January 21.
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| January 21, 2018 |
A fine, still, warm moonlight evening. We have had one or two already. Moon not yet full.
To the woods by the Deep Cut at 9 o'clock.
The blueness of the sky at night — the color it wears by day — is an everlasting surprise to me, suggesting the constant presence and prevalence of light in the firmament, that we see through the veil of night to the constant blue, as by day. The night is not black when the air is clear, but blue still. The great ocean of light and ether is unaffected by our partial night. Night is not universal. At midnight I see into the universal day. Walking at that hour, unless it is cloudy, still the blue sky o'erarches me.
I am somewhat oppressed and saddened by the sameness and apparent poverty of the heavens, — that these irregular and few geometrical figures which the constellations make are no other than those seen by the Chaldean shepherds. The same simplicity and unchangeableness which commonly impresses me by wealth sometimes affects me as barrenness. I pine for a new world in the heavens as well as on the earth, and though it is some consolation to hear of the wilderness of stars and systems invisible to the naked eye, yet the sky does not make that impression of variety and wildness that even the forest does, as it ought. It makes an impression, rather, of simplicity and unchangeableness, as of eternal laws; this being the same constellation which the shepherds saw, and obedient still to the same law.
It does not affect me as that unhandselled wilderness which the forest is. I seem to see it pierced with visual rays from a thousand observatories.
It is more the domain of science than of poetry. But it is the stars as not known to science that I would know, the stars which the lonely traveller knows. The Chaldean shepherds saw not the same stars which I see, and if I am elevated in the least toward the heavens, I do not accept their classification of them. I am not to be distracted by the names which they have imposed. The sun which I know is not Apollo, nor is the evening star Venus. The heavens should be as new, at least, as the world is new.
This classification of the stars is old and musty; it is as if a mildew had taken place in the heavens, as if the stars so closely packed had heated and moulded there. If they appear fixed, it is because that hitherto men have been thus necessitated to see them. I see not merely old but new testaments in the skies. Do not I stand as near the stars as the Chaldean shepherds? The heavens commonly look as dry and meagre as our astronomies are, — mere troops, as the latter are catalogues, of stars. The Milky Way yields no milk. A few good anecdotes is our science, with a few imposing statements respecting distance and size, and little or nothing about the stars as they concern man; teaching how he may survey a country or sail a ship, and not how he may steer his life.
Astrology contained the germ of a higher truth than this. It may happen that the stars are more significant and truly celestial to the teamster than to the astronomer. Nobody sees the stars now. They study astronomy at the district school, and learn that the sun is ninety-five millions distant, and the like, — a statement which never made any impression on me, because I never walked it, and which I cannot be said to believe.
But the sun shines nevertheless. Though observatories are multiplied, the heavens receive very little attention. The naked eye may easily see farther than the armed. It depends on who looks through it. No superior telescope to this has been invented. In those big ones the recoil is equal to the force of the discharge. The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling ranges from earth to heaven, but this the astronomer's does not often do. It does not see far beyond the dome of the observatory. Compared with the visible phenomena of the heavens, the anecdotes of science affect me as trivial and petty.
Man's eye is the true star-finder, the comet-seeker. As I sat looking out the window the other evening just after dark, I saw the lamp of a freight-train, and, near by, just over the train, a bright star, which looked exactly like the former, as if it belonged to a different part of the same train. It was difficult to realize that the one was a feeble oil lamp, the other a world.
It is more the domain of science than of poetry. But it is the stars as not known to science that I would know, the stars which the lonely traveller knows. The Chaldean shepherds saw not the same stars which I see, and if I am elevated in the least toward the heavens, I do not accept their classification of them. I am not to be distracted by the names which they have imposed. The sun which I know is not Apollo, nor is the evening star Venus. The heavens should be as new, at least, as the world is new.
This classification of the stars is old and musty; it is as if a mildew had taken place in the heavens, as if the stars so closely packed had heated and moulded there. If they appear fixed, it is because that hitherto men have been thus necessitated to see them. I see not merely old but new testaments in the skies. Do not I stand as near the stars as the Chaldean shepherds? The heavens commonly look as dry and meagre as our astronomies are, — mere troops, as the latter are catalogues, of stars. The Milky Way yields no milk. A few good anecdotes is our science, with a few imposing statements respecting distance and size, and little or nothing about the stars as they concern man; teaching how he may survey a country or sail a ship, and not how he may steer his life.
