The infinite roominess of nature

November 18.

.

A man can hardly

be said to be there if he

knows that he is there

Surveying these days the Ministerial Lot. Now at sundown I hear the hooting of an owl,-- hoo hoo hoo, hoorer, hoo. This is faintly answered in a different strain, apparently from a greater distance, almost as if it were an echo. This is my music each evening. 

I heard it last evening. It is a sound admirably suited to the swamp and to the twilight woods, suggesting a vast undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. 

I rejoice that there are owls. This sound suggests the infinite roominess of nature, that there is a world in which owls live. 

Here hawks also circle by day, and chickadees are heard, and rabbits and partridges abound. 

The chopper who works in the woods all day for many weeks or months at a time becomes intimately acquainted with them in his way. He is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them. He really forgets himself, forgets to observe, and at night he dreams of the swamp, its phenomena and events. Not so the naturalist; enough of his unconscious life does not pass there. 

A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going. The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work. (Mem. Wordsworth's observations on relaxed attention.)

November 18, 2013

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 18, 1851

I rejoice that there are owls, a world in which owls live.   See November 9, 1851 (“Observing me still scribbling, [Channing] will say that he confines himself to the ideal. . . he leaves the facts to me. Sometimes, too, he will say a little petulantly, "I am universal; I have nothing to do with the particular and definite." I, too, would fain set down something beside facts.”); November 17, 1859 ("Thus disappear the haunts of the owls. The time may come when their aboriginal hoo-hoo-hoo will not be heard hereabouts."). See also Walden ("I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.”)

Rejoice there are owls,

the roominess of nature

this world where owls live. 

November 18, 1851

The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work.  .See April 12, 1854 ("I observe that it is when I have been intently, and it may be laboriously, at work . . . that the muse visits me, and I see or hear beauty. It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light.”); June 14, 1853 ("That favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before."); December 11, 1855 ("It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.”) See also Walden ("Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation.")

Mem. Wordsworth's observations on relaxed attention.  

Relaxed attention

to the unexpected flash

of the infinite.

See De Quincy LAKE REMINISCENCES; BY THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER  quoting Wordsworth's description of  the  observations possible after a period of focused attention:

 "At the very instant when the organs of attention were all at once relaxing from their tension, the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines of massy blackness fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of the infinite"

-- as illustrated  in Wordsworth's poem, "There was a Boy"  by  the boy's "gentle shock of mild surprise . . .carried far into his  heart"  while listening for owls. ("Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise has carried far into his heart the voice o mountain-torrents or the visible scene would enter unawares into his mind") See also  Erica McAlpine, The Poet's Mistake - Page 42 (2020)

:

There was a Boy

There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs

And islands of Winander! many a time,

At evening, when the earliest stars began

To move along the edges of the hills,

Rising or setting, would he stand alone,

Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;

And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands

Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth

Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,

Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls

That they might answer him.—And they would shout

Across the watery vale, and shout again,

Responsive to his call,—with quivering peals,

And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud

Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild

Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause

Of silence such as baffled his best skill:

Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung

Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise

Has carried far into his heart the voice

Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene

Would enter unawares into his mind

With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received

Into the bosom of the steady lake . . .

Solstice  2004

This summer

collecting moments

untouched by hope or regret

expanding the present with

relaxed attention to the unexpected

splash!

a blue heron floats reflected in the lake.

a doe alert on the lawn

a fox runs across the road

a loon calls in the night

the light on the water

the sound of the waves.

A sudden wind clears the air.

ZPHX

Nov. 18. Surveying these days the Ministerial Lot. 

Now at sundown I hear the hooting of an owl, — hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo. It sounds like the hooting of an idiot or a maniac broke loose. This is faintly answered in a different strain, apparently from a greater distance, almost as if it were the echo, i. e. so far as the succession is concerned. 

This is my music each evening. I heard it last evening. The men who help me call it the "hooting owl " and think it is the cat owl. It is a sound admirably suited [to] the swamp and to the twilight woods, suggesting a vast undeveloped nature which men have not recognized nor satisfied. 

I rejoice that there are owls. They represent the stark, twilight, unsatisfied thoughts  I have. Let owls do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. This sound faintly suggests the infinite roominess of nature, that there is a world in which owls live. 

Yet how few are seen, even by the hunters! 

The sun has shone for a day over this savage swamp, where the single spruce stands covered with usnea moss, which a Concord merchant mortgaged once to the trustees of the ministerial fund and lost, but now for a different race of creatures a new day dawns over this wilderness, which one would have thought was sufficiently dismal before. 

Here hawks also circle by day, and chickadees are heard, and rabbits and partridges abound. 

The chopper who works in the woods all day for many weeks or months at a time becomes intimately acquainted with them in his way. He is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them. He is not liable to exaggerate insignificant features. He really forgets himself, forgets to observe, and at night he dreams of the swamp, its phenomena and events. Not so the naturalist; enough of his unconscious life does not pass there.

