Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change?

November 28. 

A gray, overcast, still day, and more small birds —tree sparrows and chickadees — than usual about the house. 

November 28, 2023

There have been a very few fine snowflakes falling for many hours, and now, by 2 P. M., a regular snow-storm has commenced, fine flakes falling steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape. In half an hour the russet earth is painted white even to the horizon. Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change? 

I cannot now walk without leaving a track behind me; that is one peculiarity of winter walking. Anybody may follow my trail. I have walked, perhaps, a particular wild path along some swamp-side all summer, and thought to myself, I am the only villager that ever comes here. 

But I go out shortly after the first snow has fallen, and lo, here is the track of a sportsman and his dog in my secluded path, and probably he preceded me in the summer as well. Yet my hour is not his, and I may never meet him! 

I asked Coombs the other night if he had been a-hunting lately. He said he had not been out but once this fall. He went out the other day with a companion, and they came near getting a fox. They broke his leg. He has evidently been looking forward to some such success all summer. Having done thus much, he can afford to sit awhile by the stove at the post-office. He is plotting now how to break his head. 

Goodwin cannot be a very bad man, he is so cheery. 

And all the years that I have known Walden these striped breams have skulked in it without my knowledge! How many new thoughts, then, may I have?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 28, 1858


A regular snow-storm has commenced, fine flakes falling steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape. See December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified. This is a fine, dry snow"}

Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change? See November 13, 1858 (“Thus it comes stealthily in the night and changes the whole aspect of the earth.”); November 29, 1858 ("The snow has taken all the November out of the sky."); January 26, 1855 ("This morning it snows again,—a fine dry snow with no wind to speak of, giving a wintry aspect to the landscape . . . What changes in the aspect of the earth! ")

I cannot now walk without leaving a track behind me.  See  November 15, 1858 ("You are now reminded occasionally in your walks that you have contemporaries, and perchance predecessors. I see the track of a fox . . . and, in the wood-path, of a man and a dog."); December 12, 1859 ("[In the winter] you see the tracks of those who had preceded you, and so are more reminded of them than in summer."); compare January 19, 1852 ("It is pleasant to make the first tracks in this road through the woods . . . the fine, dry snow blowing and drifting still.");

Goodwin cannot be a very bad man, he is so cheery. See November 28, 1859 ("Goodwin is cutting out a few cords of dead wood in the midst of E. Hubbard's old lot."); See also October 22, 1853 ("One-eyed John Goodwin, the fisherman, was loading into a hand-cart . . ., — though he is regarded by most as a vicious character, — whose whole motive was so easy to fathom, — thus to obtain his winter's wood, — charmed me unspeakably. . . .Goodwin stands on the solid earth"); See November 4, 1858 ("I took out my glass, and beheld Goodwin, the one-eyed Ajax, in his short blue frock, short and square-bodied, as broad as for his height he can afford to be, getting his winter's wood; for this is one of the phenomena of the season.")

These striped breams have skulked in it without my knowledge! See November 26, 1858
("Looking more attentively, I detected also a great many minnows . . .shaped like bream, but had the transverse bars of perch . . . They have about seven transverse dusky bars like a perch! Yet, from their form and single dorsal fin, I think they are breams. Are they not a new species? "); November 27, 1858 ("I got seventeen more of those little bream of yesterday. “); November 30, 1858 ("How wild it makes the pond and the township to find a new fish in it! For more than two centuries men have fished here and have not distinguished this permanent settler of the township. When my eyes first rested on Walden the striped bream was poised in it, though I did not see it. But there it dwells and has dwelt permanently, who can tell how long?")

November 28. A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November 28

So sudden a change –

the russet earth painted white

to the horizon. 

I cannot now walk

without leaving tracks behind.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  

Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change? 

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

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