At 9 A. M. up river to Fair Haven Pond.
This is our month of the crusted snow. Was this the Indians? I get over the half-buried fences at a stride, and the drifts slope up to the tops of the walls on each side. The crust is melted on the south slopes and lets me in, or where the sun has been reflected (yesterday) from a wood-side and rotted it, but the least inclination to the north is evidence of a hard surface. On the meadows and in level open fields away from the reflection of pines and oak leaves, it will generally bear.
Met Sudbury Haines on the river before the Cliffs , come a - fishing . Wearing an old coat, much patched, with many colors . . . He tells me that he caught three pickerel here the other day that weighed seven pounds all together.
It is the old story. The fisherman is a natural story-teller. No man's imagination plays more pranks than his, while he is tending his reels and trotting from one to another, or watching his cork in summer. He is ever waiting for the sky to fall. He has sent out a venture. He has a ticket in the lottery of fate, and who knows what it may draw? He ever expects to catch a bigger fish yet.
He is the most patient and believing of men. Who else will stand so long in wet places? When the haymaker runs to shelter, he takes down his pole and bends his steps to the river, glad to have a leisure day. He is more like an inhabitant of nature. The weather concerns him. He is an observer of her phenomena.
February 9, 2022
The inverted head experiment
A man goes to the end of his garden, inverts his head, and does not know his own cottage. The novelty is in us, and it is also in nature. The mirage is constant.
The state of the atmosphere is continually varying. If we incline our heads never so little, the most familiar things begin to put on some new aspect. If we invert our heads completely our wood-lot appears far off. But if I invert my head this morning and look at the woods in the horizon, they do not look so far off as in the afternoon. The prospect is a constantly varying mirage, answering to the condition of our perceptive faculties and our fluctuating imaginations.
Objects do not twice present exactly the same appearance. The air changes from hour to hour of every day. It paints and glasses everything. It is a new glass placed over the picture every hour.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 9, 1852
If we invert our heads completely our wood-lot appears far off. But if I invert my head this morning and look at the woods in the horizon, they do not look so far off as in the afternoon. The prospect is a constantly varying mirage. See 1850 ("What shall we make of the fact that you have only to stand on your head a moment to be enchanted with the beauty of the landscape ?"); August 8, 1851 ("Turning away from the sun, we get this enchanting view, as when a man looks at the landscape with inverted head ."); January 25, 1852 ("when I invert my head and look at the woods down the stream, I seem to see every stem and twig with beautiful distinctness, the fine tops of the trees relieved against the sky.”); March 4, 1852 ("I look between my legs up the river across Fair Haven. The landscape thus at this season is a plain white field hence to the horizon."); January 8, 1854 ("Gilpin, in his essay on the "Art of Sketching Landscape," says: "When you have finished your sketch . . . tinge the whole over with some light horizon hue." . . .I have often been attracted by this harmonious tint in his and other drawings, and sometimes, especially, have observed it in nature when at sunset I inverted my head."); April 20, 1854 (" I find some advantage in describing the experience of a day on the day following. At this distance it is more ideal, like the landscape seen with the head inverted, or reflections in water."); September 18, 1858 ("Some long amber clouds in the horizon, all on fire with gold, were more glittering than any jewelry. . . .And when you looked with head inverted the effect was increased tenfold, till it seemed a world of enchantment.") See Also 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.”) and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Inverted Head experiment.
The air changes from hour to hour of every day. It paints and glasses everything. It is a new glass placed over the picture every hour.. See September 10, 1851 ("As I watch the groves on the meadow opposite our house, I see how differently they look at different hours of the day."); February 5, 1852 ("The trunks and branches of the trees are of different colors at different times and in different lights and weathers, - in sun, rain, and in the night.”); July 14, 1851 ("If I take the same walk by moonlight an hour later or earlier in the evening, it is as good as a different one."); July 23, 1851("The mind is subject to moods, as the shadows of clouds pass over the earth."); February 18, 1860 ("Sometimes, when I go forth at 2 P. M., there is scarcely a cloud in the sky, but soon one will appear in the west and steadily advance and expand itself, and so change the whole character of the afternoon and of my thoughts.")
The state of the atmosphere is continually varying. If we incline our heads never so little, the most familiar things begin to put on some new aspect. If we invert our heads completely our wood-lot appears far off. But if I invert my head this morning and look at the woods in the horizon, they do not look so far off as in the afternoon. The prospect is a constantly varying mirage, answering to the condition of our perceptive faculties and our fluctuating imaginations.
Objects do not twice present exactly the same appearance. The air changes from hour to hour of every day. It paints and glasses everything. It is a new glass placed over the picture every hour.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 9, 1852
If we invert our heads completely our wood-lot appears far off. But if I invert my head this morning and look at the woods in the horizon, they do not look so far off as in the afternoon. The prospect is a constantly varying mirage. See 1850 ("What shall we make of the fact that you have only to stand on your head a moment to be enchanted with the beauty of the landscape ?"); August 8, 1851 ("Turning away from the sun, we get this enchanting view, as when a man looks at the landscape with inverted head ."); January 25, 1852 ("when I invert my head and look at the woods down the stream, I seem to see every stem and twig with beautiful distinctness, the fine tops of the trees relieved against the sky.”); March 4, 1852 ("I look between my legs up the river across Fair Haven. The landscape thus at this season is a plain white field hence to the horizon."); January 8, 1854 ("Gilpin, in his essay on the "Art of Sketching Landscape," says: "When you have finished your sketch . . . tinge the whole over with some light horizon hue." . . .I have often been attracted by this harmonious tint in his and other drawings, and sometimes, especially, have observed it in nature when at sunset I inverted my head."); April 20, 1854 (" I find some advantage in describing the experience of a day on the day following. At this distance it is more ideal, like the landscape seen with the head inverted, or reflections in water."); September 18, 1858 ("Some long amber clouds in the horizon, all on fire with gold, were more glittering than any jewelry. . . .And when you looked with head inverted the effect was increased tenfold, till it seemed a world of enchantment.") See Also 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.”) and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Inverted Head experiment.
Lichens in the shade
and an owl behind sitting
in the bright sunlight.
February 9, 2022
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/hdt520902
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