February 4.
the eternal plains of truth, where rests the base of those beautiful columns that sustain the heavens
February 4, 2017
Yet along that sled-track (vide the 3d) they will have their schools and lyceums and churches, like the snow-heaps crowded up by the furrow, and consider themselves liberally educated, notwithstanding their narrow views and range. And the bare track that leads to the next town and seaboard, only six inches' breadth of iron rails! and a one-eighth-inch wire in the air!
I sometimes hear a prominent but dull-witted worthy man say, or hear that he has said, rarely, that if it were not for his firm belief in "an overruling power," or a "perfect Being," etc., etc. But such poverty-stricken expressions only convince me of his habitual doubt and that he is surprised into a transient belief. Such a man's expression of faith, moving solemnly in the traditional furrow, and casting out all free-thinking and living souls with the rusty mould-board of his compassion or contempt, thinking that he has Moses and all the prophets in his wake, discourages and saddens me as an expression of his narrow and barren want of faith. I see that the infidels and skeptics have formed themselves into churches and weekly gather together at the ringing of a bell.
Sometimes when, in conversation or a lecture, I have been grasping at, or even standing and reclining upon, the serene and everlasting truths that underlie and support our vacillating life, I have seen my auditors standing on their terra firma, the quaking earth, crowded together on their Lisbon Quay, and compassionately or timidly watching my motions as if they were the antics of a rope-dancer or mountebank pretending to walk on air; or here and there one creeping out upon an overhanging but cracking bough, unwilling to drop to the adamantine floor beneath, or perchance even venturing out a step or two, as if it were a dangerous kittly-bender, timorously sounding as he goes.
So the other day, as I stood on Walden, drinking at a puddle on the ice, which was probably two feet thick, and thinking how lucky I was that I had not got to cut through all that thickness, I was amused to see an Irish laborer on the railroad, who had come down to drink, timidly tiptoeing toward me in his cowhide boots, lifting them nearly two feet at each step and fairly trembling with fear, as if the ice were already bending beneath his ponderous body and he were about to be engulfed. "Why, my man," I called out to him, " this ice will bear a loaded train, half a dozen locomotives side by side, a whole herd of oxen," suggesting whatever would be a weighty argument with him. And so at last he fairly straightened up and quenched his thirst.
It was very ludicrous to me, who was thinking, by chance, what a labor it would be to get at the water with an axe there and that I was lucky to find some on the surface.
So, when I have been resting and quenching my thirst on the eternal plains of truth, where rests the base of those beautiful columns that sustain the heavens, I have been amused to see a traveller who had long confined himself to the quaking shore, which was all covered with the traces of the deluge, come timidly tiptoeing toward me, trembling in every limb.
I see the crowd of materialists gathered together on their Lisbon Quay for safety, thinking it a terra firma.
Though the farmer has been all winter teaming wood along the river, the timid citizen that buys it, but who has not stepped out of the road, thinks it all kittly-benders there and warns his boys not to go near it.
Minott says that Dr. Heywood used to have a crazy hen (and he, too, has had one). She went about by herself uttering a peevish craw craw, and did not lay. One day he was going along on the narrow peninsula of Goose Pond looking for ducks, away in Walden Woods a mile and a half from Heywood's, when he met this very hen, which passed close by him, uttering as usual a faint craw craw. He knew her perfectly well, and says that he was never so surprised at anything in his life. How she had escaped the foxes and hawks was more than he knew.
Told a story about one Josh Piper, a harelipped man, who lived down east awhile, whose wife would not let him occupy her bed; but he used to catch ducks there in a net on the shore as they do pigeons, and so got feathers enough to fill the bed, and therefore thought he had a right to lie on it.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 4, 1857
I see the crowd of materialists gathered together on their Lisbon Quay for safety,. . .A refernee to the earthquake at Lisbon on the 1st of November, 1755 : “.The most extraordinary circumstance which occurred at Lisbon during the catastrophe was the subsidence of a new quay, built entirely of marble at an immense expense. A great concourse of people had collected there for safety, as a spot where they might be beyond the reach of falling ruins; but, suddenly, the quay sank down with all the people on it,. . .” 2 Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology 239 (3d ed. 1834)
the timid citizen . . . thinks it all kittly-benders there and warns his boys not to go near it. See Walden, Conclusion ("It affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittlybenders. There is a solid bottom everywhere.”)
another walk ending up at the Fisher Kendall pond. It is a quarter moon and though somewhat cloudy enough light to walk by for most of the walk At the pond we clear some branches to make an easier path over the ice. It is a beautiful spot in at the top of the mountain between the ridges. We stop turn out the lights and listen Orion peaks through the clouds At the pond while we are busy there we have a start when Acorn disappears Bushwhacking back we are both under red light it is good exercise there is couple of inches of snow on a stable crust and good walking 20170204
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February 4
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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