The year is but a succession of days,
and I see that I could assign some office to each day
which, summed up, would be the history of the year.
Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852
There is a season
when old pine leaves are yellow –
then they are fallen.
Reflections suggest
the sky
both underlies and
overlies
the hills.
What has become of
love of facts when mud puddles
reflect skies and trees?
I would so state facts
they shall be significant
and mythologic.
Facts to frame and tell
who I am, where I have been
or what I have thought
as now the bell rings
and volumes of sound make the
tent in which I dwell.
To-day the mountains
are dark blue, so dark that they
look like new mountains.
A new prospect and
walks can be created where
we least expect it.
November 9, 1851
How wild these old black
willows of the river-brink
unchanged from the first.
The oaks have assumed
their true November aspect;
the larger are bare.
It is a great art
in the writer to harvest
that which his life yields.
November 9, 2020
A clear and beautiful day after frost. Looking over the meadow westward from Merrick’s Pasture Shore, I see the alders beyond Dodd’s, now quite bare and gray (maple-like) in the morning sun (the frost melted off, though I found a little ice on my boat-seat), —that true November sight, — ready to wear frost leaves and to transmit (so open) the tinkle of tree sparrows. November 9, 1855
Very warm to-day; rainy in forenoon. November 9, 1857
The newspaper tells me that Uncannunuc was white with snow for a short time on the morning of the 7th. Thus steadily but unobserved the winter steals down from the north, till from our highest hills we can discern its vanguard. Next week, perchance, our own hills will be white. November 9, 1858
Just a month ago, I observed that the white pines were parti-colored, green and yellow, the needles of the previous year now falling. Now I do not observe any yellow ones, and I expect to find that it is only for a few weeks in the fall after the new leaves have done growing that there are any yellow and falling, — that there is a season when we may say the old pine leaves are now yellow, and again, they are fallen. The trees were not so tidy then; they are not so full now. They look best when contrasted with a field of snow. November 9, 1850
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. November 9, 1851
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. November 9, 1851
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. November 9, 1851
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 forgotten that it reflected the hills around it. So retired! which I must think even the sordid owner does not know that he owns. November 9, 1851
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. November 9, 1851
It is a pleasant surprise to walk over a hill where an old wood has recently been cut off, and, on looking round, to see, instead of dense ranks of trees almost impermeable to light, distant well-known blue mountains in the horizon and perchance a white village over an expanded open country. November 9, 1850
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. November 9, 1851
How wild and refreshing to see these old black willows of the river-brink, unchanged from the first, which man has never cut for fuel or for timber! Only the muskrat, tortoises, blackbirds, bitterns, and swallows use them. November 9, 1855
The scarlet oak by Agricultural Ground (and no doubt generally) is falling fast, and has been for some days, and they have now generally grown dull—before the leaves have lost their color. Other oaks may be said [to] have assumed their true November aspect; i. e., the larger ones are about bare. Only the latest black oaks are leafy, and they just withered. November 9, 1858
There is the pitch pine field northeast of Beck Stow's Swamp, where some years ago I went a-blackberrying and observed that the pitch pines were beginning to come in, and I have frequently noticed since how fairly they grew, dotting the plain as evenly as if dispersed by art. To-day I was aware that I walked in a pitch pine wood, which ere long, perchance, I may survey and lot off for a wood auction and see the choppers at their work. There is also the old pigeon-place field by the Deep Cut. I remember it as an open grassy field. It is now one of our most pleasant woodland paths. In the former place, near the edge of the old wood, the young pines line each side of the path like a palisade, they grow so densely. It never rains but it pours, and so I think when I see a young grove of pitch pines crowding each other to death in this wide world. These are destined for the locomotive's maw. These branches, which it has taken so many years to mature, are regarded even by the woodman as "trash." November 9, 1850
Garfield shot a hen-hawk just as I came up on the hillside in front of his house. He has killed three within two years about his house, and they have killed two hens for him. They will fly off with a hen. In this case the hen was merely knocked over. I was surprised to find that this bird had not a red tail, and guessed it must be a young one. I brought it home and found that it was so, the same which Wilson called “ Falco leverianus, American Buzzard or White-breasted Hawk,” it differed so much from the old. There [was] little if any rufous brown about this bird. It had a white breast and prettily barred (with blackish or dark-brown) white tail-coverts ;was generally dark-brown with white spots above. He says that he killed the others also at this season, and that they were marked like this. They were all young birds, then, and hence so bold or inexperienced, perhaps. They take his hens from between the house and the barn. When the hawk comes, all the hens and roosters run for the barn. November 9, 1858
