tonsures either in religion or agriculture."
The very vision of widened acres set my thoughts on fire. In
imagination I extended my farm upon all sides, thinking how much
better I could handle my land than my neighbours. I dwelt avariciously
upon more possessions: I thought with discontent of my poverty. More
land I wanted. I was enveloped in clouds of envy. I coveted my
neighbour's land: I felt myself superior and Horace inferior: I was
consumed with black vanity.
So I dealt hotly with these thoughts until I reached the top of the ridge
at the farther corner of my land. It is the highest point on the farm.
For a moment I stood looking about me on a wonderful prospect of
serene beauty. As it came to me--hills, fields, woods--the fever which
had been consuming me died down. I thought how the world stretched
away from my fences--just such fields--for a thousand miles, and in

each small enclosure a man as hot as I with the passion of possession.
How they all envied, and hated, in their longing for more land! How
property kept them apart, prevented the close, confident touch of
friendship, how it separated lovers and ruined families! Of all obstacles
to that complete democracy of which we dream, is there a greater than
property?
I was ashamed. Deep shame covered me. How little of the earth, after
all, I said, lies within the limits of my fences. And I looked out upon
the perfect beauty of the world around me, and I saw how little excited
it was, how placid, how undemanding.
I had come here to be free and already this farm, which I thought of so
fondly as my possession, was coming to possess me. Ownership is an
appetite like hunger or thirst, and as we may eat to gluttony and drink
to drunkenness so we may possess to avarice. How many men have I
seen who, though they regard themselves as models of temperance,
wear the marks of unbridled indulgence of the passion of possession,
and how like gluttony or licentiousness it sets its sure sign upon their
faces.
I said to myself, Why should any man fence himself in? And why hope
to enlarge one's world by the creeping acquisition of a few acres to his
farm? I thought of the old scientist, who, laying his hand upon the grass,
remarked: "Everything under my hand is a miracle"--forgetting that
everything outside was also a miracle.
[Illustration: "HOW GRACEFUL CLIMB THESE SHADOWS ON
MY HILL"]
As I stood there I glanced across the broad valley wherein lies the most
of my farm, to a field of buckwheat which belongs to Horace. For an
instant it gave me the illusion of a hill on fire: for the late sun shone full
on the thick ripe stalks of the buckwheat, giving forth an abundant red
glory that blessed the eye. Horace had been proud of his crop,
smacking his lips at the prospect of winter pancakes, and here I was
entering his field and taking without hindrance another crop, a crop
gathered not with hands nor stored in granaries: a wonderful crop,

which, once gathered, may long be fed upon and yet remain
unconsumed.
So I looked across the countryside; a group of elms here, a tufted
hilltop there, the smooth verdure of pastures, the rich brown of
new-plowed fields--and the odours, and the sounds of the country--all
cropped by me. How little the fences keep me out: I do not regard titles,
nor consider boundaries. I enter either by day or by night, but not
secretly. Taking my fill, I leave as much as I find.
And thus standing upon the highest hill in my upper pasture, I thought
of the quoted saying of a certain old abbot of the middle ages--"He that
is a true monk considers nothing as belonging to him except a lyre."
What finer spirit? Who shall step forth freer than he