How earnestly and rapidly each creature, each flower, is fulfilling its part while its day lasts!

September 13.

September 13, 2019

Yesterday, it rained all day, with considerable wind, which has strewn the ground with apples and peaches, and, all the country over, people are busy picking up the windfalls. More leaves also have fallen. Rain has as much to do with it as wind.

Ride round through Lincoln and a part of Weston and Wavland. 

The barberries, now reddening, begin to show. Asters, various shades of blue, and especially the smaller kinds of dense-flowering white ones, are more than ever by the roadsides.

In my ride I experience the pleasure of coming into a landscape where there was more distance and a bluish tinge in the horizon. The farther off the mountain which is the goal of our enterprise, the more of heaven's tint it wears. This is the chief value of a distance in landscapes.

  

The great bidens in the sun in brooks affects me as the rose of the fall. They are low suns in the brook. The golden glow of autumn concentrated, more golden than the sun. How surely this yellow comes out along the brooks in autumn. It yellows along the brook.

The earth wears different colors or liveries at different seasons. At this season, a golden blaze salutes me here from a thousand suns.

How earnestly and rapidly each creature, each flower, is fulfilling its part while its day lasts! Nature never lost a day, nor a moment. As the planet in its orbit and around its axis, so do the seasons, so does time, revolve, with a rapidity inconceivable. In the moment, in the eon, time ever advances with this rapidity. Clear the track ! The plant waits a whole year, and then blossoms the instant it is ready and the earth is ready for it, without the conception of delay.

To the conscience of the idle man, the stillness of a placid September day sounds like the din and whirl of a factory.  Only employment can still this din in the air.

I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest, but suffer from a constant strain. When I have found myself ever looking down and confining my gaze to the flowers, I have thought it might be well to get into the habit of observing the clouds as a corrective; but no! that study would be just as bad. It is as bad to study stars and clouds as flowers and stones.

I must walk more with free senses. I must let my senses wander as my thoughts, my eyes see without looking. Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe. Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object; let it come to you. What I need is not to look at all, but a true sauntering of the eye.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 13, 1852

How earnestly and rapidly each creature, each flower, is fulfilling its part while its day lasts!  See September 10, 1860 ("Almost every plant, however humble . . . has its day. March 18, 1853 ("These plants waste not a day, not a moment, suitable to their development."); August 26, 1856 ("Each humblest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours."); August 30, 1851 ("This plant acts not an obscure, but essential, part in the revolution of the seasons. May I perform my part as well!"); September 17, 1857 ("How perfectly each plant has its turn! – as if the seasons revolved for it alone."); October 22, 1858 ("When you come to observe faithfully the changes of each humblest plant, you find, it may be unexpectedly, that each has sooner or later its peculiar autumnal tint or tints") See also the air.  See April 29, 1852 ("The art of life, not having anything to do, is to do something.”). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, As the Seasons revolve

Only employment can still this din in the air.  See April 29, 1852 ("The art of life, not having anything to do, is to do something.”). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, To effect the quality of the day

Be not preoccupied with looking. See August 5, 1851 ("The question is not what you look at, but what you see."); August 21, 1851 ("You must walk sometimes perfectly free, not prying nor inquisitive, not bent upon seeing things."); November 18 1851 ("The chopper who works in the woods all day 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."); March 23, 1853 ("Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye."); June 14, 1853 ("You are in 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."); April 28, 1856 ("Again, as so many times, I am reminded of the advantage to the poet, and philosopher, and naturalist, and whomsoever, of pursuing from time to time some other business than his chosen one, — seeing with the side of the eye.")

https://tinyurl.com/HDTwhilethe-daylasts