Thoreau's Lynx
The November 29, 1860 journal entry by Henry David Thoreau seems an appropriate description of the attitude that many Americans express toward life:
“You would say that some men had been tempted to live in this world…..only by the offer of a bounty by the general government – a bounty on living – to anyone who will consent to be OUT at this era of the world the object of the governors being to create a nursery for their navy.
I told such a man the other day that I had got a Canada lynx here in Concord, and his instant question was, ‘Have you got the reward for him?‘ ‘What reward?’ ‘Why, the ten dollars which the State offers.’
As long as I saw him he neither said nor thought anything about the lynx, but only about this reward.
You might have inferred that ten dollars was something rarer in his neighborhood than a lynx even, and he was anxious to see it on that account. I have thought that a lynx was a bright-eyed, four-legged, furry beast of the cat kind, very CURRENT, indeed, though its natural gait is by leaps. But he knew it to be a draught drawn by the cashier of the wildcat bank on the State treasury, payable at sight.
Yet, though money can buy no fine fruit whatever, and we are never made truly rich by the possession of it, the value of things generally is commonly estimated by the amount of money they will fetch. A thing is not valuable – e.g. a fine situation for a house - until it is convertible into so much money, that is, can cease to be what it is and become something else which you prefer.
So you will see that all prosaic people who possess only the commonest sense, who believe strictly in this kind of wealth, are speculators in fancy stocks and continually cheat themselves, but poets and all discerning people, who have an object in life and know what they want, speculate in real values.