We want no completeness but intensity of life.

May 24. 

A. M. — To Hill.

White ash, apparently yesterday, at Grape Shore but not at Conantum. What a singular appearance for some weeks its great masses of dark-purple anthers have made, fruit-like on the trees! 

A very warm morning. Now the birds sing more than ever, methinks, now, when the leaves are fairly expanding, the first really warm summer days. 

The water on the meadows is perfectly smooth nearly all the day. 

At 3 p. m. the thermometer is at 88°. 

It soon gets to be quite hazy. 

Apple out. 

Heard one speak to-day of his sense of awe at the thought of God, and suggested to him that awe was the cause of the potato-rot. 

The same speaker dwelt on the sufferings of life, but my advice was to go about one's business, suggesting that no ecstasy was ever interrupted, nor its fruit blasted. As for completeness and roundness, to be sure, we are each like one of the laciniae of a lichen, a torn fragment, but not the less cheerfully we expand in a moist day and assume unexpected colors. We want no completeness but intensity of life. 

Hear the first cricket as I go through a warm hollow, bringing round the summer with his everlasting strain.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 24, 1857

At 3 p. m. the thermometer is at 88°. See May 24, 1856 ("To-day is suddenly overpowering warm. Thermometer at 1 P. M., 94° in the shade!")

It soon gets to be quite hazy. See May 24, 1860 ("Looking into the northwest horizon, I see that Wachusett is partially concealed by a haze.")

We each ... assume unexpected colors. We want no completeness but intensity of life. See October 18, 1856 ("[L]ife is everything. All that interests the reader is the depth and intensity of the life excited.")

Hear the first cricket as I go through a warm hollow, bringing round the summer . . . . See May 22, 1854 ("Only in their saner moments do men hear the crickets."); May 26, 1852 ("To-night I hear many crickets. They have commenced their song. They bring in the summer.")

May 24. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, May 24 

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 © 2009-2021