Another drizzling day, — as fine a mist as can fall.
November 7, 2021
I find it good to be out this still, dark, mizzling afternoon; my walk or voyage is more suggestive and profitable than in bright weather.
The view is contracted by the misty rain, the water is perfectly smooth, and the stillness is favorable to reflection.
I am more open to impressions, more sensitive (not calloused or indurated by sun and wind), as if in a chamber still.
My thoughts are concentrated; I am all compact.
The solitude is real, too, for the weather keeps other men at home.
This mist is like a roof and walls over and around, and I walk with a domestic feeling.
The sound of a wagon going over an unseen bridge is louder than ever, and so of other sounds.
I am compelled to look at near objects.
All things have a soothing effect; the very clouds and mists brood over me.
My power of observation and contemplation is much increased.
My attention does not wander.
The world and my life are simplified.
I see a painted tortoise swimming under water, and to my surprise another afterward out on a willow trunk this dark day. It is long since I have seen one of any species except the insculpta. They must have begun to keep below and go into winter quarters about three weeks ago.
Looking west over Wheeler’s meadow, I see that there has been much gossamer on the grass, and it is now revealed by the dewy mist which has collected on it.
Some green-briar leaves still left, a dull red or scarlet, others yellowish; also the silky cornel is conspicuously dull-red, and others yellowish-red.
And the sallow on river’s brink (not cordata), with a narrow leaf pointed at both ends, shows some clear chrome yellow leaves atop.
The white birches lose their lower leaves first, and now their tops show crescents or cones of bright-yellow (spring flames) leaves, some of the topmost even green still.
The black willows almost everywhere entirely bare, yet the color of their twigs gives them the aspect of the crisp brown weeds of the river’s brink.
How completely crisp and shrivelled the leaves and stems of the Polygonum amphibium var. terrestre, still standing above the water and grass!
The river has risen a little more, the North Branch especially, and the pail-stuff which has drifted down it has been carried a few rods up the main stream above the junction. It rises and falls very suddenly, and I was surprised to see the other day a line of sawdust more than a foot above the water’s edge, showing that it had risen to that height and suddenly fallen without my knowledge.
Opened a muskrat-house nearly two feet high, but there was no hollow to it. Apparently they do not form that part yet.
Birds are pretty rare now. I hear a few tree sparrows in one place on the trees and bushes near the river, — a clear, chinking chirp and a half-strain,— a jay at a distance; and see a nuthatch flit with a ricochet flight across the river, and hear his gnah half uttered when he alights.
A gray squirrel —as day before yesterday—runs down a limb of an oak and hides behind the trunk and I lose him. A red one runs along the trees to scold at me, boldly or carelessly, with a chuckling, bird like note and that other peculiar sound at intervals, between a purr and a grunt. He is more familiar than the gray and more noisy. What sound does the gray make?
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 7, 1855
More open to impressions. See June 14, 1853 ("open to great impressions . . .you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye.")
The view is contracted by the misty rain . . . I am compelled to look at near objects. See August 4, 1854 ("Rain and mist contract our horizon and we notice near and small objects”). Also December 16, 1855 ("The mist makes the near trees dark and noticeable"); February 6, 1852 (A mistiness makes the woods look denser, darker and more primitive.); November 29, 1850("The trees and shrubs look larger than usual when seen through the mist")
I see a painted tortoise swimming under water, and to my surprise another afterward out on a willow trunk this dark day. It is long since I have seen one of any species except the insculpta. They must have begun to keep below and go into winter quarters about three weeks ago.
Looking west over Wheeler’s meadow, I see that there has been much gossamer on the grass, and it is now revealed by the dewy mist which has collected on it.
Some green-briar leaves still left, a dull red or scarlet, others yellowish; also the silky cornel is conspicuously dull-red, and others yellowish-red.
And the sallow on river’s brink (not cordata), with a narrow leaf pointed at both ends, shows some clear chrome yellow leaves atop.
The white birches lose their lower leaves first, and now their tops show crescents or cones of bright-yellow (spring flames) leaves, some of the topmost even green still.
