First ice that I’ve seen or heard of, a tenth of an inch thick in yard, and the ground is slightly frozen.
I see many myrtle-birds now about the house this forenoon, on the advent of cooler weather. They keep flying up against the house and the window and fluttering there, as if they would come in, or alight on the wood-pile or pump. They would commonly be mis taken for sparrows, but show more white when they fly, beside the yellow on the rump and sides of breast seen near to and two white bars on the wings. Chubby birds.
P. M. — Up Assabet
Cool and windy. Those who have put it off thus long make haste now to collect what apples were left out and dig their potatoes before the ground shall freeze hard. Now again, as in the spring, we begin to look for sheltered and sunny places where we may sit.
I see, hanging over an alder bough above the hemlocks, five inches above the water, a great eel, over two feet long and two inches wide or thick horizontally (more vertically) in the forward part of its body. It must weigh two and a half pounds; the biggest I ever saw. What a repulsive and gluttonous-looking creature, with its vomer made to plow the mud and wallow in filth, and its slimy skin (I had forgotten it was scaly, it is so fine). It was somewhat bloated, perhaps, and its skin distended, but at any rate it had got its skin full. It is more repulsive to me than a snake, and I think must be less edible. Its dead-white eye-spots — for the eyes were closed flat on its black and shiny vomer — and the fringed gelatinous kind of alga or what-not that covered like a lichen the parts submerged made it yet more repulsive.
I cannot go by a large dead swamp white oak log this cool evening, but with no little exertion get it aboard, and some blackened swamp white oak stumps, whose earthy parts are all gone.
I see a robin eating prinos berries. Is not the robin the principal berry-eating bird nowadays? There must be more about the barberry bushes in Melvin’s Preserve than anywhere.
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| October 21, 2017 |
I saw wood tortoises coupled, up the Assabet, the back of the upper above water. It held the lower with its claws about the head, and they were not to be parted.
It is pitiful to see a man of sixty, a philosopher, per chance, inquiring for a bearing apple orchard for sale. If he must have one, why did he not set it out when he was thirty? How mean and lazy, to be plucking the fruit of another man’s labor. The old man I saw yesterday lives on peaches and milk in their season, but then he planted them.
Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day.
That big swamp white oak limb or tree which I found prostrate in the swamp was longer than my boat and tipped it well. One whole side, the upper, was covered with green hypnum, and the other was partly white with fungi. That green coat adhered when I split it. Immortal wood! that had begun to live again.
Others burn unfortunate trees that lose their lives prematurely.
These old stumps stand like anchorites and yogees, putting off their earthy garments, more and more sublimed from year to year, ready to be translated, and then they are ripe for my fire. I administer the last sacrament and purification. I find old pitch pine sticks which have lain in the mud at the bottom of the river, nobody knows how long, and weigh them up, — almost as heavy as lead, – float them home, saw and split them. Their pitch, still fat and yellow, has saved them for me, and they burn like candles at last.
I become a connoisseur in wood at last, take only the best.
H.D. Thoreau, Journal, October 21, 1857
That peculiar yellow light in the east, from the sun at little before its setting. See October 28, 1852 (“Suddenly the light of the setting sun yellows and warms all the landscape.”); October 28, 1857 ("All at once a low-slanted glade of sunlight from one of heaven’s west windows behind me.") See also note to 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 . . . After a cold gray day this cheering light almost warms us by its resemblance to fire.")
I see many myrtle-birds now about the house this forenoon, on the advent of cooler weather. They keep flying up against the house and the window. See October 10, 1859 ("White-throated sparrows in yard and close up to house, together with myrtle-birds (which fly up against side of house and alight on window-sills)"); October 14, 1855 (“One flies up against the house and alights on the window-sill within a foot of me inside. Black bill and feet, yellow rump, brown above, yellowish-brown on head, cream-colored chin, two white bars on wings, tail black edged with white, — the yellow-rump warbler or myrtle-bird without doubt”); October 19, 1856 (“See quite a flock of myrtle-birds, — which I might carelessly have mistaken for slate-colored snowbirds.) and note to October 28, 1853 ("Little sparrow-sized birds flitting about amid the dry corn stalks and the weeds, — one, quite slaty with black streaks and a bright-yellow crown and rump, which I think is the yellow-crowned warbler,") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Myrtle-bird
Now again, as in the spring, we begin to look for sheltered and sunny places where we may sit. See October 21, 1857 ("somehow it reminds me that now the hearth-side is getting to be a more comfortable place than out-of-doors"); See also October 26, 1852 ("At this season we seek warm sunny lees and hillsides . . .where we cuddle and warm ourselves in the sun as by a fire, where we may get some of its reflected as well as direct heat."); April 26, 1857 (In the winter we sit by fires in the house; in spring and fall, in sunny and sheltered nooks; in the summer, in shady and cool groves, or over water where the breeze circulates.”)
I saw wood tortoises coupled .See June 19, 1855 (“Wood tortoises united, with heads out of water.”)
Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? . . . how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day. See December 26, 1855 (“In a true history or biography, of how little consequence those events of which so much is commonly made! . . . I find in my Journal that the most important events in my life, if recorded at all, are not dated.”); October 27, 1857 ("The real facts of a poet's life would be of more value to us than any work of his art.")
October 21. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, October 21
Before I get home
the sun has set with a cold
white light in the west.
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
tinyurl.com/HDT571021
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