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.")
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