The days are now sensibly longer

January 20.

It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day . . .  The morning and the evening are full of news to me.  My walks are full of incidents . . . To see the sun rise or go down every day! 

It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. 

Walk down the Boston road. 

It is good to look off over the great unspotted fields of snow, the walls and fences almost buried in it and hardly a turf or stake left bare for the starving crows to light on. There is no track nor mark to mar its purity beyond the single sled track, except where, once in half a mile, some traveller has stepped aside for a sleigh to pass. 


The days are now sensibly longer, and half past five is as light as five was.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 20, 1852

It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. See January 20, 1855 ("How new all things seem! . . . The world is not only new to the eye, but is still as at creation; every blade and leaf is hushed; not a bird or insect is heard; only, perchance, a faint tinkling sleigh-bell in the distance . .. I sit looking up at the mackerel sky and also at the neighboring wood so suddenly relieved of its snowy burden . . .Very musical and even sweet now, like a horn, is the hounding of a foxhound heard now in some distant wood, while I stand listening in some far solitary and silent field."); January 20, 1853 ("What more beautiful or soothing to the eye than those finely divided or minced clouds . . . now reaching up from the west above my head!"); January 20, 1856 ("What a different aspect the river’s brim now from what it wears in summer!"); January 20, 1859 ("What a singular element is this water! "); January 20, 1860 ("What a bountiful supply of winter food is here provided for them! ");

The green of the ice

begins to be visible

just before sunset.

January 20, 1859

See also A Day's Devotion and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 20

The days are now sensibly longer, and half past five is as light as five was. See January 3, 1854 ("The twilight appears to linger. The day seems suddenly longer."); January 23, 1854 ("The increased length of the days is very observable of late."); January 24, 1852 ("The sun sets about five.”)

*****

Jan. 20. Walked down the Boston road. It was good to look off over the great unspotted fields of snow, the walls and fences almost buried in it and hardly a turf or stake left bare for the starving crows to light on. There is no track nor mark to mar its purity be yond the single sled track, except where, once in half a mile, some traveller has stepped aside for a sleigh to pass.

The farmers nowadays can cart out peat and muck over the frozen meadows. Somewhat analogous, me- thinks, the scholar does; drives in with tight-braced energy and winter cheer on to his now firm meadowy grounds, and carts, hauls off, the virgin loads of fer tilizing soil which he threw up in the warm, soft summer. We now bring our muck out of the meadows, but it was thrown up first in summer.

The scholar's and the farmer's work are strictly analogous.

Easily he now conveys, sliding over the snow-clad ground, great loads of fuel and of lumber which have grown in many summers, from the forest to the town. He deals with the dry hay and cows, the spoils of summer meads and fields, stored in his barns, doling it out from day to day, and manufactures milk for men. When I see the farmer driving into his barn-yard with a load of muck, whose blackness contrasts strangely with the white snow, I have the thoughts which I have described. He is doing like myself.

My barn-yard is my journal.

I do not know but it is too much to read one news paper in a week, for I now take the weekly Tribune, and for a few days past, it seems to me, I have not dwelt in Concord; the sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. To read of things distant and sounding betrays us into slighting these which are then apparently near and small. We learn to look abroad for our mind and spirit's daily nutriment, and what is this dull town to me? what are these plain fields and the aspects of this earth and these skies ?

All summer and far into the fall I unconsciously went by the newspapers and the news, and now I find it was because the morning and the evening were full of news to me. My walks were full of incidents. 

I attended not to the affairs of Europe, but to my own affairs in Concord fields.

To see the sun rise or go down every day would preserve us sane forever, — so to relate ourselves, for our mind's and body's health, to a universal fact.

 Last spring our new stone bridge was said to be about to fall. The selectmen got a bridge architect to look at it and, acting on his advice, put up a barrier and warned travellers not to cross it. Of course, I be lieved with the rest of my neighbors that there was no immediate danger, for there it was standing, and the barrier knocked down, that travellers might go over, as they did with few exceptions. But one day, riding that way with another man, and reflecting that I had never looked into the condition of the bridge myself, and if it should fall with us on it, I should have reason to say what a fool I was to go over when I was warned, I made him stop on this side, merely for principle's sake, and walked over while he rode before, and I got in again at the other end. I paid that degree of respect to the advice of the bridge architect and the warning of the selectmen. It was my companion's daily thoroughfare.

Greeley says of London, " The morning to sleep, the afternoon to business, and the evening to enjoyment, seems the usual routine with the favored classes." They have no morning life then. They are afternoon men. To begin the day at noon!

The days are now sensibly longer, and half past five is as light as five was.

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

tinyurl.com/hdt18520120