what is the metaphor that Thoreau uses to describe a civil life in this paragraph? “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 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 thumbnail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are
the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for,
that a man has to live, 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.
Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of
a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion...