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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we
should continue to exist upon this crowded earth.
If Thoreau had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover
of trees, birds, and fishes, and the open air and virtue, a
reader of wise books, an idle, selfish self-improver, he
would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to
metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who
can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private
means, and even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the
necessary amount of it to some six weeks a year, having the
more liberty, have only the higher moral obligation to be up
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