We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see.
How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding!
How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!
One afternoon in the fall, November, 2015
One afternoon in the fall, November 21st, I saw Fair Haven Pond with its island and meadow; between the island and the shore, a strip of perfectly smooth water in the lee of the island; and two hawks sailing over it; and something more I saw which cannot easily be described, which made me say to myself that the landscape could not be improved.
I did not see how it could be improved. Yet I do not know what these things can be; I begin to see such objects only when I leave off understanding them, and afterwards remember that I did not appreciate them before. But I get no further than this.
How adapted these forms and colors to our eyes, a meadow and its islands! What are these things?
Yet the hawks and the ducks keep so aloof, and nature is so reserved! We are made to love the river and the meadow, as the wind to ripple the water.
We learn by the January thaw that the winter is intermittent and are reminded of other seasons. The back of the winter is broken.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 14, 1851
How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! See June 23, 1851 ("My genius makes distinctions which my understanding cannot, and which my senses do not report."); September 9, 1858 (“How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects! A man sees only what concerns him."); October 4, 1859 ("It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. I do not get nearer by a hair's breadth to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man. To conceive of it with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange . . . you must approach the object totally unprejudiced You must be aware that no thing is what you have taken it to be"); January 5, 1860 ("A man receives only what he is ready to receive. . . He does not observe the phenomenon that cannot be linked with the rest which he has observed, however novel and remarkable it may be.”)
I saw Fair Haven Pond with its island and meadow. See May, 1850 ("In all my rambles I have seen no landscape which can make me forget Fair Haven."); November 21, 1850 ("I see Fair Haven Pond with its island, and meadow between the island and the shore, and a strip of perfectly still and smooth water in the lee of the island, and two hawks, fish hawks perhaps, sailing over it. I do not see how it could be improved. Yet I do not see what these things can be."); April 14, 1852 ("The different parts of Fair Haven Pond -- the pond,. . . the island, and the meadow between the island and mainland with its own defining lines -- are all parted off like the parts of a mirror. A fish hawk is calmly sailing over all, looking for his prey . . . So perfectly calm and beautiful, and yet no man looking at it this morning but myself.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Fair Haven Pond
November 14. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February 14
We are made to love
the river and the meadow –
wind ripples water.
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2025
https://tinyurl.com/hdt-510214
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