A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going. The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work. (Mem. Wordsworth's observations on relaxed attention.) You must be conversant with things for a long time to know much about them, like the moss which has hung from the spruce, and as the partridge and the rabbit are acquainted with the thickets and at length have acquired the color of the places they frequent. If the man of science can put all his knowledge into propositions, the woodman has a great deal of incommunicable knowledge. 

Deacon Brown told me to-day of a tall, raw-boned fellow by the name of Hosmer who used to help draw the seine behind the Jones house, who once, when he had hauled it without getting a single shad, held up a little perch in sport above his face, to show what he had got. At that moment the perch wiggled and dropped right down his throat head foremost, and nearly suffocated him; and it was only after considerable time, during which the man suffered much, that he was extracted or forced down. He was in a worse predicament than a fish hawk would have been. 

In the woods south of the swamp are many great holes made by digging for foxes.

A tall, raw-boned fellow by the name of Hosmer. See June 4, 1856 ("Dr. Heywood worked over him a fortnight, while the perch was dissolving in his throat. He got little compassion generally, and the nickname “Perch” into the bargain. Think of going to sleep for fourteen nights with a perch, his fins set and his scales (!), dissolving in your throat! ! What dreams! What waking thoughts ")

https://tinyurl.com/HDT511118

A Bright November Day

November 11.

A bright, but cold day, finger-cold. One must next wear gloves, put his hands in winter quarters.

I am glad of the shelter of the thick pine wood on the Marlborough road, on the plain. The wind roars over the pines, and at intervals there is a certain resounding woodiness in the tone. How the wind roars among the shrouds of the wood! The sky looks mild and fair enough from this shelter.

There is a cold, silvery light on the white pines as I go through J.P. Brown's field near Jenny Dugan's. Every withered blade of grass and every dry weed, as well as pine-needle, reflects light. The lately dark woods are open and light; the sun shines in upon the stems of trees which it has not shone on since spring.

Around the edges of ponds the weeds are dead, and there, too, the light penetrates. The atmosphere is less moist and gross, and light is universally dispersed.

We are greatly indebted to these transition seasons or states of the atmosphere, which show us thus phenomena which belong not to the summer or the winter of any climate. The brilliancy of the autumn is wonderful, this flashing brilliancy, as if the atmosphere were phosphoric.

The fall of the year is over, and now let us see if we shall have any Indian summer.

White Pond is prepared for winter. Now that most other trees have lost their leaves, the evergreens are more conspicuous about its shores and on its capes. The view of the southern horizon from the lane this side still attracts me, but not so much as before I had explored those Wayland hills, which look so much fairer, perhaps, than they are. 

To-day you may write a chapter on the advantages of travelling, and to-morrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not travelling. The horizon has one kind of beauty and attraction to him who has never explored the hills and mountains in it, and another, I fear a less ethereal and glorious one, to him who has. 

That blue mountain in the horizon is certainly the most heavenly, the most elysian, which we have not climbed, on which we have not camped for a night. But only our horizon is moved thus further off, and if our whole life should prove thus a failure, the future which is to atone for all, where still there must be some success, will be more glorious still. 

"Says I to myself " should be the motto of my journal. 

It is fatal to the writer to be too much possessed by his thought. Things must lie a little remote to be described.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 11, 1851

A bright, but cold day, finger-cold. One must next wear gloves, put his hands in winter quarters. See November 11, 1853 ("Bracing cold, and exhilarating sunlight . . .I wear mittens now.”); November 11, 1858 (“Coming home I have cold fingers, and must row to get warm.”)

Things must lie a little remote to be described. See July 23, 1851 ("Do not tread on the heels of your experience. Be impressed without making a minute of it. Poetry puts an interval between the impression and the expression, — waits till the seed germinates naturally.")

An horizon moved further off

November 11.

The view of the southern horizon from the lane this side still attracts me, but not so much as before I had explored those Wayland hills, which look so much fairer, perhaps, than they are. The horizon has one kind of beauty and attraction to him who has never explored the hills and mountains in it, and another, I fear a less ethereal and glorious one, to him who has. 

That blue mountain in the horizon is certainly the most heavenly, the most elysian, which we have not climbed, on which we have not camped for a night.


But only our horizon is moved thus further off, and if our whole life should prove thus a failure, the future which is to atone for all, where still there must be some success, will be more glorious still.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 11, 1851

That blue mountain in the horizon is certainly the most heavenly, the most elysian, which we have not climbed, on which we have not camped for a night. Compare March 31, 1853 (" It is affecting to see a distant mountain-top, like the summits of Uncanoonuc, well seen from this hill, whereon you camped for a night in your youth, which you have never revisited, still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it.”)

My facts shall be falsehoods

November 9.

In our walks C. takes out his note-book sometimes and tries to write as I do, but all in vain. He soon puts it up again, or contents himself with scrawling some sketch of the landscape. Observing me still scribbling, he will say that he confines himself to the ideal, purely ideal remarks; he leaves the facts to me.

Sometimes, too, he will say a little petulantly, "I am universal; I have nothing to do with the particular and definite."

