Began snowing yesterday afternoon, and it is still snowing this forenoon.
Mother remembers the Cold Friday very well. She lived in the house where I was born. The people in the kitchen — Jack Garrison, Esther, and a Hardy girl — drew up close to the fire, but the dishes which the Hardy girl was washing froze as fast as she washed them, close to the fire. They managed to keep warm in the parlor by their great fires.
The other day a man came "just to get me to run a line in the woods." This is the usual request. "Do you know where one end of it is?" I asked. (It was the Stratton lot.) "No," said he, "I don't know either end; that is what I want to find." "Do you know either of the next sides of the lot ?" Thinking a moment, he answered, "No." "Well, do you know any one side of the whole lot, or any corner ?" After a little hesitation he said that he did not.
Here, then, was a wood-lot of half a dozen acres, well enough described in a deed dated 1777, courses and distances given, but he could not tell exactly in what part of the universe any particular part of it was, but he expected me to find out. This was what he understood by "running." On the strength of this deed he had forbidden a man to chop wood somewhere.
Frequently, when my employer does not know where his land lies, and has put into my hands an ancient and tattered piece of paper called his deed, which throws no light at all on the question, he turns away, saying, "I want you to make it all right. Give me all that belongs to me."
In the deed of the Stratton wood-lot, dated 1777, there is no mention [of] any building on [it] to be conveyed, so that probably there was only a cellar-hole there then, eighty years ago, as now. For so long, at least, it has been a mere dent in the earth there, to which, from time to time, dead horses or hogs were drawn from the village and cast in. These are our Ninevehs and Babylons. I approach such a cellar-hole as Layard the scene of his labors, and I do not fail to find there relics as interesting to me as his winged bulls.
For some years past I have partially offered myself as a lecturer; have been advertised as such several years. Yet I have had but two or three invitations to lecture in a year, and some years none at all. I congratulate myself on having been permitted to stay at home thus, I am so much richer for it. I do not see what I should have got of much value, but money, by going about, but I do see what I should have lost. It seems to me that I have a longer and more liberal lease of life thus.
I cannot afford to be telling my experience, especially to those who perhaps will take no interest in it. I wish to be getting experience. You might as well recommend to a bear to leave his hollow tree and run about all winter scratching at all the hollow trees in the woods. He would be leaner in the spring than if he had stayed at home and sucked his claws.
As for the lecture-goers, it is none of their business what I think. I perceive that most make a great account of their relations, more or less personal and direct, to many men, coming before them as lecturers, writers, or public men. But all this is impertinent and unprofitable to me. I never yet recognized, nor was recognized by, a crowd of men. I was never assured of their existence, nor they of mine.
There was wit and even poetry in the negro's answer to the man who tried to persuade him that the slaves would not be obliged to work in heaven. "Oh, you g'way, Massa. I know better. If dere's no work for cullud folks up dar, dey'll make some fur 'em, and if dere's nuffin better to do, dey'll make 'em shub de clouds along. You can't fool this chile, Massa"
I was describing the other day my success in solitary and distant woodland walking outside the town. I do not go there to get my dinner, but to get that sustenance which dinners only preserve me to enjoy, with out which dinners are a vain repetition. But how little men can help me in this! only by having a kindred experience. Of what use to tell them of my happiness? Thus, if ever we have anything important to say, it might be introduced with the remark: "It is nothing to you, in particular. It is none of your business, I know." That is what might be called going into good society.
I never chanced to meet with any man so cheering and elevating and encouraging, so infinitely suggestive, as the stillness and solitude of the Well Meadow Field.
Men even think me odd and perverse because I do not prefer their society to this nymph or wood-god rather. But I have tried them. I have sat down with a dozen of them together in a club, and instantly — they did not inspire me. One or another abused our ears with many words and a few thoughts which were not theirs. There was very little genuine goodness apparent. We are such hollow pretenders. I lost my time.
But out there! Who shall criticise that companion? It is like the hone to the knife. I bathe in that climate and am cleansed of all social impurities. I become a witness with unprejudiced senses to the order of the universe. There is nothing petty or impertinent, none to say, "See what a great man I am!" There chiefly, and not in the society of the wits, am I cognizant of wit. Shall I prefer a part, an infinitely small fraction, to the whole? There I get my underpinnings laid and repaired, cemented, levelled. There is my country club. We dine at the sign of the Shrub Oak, the New Albion House.
I demand of my companion some evidence that he has travelled further than the sources of the Nile, that he has seen something, that he has been out of town, out of the house. Not that he can tell a good story, but that he can keep a good silence. Has he attended to a silence more significant than any story? Did he ever get out of the road which all men and fools travel? You call yourself a great traveller, perhaps, but can you get beyond the influence of a certain class of ideas?
I expect the time when there will be founded hospitals for the founders of hospitals.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 11, 1857
Cold Friday [January 19, 1810]. . . .See February 7, 1855 ("The old folks still refer to the Cold Friday, when they sat before great fires of wood four feet long, with a fence of blankets behind them, and water froze on the mantelpiece.")
I was describing the other day my success in solitary and distant woodland walking outside the town. See December 18, 1856 ("Lectured in basement (vestry) of the orthodox church, and I trust helped to undermine it.") Thoreau presented "Walking" again to audiences in Fitchburg and Worcester in February, 1857. See Thoreau's Lectures after Walden. 283-89
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 11
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 © 2009-2023
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