The chickadees, if I stand long enough, hop nearer and nearer inquisitively, from pine bough to pine bough, till within four or five feet, occasionally lisping a note. November 9, 1850
See a painted tortoise and a wood tortoise in different places out on the bank still! November 9, 1855
I found many fresh violets (Viola pedata) to-day (November 9th) in the woods. November 9, 1850
Ranunculus repens , Bidens connata (flat in a brook ), yarrow, dandelion, autumnal dandelion tansy, Aster undulatus, etc. A late three ribbed goldenrod . . . Potentilla argentea. November 9, 1852
An abundance of the rattlesnake plantain in the woods by Brown's Pond, now full of a fine chaffy seed. November 9, 1851
It is a great art in the writer to improve from day to day just that soil and fertility which he has, to harvest that crop which his life yields, whatever it may be, not be straining as if to reach apples or oranges when he yields only ground-nuts. He should be digging, not soaring. Just as earnest as your life is, so deep is your soil. If strong and deep, you will sow wheat and raise bread of life in it. November 9, 1858
We had a true November sunset after a dark, cloudy afternoon. The sun reached a clear stratum just before setting, beneath the dark cloud, though ready to enter another on the horizon’s edge, and a cold, yellow sunlight suddenly illumined the withered grass of the fields around, near and far, eastward. Such a phenomenon as, when it occurs later, I call the afterglow of the year. November 9, 1858
November 9, 2020
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Pine Fall
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Pitch Pine.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, at Beck Stow's Swamp
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The White Pines
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Chickadee in Winter
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The hen-hawk
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Alders
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Painted Turtle (Emys picta)
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Bells and Whistles
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Violets
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Autumnal Dandelion
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Reflections
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November Moods
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The world can never be more beautiful than now.
November 9, 2019
November 1, 1855 (“It is a beautiful Indian-summer day, the most remarkable hitherto and equal to any of the kind. . . .It is akin to sin to spend such a day in the house.”);
November 2, 1853 ("I might put by themselves the November flowers, — flowers which survive severe frosts and the fall of the leaf.")
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. ")
November 3, 1853 ("To-day I see yarrow, very bright ")
November 3, 1853 ("I saw a very fresh A. undulatus this afternoon.")
November 3, 1858 ("Aster undulatus is still freshly in bloom")
November 7, 1857 (“This has been another Indian-summer day. Thermometer 58° at noon.”)
November 7, 1858 ("Aster undulatus and several goldenrods, at least, may be found yet.")
November 12, 1853 ("Tansy is very fresh still in some places")
November 14, 1852 ("Still yarrow, tall buttercup, and tansy.")
November 7, 1858 ("I heard a chickadee on a hemlock, and was inexpressibly cheered to find that an old acquaintance was yet stirring about the premises, and was, I was assured, to be there all winter. All that is evergreen in me revived at once.")
The chickadee
Hops near to me.
November 8, 1857
November 12, 1853 ("Tansy is very fresh still in some places")
November 14, 1852 ("Still yarrow, tall buttercup, and tansy.")
November 14 1858 (" It is very cold and windy; thermometer 26. . . . Of birds only the chickadees seem really at home. Where they are is a hearth and a bright fire constantly burning.")
November 22, 1851 ("The light of the setting sun, just emerged from a cloud and suddenly falling on and lighting up the needles of the white pine between you and it, after a raw and louring afternoon near the beginning of winter, is a memorable phenomenon. . . . After a cold gray day this cheering light almost warms us by its resemblance to fire.")November 29, 1853 (""Suddenly a glorious yellow sunlight falls on all the eastern landscape. . .I think that we have some such sunsets as this, and peculiar to the season, every year. I should call it the russet afterglow of the year.)
November 9, 2020
If you make the least correct
observation of nature this year,
you will have occasion to repeat it
with illustrations the next,
and the season and life itself is prolonged.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November 9
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 © 2009-2022
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