Astrology contained the germ of a higher truth than this. It may happen that the stars are more significant and truly celestial to the teamster than to the astronomer. Nobody sees the stars now. They study astronomy at the district school, and learn that the sun is ninety-five millions distant, and the like, — a statement which never made any impression on me, because I never walked it, and which I cannot be said to believe.
But the sun shines nevertheless. Though observatories are multiplied, the heavens receive very little attention. The naked eye may easily see farther than the armed. It depends on who looks through it. No superior telescope to this has been invented. In those big ones the recoil is equal to the force of the discharge. The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling ranges from earth to heaven, but this the astronomer's does not often do. It does not see far beyond the dome of the observatory. Compared with the visible phenomena of the heavens, the anecdotes of science affect me as trivial and petty.
Man's eye is the true star-finder, the comet-seeker. As I sat looking out the window the other evening just after dark, I saw the lamp of a freight-train, and, near by, just over the train, a bright star, which looked exactly like the former, as if it belonged to a different part of the same train. It was difficult to realize that the one was a feeble oil lamp, the other a world.
As I walk the railroad causeway I am, as the last two months, disturbed by the sound of my steps on the frozen ground. I wish to hear the silence of the night, for the silence is something positive and to be heard. I cannot walk with my ears covered. I must stand still and listen with open ears, far from the noises of the village, that the night may make its impression on me. A fertile and eloquent silence. Sometimes the silence is merely negative, an arid and barren waste in which I shudder, where no ambrosia grows. I must hear the whispering of a myriad voices.
Silence alone is worthy to be heard. Silence is of various depth and fertility, like soil. Now it is a mere Sahara, where men perish of hunger and thirst, now a fertile bottom, or prairie, of the West. As I leave the village, drawing nearer to the woods, I listen from time to time to hear the hounds of Silence baying the Moon, — to know if they are on the track of any game. If there 's no Diana in the night, what is it worth? I hark the goddess Diana.
The silence rings; it is musical and thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible. I hear the unspeakable. I easily read the moral of my dreams.
Yesterday I was influenced with the rottenness of human relations. They appeared full of death and decay, and offended the nostrils. In the night I dreamed of delving amid the graves of the dead, and soiled my fingers with their rank mould. It was sanitarily, morally, and physically true.
If night is the mere negation of day, I hear nothing but my own steps in it. Death is with me, and life far away. If the elements are not human, if the winds do not sing or sigh, as the stars twinkle, my life runs shallow. I measure the depth of my own being. I walk with vast alliances. I am the allied powers, the holy alliance, absorbing the European potentates.
I do not get much from the blue sky, these twinkling stars, and bright snow-fields reflecting an almost rosaceous light. But when I enter the woods I am fed by the variety, — the forms of the trees above against the blue, with the stars seen through the pines like the lamps hung on them in an illumination, the somewhat in distinct and misty fineness of the pine-tops, and the finely divided spray of the oaks, etc., and the shadows of all these on the snow.
The first shadow I came to I thought was a black place where the woodchoppers had had a fire. These myriad shadows checker the white ground and enhance the brightness of the enlightened portions. See the shadows of these young oaks which have lost half their leaves, more beautiful than themselves, like the shadow of a chandelier, and motionless as if they were fallen leaves on the snow, — but shake the tree, and all is in motion.
In this stillness and at this distance, I hear the nine-o'clock bell in Bedford five miles off, which I might never hear in the village, but here its music surmounts the village din and has something very sweet and noble and inspiring in it, associated, in fact, with the hooting of owls.
Returning, I thought I heard the creaking of a wagon just starting from Hubbard's door, and rarely musical it sounded. It was the telegraph harp. It began to sound but at one spot only. It is very fitful, and only sounds when it is in the mood. You may go by twenty times, both when the wind is high and when it is low and let it blow which way it will, and yet hear no strain from it, but another time, at a particular spot, you may hear a strain rising and swelling on the string, which may at last ripen to something glorious. The wire will perhaps labor long with it before it attains to melody. Even the creaking of a wagon in a frosty night has music in it which allies it to the highest and purest strain of the muse.
I think it was January 20th that I saw that which I think an otter track in path under the Cliffs, — a deep trail in the snow, six or seven inches wide and two or three deep in the middle, as if a log had been drawn along, similar to a muskrat's only much larger, and the legs evidently short and the steps short, sinking three or four inches deeper still, as if it had waddled along. It finally turned into my old tracks and went toward the river and Fair Haven Pond. One was killed there last spring.