The black willows almost everywhere entirely bare, yet the color of their twigs gives them the aspect of the crisp brown weeds of the river’s brink.
How completely crisp and shrivelled the leaves and stems of the Polygonum amphibium var. terrestre, still standing above the water and grass!
The river has risen a little more, the North Branch especially, and the pail-stuff which has drifted down it has been carried a few rods up the main stream above the junction. It rises and falls very suddenly, and I was surprised to see the other day a line of sawdust more than a foot above the water’s edge, showing that it had risen to that height and suddenly fallen without my knowledge.
Opened a muskrat-house nearly two feet high, but there was no hollow to it. Apparently they do not form that part yet.
Birds are pretty rare now. I hear a few tree sparrows in one place on the trees and bushes near the river, — a clear, chinking chirp and a half-strain,— a jay at a distance; and see a nuthatch flit with a ricochet flight across the river, and hear his gnah half uttered when he alights.
A gray squirrel —as day before yesterday—runs down a limb of an oak and hides behind the trunk and I lose him. A red one runs along the trees to scold at me, boldly or carelessly, with a chuckling, bird like note and that other peculiar sound at intervals, between a purr and a grunt. He is more familiar than the gray and more noisy. What sound does the gray make?
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 7, 1855
More open to impressions. See June 14, 1853 ("open to great impressions . . .you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye.")
The view is contracted by the misty rain . . . I am compelled to look at near objects. See August 4, 1854 ("Rain and mist contract our horizon and we notice near and small objects”). Also December 16, 1855 ("The mist makes the near trees dark and noticeable"); February 6, 1852 (A mistiness makes the woods look denser, darker and more primitive.); November 29, 1850("The trees and shrubs look larger than usual when seen through the mist")
I see a painted tortoise swimming. See November 1, 1855 ("I see no painted tortoises out, and I think it is about a fortnight since I saw any."): November 14, 1855 ("A clear, bright, warm afternoon. A painted tortoise swimming under water and a wood tortoise out on the bank."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Painted Turtle (Emys picta)
Opened a muskrat-house nearly two feet high, but there was no hollow to it. See November 7, 1853 ("A muskrat-house on the top of a rock, too thin round the sides for a passage beneath, yet a small cavity at top, which makes me think that they use them merely as a sheltered perch above water."); November 7, 1858 ("I pass a musquash-house, apparently begun last night. ") See also September 20, 1855 ("Open a new and pretty sizable muskrat-house with no hollow yet made in it.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Musquash
Birds are pretty rare now. See November 4, 1855 ("The winter is approaching. The birds are almost all gone. The note of the dee de de sounds now more distinct, prophetic of winter,"):November 5, 1858 ("It is quite still; no wind, no insect hum, and no note of birds, but one hairy woodpecker."); November 24, 1857 ("Nowadays birds are so rare I am wont to mistake them at first for a leaf or mote blown off from the trees or bushes")
See a nuthatch flit with a ricochet flight across the river, and hear his gnah half uttered when he alights.
See November 7, 1858 ("The nuthatch is another bird of the fall which I hear these days and for a long time, — apparently ever since the young birds grew up. ") See also October 20, 1856 ("Think I hear the very faint gnah of a nuthatch. Thus, of late, when the season is declining, many birds have departed, and our thoughts are turned towards winter (began to have a fire, more or less, say ten days or a fortnight ago), we hear the jay again more frequently, and the chickadees are more numerous and lively and familiar and utter their phebe note, and the nuthatch is heard again, and the small woodpecker seen amid the bare twigs"); November 26, 1860 ("I hear the faint note of a nuthatch . . .a phenomenon of the late fall or early winter; for we do not hear them in summer that I remember.”); December 1, 1857 ("I thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter, as if it did not breed here, but wintered here.”) and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Nuthatch
A red one runs along the trees to scold at me, See December 1, 1857 ("I hear a red squirrel barking at me amid the pine and oak tops, and now I see him coursing from tree to tree.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Red Squirrel
The world and my life
are simplified this still, dark
mizzling afternoon.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The world and my life are simplified
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
https://tinyurl.com/hdt-551107
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