Saw a small flock of geese go over.
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| December 15, 2018 |
One's life, the enterprise he is here upon, should certainly be a grand fact to consider, not a mean or insignificant one. A man should not live without a purpose, and that purpose must surely be a grand one.
But is this fact of "our life" commonly but a puff of air, a flash in the pan, a smoke, a nothing? It does not afford arena for a tragedy.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 15, 1852
But is this fact of "our life " commonly but a puff of air, a flash in the pan, a smoke, a nothing? See August 8, 1852 ("When the play - it may be the tragedy of life - is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.")
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 15, 1852
Saw a small flock of geese go over. See December 1, 1857 ("I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day.”); December 6, 1855 ("10 P. M. — Hear geese going over.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Geese in Autumn
A man should not live without a purpose. See December 29, 1841("That one may work out a true life requires more art and delicate skill than any other work."); April 29, 1852 (“The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.”); Walden ("To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”) and ("And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. . . .Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, . . .— determined to make a day of it.”); October 18, 1855 (“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”); November 18, 1857 "Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of . . .”); August 30, 1856 (“Many of our days should be spent, not in vain expectations and lying on our oars, but in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him. Let not your life be wholly without an object, though it be only to ascertain the flavor of a cranberry, for it will not be only the quality of an insignificant berry that you will have tasted, but the flavor of your life to that extent, and it will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy ”); September 8, 1858 ("It is good policy to be stirring about your affairs, for the reward of activity and energy is that if you do not accomplish the object you had professed to yourself, you do accomplish something else.”)
A man should not live without a purpose. See December 29, 1841("That one may work out a true life requires more art and delicate skill than any other work."); April 29, 1852 (“The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.”); Walden ("To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”) and ("And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. . . .Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, . . .— determined to make a day of it.”); October 18, 1855 (“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”); November 18, 1857 "Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of . . .”); August 30, 1856 (“Many of our days should be spent, not in vain expectations and lying on our oars, but in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him. Let not your life be wholly without an object, though it be only to ascertain the flavor of a cranberry, for it will not be only the quality of an insignificant berry that you will have tasted, but the flavor of your life to that extent, and it will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy ”); September 8, 1858 ("It is good policy to be stirring about your affairs, for the reward of activity and energy is that if you do not accomplish the object you had professed to yourself, you do accomplish something else.”)
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