I, too, would fain set down something beside facts.

Facts should only be as the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology which I am writing; not facts to assist men to make money, farmers to farm profitably, in any common sense; facts to tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought: as now the bell rings for evening meeting, and its volumes of sound, like smoke which rises from where a cannon is fired, make the tent in which I dwell.

My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought -- with these I deal.

James P. Brown's retired pond, now shallow and more than half dried up, seems far away and rarely visited, known to few, though not far off. It is encircled by an amphitheatre of low hills, on two opposite sides covered with high pine woods, the other sides with young white oaks and white pines respectively. I am affected by beholding there reflected this gray day, so unpretendingly, the gray stems of the pine wood on the hillside and the sky, - that mirror, as it were a permanent picture to be seen there, a permanent piece of idealism.

What were these reflections to the cows alone! Were these things made for cows' eyes mainly? You shall go over behind the hills, where you would suppose that otherwise there was no eye to behold, and find this piece of magic a constant phenomenon there. It is not merely a few favored lakes or pools that reflect the trees and skies, but the obscurest pond-hole in the most unfrequented dell does the same.

These reflections suggest that the sky underlies the hills as well as overlies them, and in another sense than in appearance.

I am a little surprised on beholding this reflection, which I did not perceive for some minutes after looking into the pond, as if I had not regarded this as a constant phenomenon. What has become of Nature's common sense and love of facts, when in the very mud-puddles she reflects the skies and trees?

I knew that this pond was early to freeze; I had for gotten that it reflected the hills around it. So retired! which I must think even the sordid owner does not know that he owns. It is full of little pollywogs now. Pray, when were they born ? 

To-day the mountains seen from the pasture above are dark blue, so dark that they look like new mountains and make a new impression, and the intervening town of Acton is seen against them in a new relation, a new neighborhood.

Pitch pine cones very beautiful, not only the fresh leather-colored ones but especially the dead gray onescovered with lichens, the scales so regular and close, like an impenetrable coat of mail. These are very hand some to my eye; also those which have long since opened regularly and shed their seeds.

An abundance of the rattlesnake plantain in the woods by Brown's Pond, now full of a fine chaffy seed ( ?). 

Now the leaves are gone the birds' nests are revealed, the brood being fledged and flown. There is a perfect adaptation in the material used in constructing a nest. There is one which I took from a maple on the cause way at Hubbard's Bridge. It is fastened to the twigs by white woolen strings (out of a shawl?), which it has picked up in the road, though it is more than half a mile from a house; and the sharp eyes of the bird have discovered plenty of horsehairs out of the tail or mane, with which to give it form by their spring; with fine meadow hay for body, and the reddish woolly material which invests the ferns in the spring (apparently) for lining.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 9, 1851


I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. See February 18, 1852 ("I have a commonplace-book for facts and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in my mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success. ... I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant, ... I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all."); April 18, 1852 (“I am serene and satisfied when … … the events of the day have a mythological character, and the most trivial is symbolical.”);  June 19, 1852 ("Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth, samaræ, tinged with his expectation  Oh may my words be verdurous and sempiternal as the hills!Facts fall from the poetic observer as ripe seeds."); May 10, 1853 (“Nature will be my language full of poetry, all nature will fable, and every natural phenomenon be a myth. … I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant”); May 31, 1853 (“Some incidents in my life have seemed far more allegorical than actual; they were so significant that they plainly served no other use. That is, they have been like myths or passages in a myth, rather than mere incidents or history, which have to wait to become significant.”)

I am a little surprised on beholding this reflection, which I did not perceive for some minutes after looking into the pond  . . . See November 2, 1857 ("I think that most men, as farmers, hunters, fishers, etc., walk along a river's bank, or paddle along its stream, without seeing the reflections. Their minds are not abstracted from the surface, from surfaces generally. It is only a reflecting mind that sees reflections. "); October 7, 1857 ("Unless you look for reflections, you commonly will not find them.")

November. Saw Mill Brook..

November 4.

It is truly a raw and gusty day, and I hear a tree creak sharply like a bird, a phoebe. The jays with their scream are at home in the scenery.

The slender chestnuts, maples, elms, and white ash trees, which last are uncommonly numerous here, are now all bare of leaves, and a few small hemlocks, with their now thin but unmixed and fresh green foliage, stand over and cheer the stream and remind me of winter, the snows which are to come and drape them and contrast with their green, and the chickadees that are to flit and lisp amid them.

These little cheerful hemlocks, - the lisp of chickadees seems to come from them now, - each standing with its foot on the very edge of the stream, reaching sometimes part way over its channel, and here and there one has lightly stepped across. These evergreens are plainly as much for shelter for the birds as for anything else.

The fallen leaves are so thick they almost fill the bed of the stream and choke it. I hear the runnel gurgling underground. 

There are a few bright-green ferns lying flat by the sides of the brook, but it is cold, cold, withering to all else. It was quite a discovery when I first came upon this brawling mountain stream in Concord woods.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal , November 4, 1851