Minott says his mother told him she had seen a deer come down the hill behind her house, where I. Moore's now is, and cross the road and the meadow in front; thinks it may have been eighty years ago.
Otter are very rare here now. I have not heard of any killed here abouts for twenty or thirty years till, within two years, two or three of them. In Sudbury and at Fair Haven Pond. Israel Rice tells of one shot within the year in a ditch near White Pond; probably the same [as made the track of January 20.]
H. D Thoreau, Journal, January 21, 1853
Moon not yet full.To the woods by the Deep Cut at 9 o'clock. See July 16, 1850 ("Many men walk by day; few walk by night.); July 12, 1851 ("The moon is full, and I walk alone.")
As I sat looking out the window the other evening just after dark, I saw the lamp of a freight-train, and, near by, just over the train, a bright star, which looked exactly like the former, as if it belonged to a different part of the same train. Compare Wordsworth, according to DeQuincey (""Just now … . . .t the very instant when I raised my head from the ground . . .at the very instant when the organs of attention were all at once relaxing from their tension, the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines of massy blackness, fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of the Infinite, that would not have arrested me
under other circumstances.")
I think it was January 20th that I saw that which I think an otter track in path under the Cliffs. See note to March 6, 1856 ("On the rock this side the Leaning Hemlocks, is the track of an otter. He has left some scentless jelly-like substance").
Otter are very rare here now. See December 10, 1840. (" I discover a strange track in the snow, and learn that some migrating otter has made across from the river to the wood, by my yard and the smith's shop, in the silence of the night . . . though his tracks are now crosswise to mine, our courses are not divergent, but we shall meet at last."); March 14, 1853 ("The blacksmith of Sudbury has two otter skins taken in that town."); December 31, 1853 ("Saw probably an otter's track, very broad and deep, as if a log had been drawn along. . . .This animal probably I should never see the least trace of, were it not for the snow, the great revealer."); January 30, 1854 ("How retired an otter manages to live! He grows to be four feet long without any mortal getting a glimpse of him,"); February 20, 1855 (among the quadrupeds of Concord, the otter is "very rare."); April 6, 1855 ("it reminds me of an otter, which however I have never seen."); ; March 31, 1857 ("The existence of the otter, our largest wild animal, is not betrayed to any of our senses (or at least not to more than one in a thousand)!");and the Natural History of Massachusetts (1842) ("The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten have disappeared ; the otter is rarely if ever seen here at present; and the mink is less common than formerly.")
I hear the nine- o'clock bell in Bedford five miles off. See August 8, 1851 (“I hear the nine o'clock bell ringing in Bedford. ”)
She had seen a deer eighty years ago. See March 23, 1856 ("I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here, — the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverene, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc., — I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.”)
She had seen a deer eighty years ago. See March 23, 1856 ("I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here, — the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverene, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc., — I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.”)
I think it was January 20th that I saw that which I think an otter track in path under the Cliffs. See note to March 6, 1856 ("On the rock this side the Leaning Hemlocks, is the track of an otter. He has left some scentless jelly-like substance").
Otter are very rare here now. See December 10, 1840. (" I discover a strange track in the snow, and learn that some migrating otter has made across from the river to the wood, by my yard and the smith's shop, in the silence of the night . . . though his tracks are now crosswise to mine, our courses are not divergent, but we shall meet at last."); March 14, 1853 ("The blacksmith of Sudbury has two otter skins taken in that town."); December 31, 1853 ("Saw probably an otter's track, very broad and deep, as if a log had been drawn along. . . .This animal probably I should never see the least trace of, were it not for the snow, the great revealer."); January 30, 1854 ("How retired an otter manages to live! He grows to be four feet long without any mortal getting a glimpse of him,"); February 20, 1855 (among the quadrupeds of Concord, the otter is "very rare."); April 6, 1855 ("it reminds me of an otter, which however I have never seen."); ; March 31, 1857 ("The existence of the otter, our largest wild animal, is not betrayed to any of our senses (or at least not to more than one in a thousand)!");and the Natural History of Massachusetts (1842) ("The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten have disappeared ; the otter is rarely if ever seen here at present; and the mink is less common than formerly.")
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