This is a very beautiful November day

November 22

This is a very beautiful November day, - a cool but clear, crystalline air. It is a day to behold and to ramble over the hard (stiffening) and withered surface of the tawny earth. 

Every plant's down glitters with a silvery light along the Marlborough road.  A thousand bare twigs gleam like cobwebs in the sun. I rejoice in the bare, bleak, hard, and barren-looking surface of the tawny pastures, the firm outline of the hills, and the air so bracing and wholesome.

You walk fast and far, and every apple left out is grateful to your invigorated taste. You enjoy not only the bracing coolness, but all the heat and sunlight that there is, reflected back to you from the earth. The sandy road itself, lit by the November sun, is beautiful. 

Shrub oaks and young oaks generally  and hazel bushes and other hardy shrubs, now more or less bare, are your companions, as if it were an iron age  yet in simplicity, innocence, and strength a golden one. 

Summer is gone with all its infinite wealth, and still nature is genial to man. Still he beholds the same inaccessible beauty around him.

Though your hands are numb with cold, your sense of enjoyment is not benumbed. You cannot now find an apple but it is sweet to taste. 

Simply to see to a distant horizon through a clear air, – the fine outline of a distant hill or a blue mountain-top through some new vista, – this is wealth enough for one afternoon.

Though you are finger-cold toward night, and you cast a stone on to your first ice, and see the unmelted crystals under every bank, it is glorious November weather, and only November fruits are out.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 22, 1860

This is a very beautiful November day, See May 5, 1852 ("Every part of the world is beautiful today."); May 18, 1852 ("The world can never be more beautiful than now."); August 19, 1853 ("It is a glorious and ever-memorable day."); September 18, 1860 ("If you are not happy to-day you will hardly be so to-morrow.")

You walk fast and far, and every apple left out is grateful to your invigorated taste. See October 27, 1855 (“To appreciate their wild and sharp flavors, it seems necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. They must be eaten in the fields, when your system is all aglow with exercise, the frosty weather nips your fingers (in November), the wind rattles the bare boughs and rustles the leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around. Some of those apples might be labelled, “To be eaten in the wind.”); November 4, 1855 ("It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild apple.“); November 11, 1850 ("Now is the time for wild apples.")

Summer is gone with all its infinite wealth, and still nature is genial to man. Still he beholds the same inaccessible beauty around him. See Henry Thoreau, A Week (Wednesday) ("I have found all things thus far,persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources."); May 1850 ("It is as sweet a mystery to me as ever, what this world is."); November 16, 1850 ("Notwithstanding a sense of unworthiness which possesses me. . . the spirit of the universe is unaccountably kind to me."); November 21, 1850 ("How adapted these forms and colors to my eye! A meadow and an island! What are these things? ") December 11, 1855 ("We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Nature is genial to man (the anthropic principle)

To see a distant horizon through a clear air . . . is is wealth enough for one afternoon. See May 25, 1851 ("These are the resting-places in a walk . . .  A vista where you have the near green horizon contrasted with the distant blue one, terrestrial with celestial earth. The prospect of a vast horizon must be accessible in our neighborhood."); September 12, 1851 ("It is worth the while to see the mountains in the horizon once a day.") See also A Book of the Seasons,by Henry Thoreau, Mountains in the Horizon

It is glorious November weather, and only November fruits are out. See November 21, 1850 ("I get nothing to eat in my walks now but wild apples, sometimes some cranberries, and some walnuts. The squirrels have got the hazelnuts and chestnuts.").See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, It is glorious November weather

November 22. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November 22

November's bare bleak

inaccessible beauty

seen through a clear air.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, This is a very beautiful November day

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

 "A book, each page written in its own season, 

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2024

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