Both for bodily and mental health, court the present.

December 28.


Brought my boat from Walden in rain.

No snow on ground. Grass in the churchyard and elsewhere green as in the spring.

I omitted some observations apparently between the 18th and 22d, to the effect that the berries that hold on into winter are to be remarked, — the winterberry, alder and birch fruit, smilax, pyrus, hips, etc. 

Both for bodily and mental health, court the present.

Embrace health wherever you find her.

A clump of birches raying out from one centre make a more agreeable object than a single tree.

The rosettes in the ice, as Channing calls them, now and for some time have attracted me.

It is worth the while to apply what wisdom one has to the conduct of his life, surely.

I find myself oftenest wise in little things and foolish in great ones. That I may accomplish some particular petty affair well, I live my whole life coarsely.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book.

Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping.

Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe? 

We live too fast and coarsely, just as we eat too fast, and do not know the true savor of our food.

We consult our will and understanding and the expectation of men, not our genius.

I can impose upon myself tasks which will crush me for life and prevent all expansion, and this I am but too inclined to do.

One moment of life costs many hours, hours not of business but of preparation and invitation.

Yet the man who does not betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called a leader, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while, which shall surely be opened to him.

That aim in life is highest which requires the highest and finest discipline.

How much, what infinite, leisure it requires, as of a lifetime, to appreciate a single phenomenon! You must camp down beside it as for life, having reached your land of promise, and give yourself wholly to it. It must stand for the whole world to you, symbolical of all things.

The least partialness is your own defect of sight and cheapens the experience fatally.

Unless the humming of a gnat is as the music of the spheres, and the music of the spheres is as the humming of a gnat, they are naught to me.

It is not communications to serve for a history, — which are science, — but the great story itself, that cheers and satisfies us.

As I have not observed the rainbow on the Juncus militaris nor the andromeda red the past fall, it suggests the great difference in seasons. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 28, 1852

 

Brought my boat from Walden in rain. See December 27, 1852 ("Not a particle of ice in Walden to-day. Paddled across it. I took my new boat out.”)

Both for bodily and mental health, court the present. see January 7, 1851(“I must live above all in the present.”); Walden: Where I lived and what I lived for ("God Himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages."); April 24, 1859 ("Find your eternity in each moment. Live in the present. On any other course life is a succession of regrets")

Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe? See August 19, 1851 ("The poet must be continually watching the moods of his mind, as the astronomer watches the aspects of the heavens. What might we not expect from a long life faithfully spent in this wise? The humblest observer would see some stars shoot. A faithful description as by a disinterested person of the thoughts which visited a certain mind in threescore years and ten, as when one reports the number and character of the vehicles which pass a particular point. ")

A clump of birches raying out from one centre make a more agreeable object than a single tree.See January 9, 1860 ("I am interested by a clump of young canoe birches on the hillside shore of the pond")

The rosettes in the ice. See December 21, 1854 ("What C. calls ice-rosettes, i.e. those small pinches of crystallized snow, . . .I think it is a sort of hoar frost on the ice. It was all done last night, for we see them thickly clustered about our skate-tracks on the river, where it was quite bare yesterday"); January 7, 1856 ("It is completely frozen at the Hubbard’s Bath bend now, — a small strip of dark ice, thickly sprinkled with those rosettes of crystals, two or three inches in diameter"); February 2, 1860 ("The new ice over the channel is of a yellow tinge, and is covered with handsome rosettes two or three inches in diameter where the vapor which rose through froze and crystallized."); February 13, 1859 ("Ice which froze yesterday and last night is thickly and evenly strewn with fibrous frost crystals . . . sometimes arranged like a star or rosette, one for every inch or two; . . . I think that this is the vapor from the water which found its way up through the ice and froze in the night"). 

Moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe.  See  June 22, 1851("My pulse must beat with Nature"); December 12, 1851 ("I wish for leisure and quiet to let my life flow in its proper channels, with its proper currents; when I might not waste the days."); January 11, 1852 ("We cannot live too leisurely. Let me not live as if time was short. Catch the pace of the seasons; have leisure to attend to every phenomenon of nature, and to entertain every thought that comes."); January 26, 1852 ("Let us preserve, secure, protect the coincidence of our life with the life of nature.");  May 28, 1854 ("To be serene and successful we must be at one with the universe."); See also notes to September 7, 1851 ("The art of life") and December 15, 1852 ("A man should not live without a purpose")

As I have not observed the rainbow on the Juncus militaris it suggests the great difference in seasons. See October 27, 1858 ("The bayonet rush also has partly changed, and now, the river being perhaps lower than before this season, shows its rainbow colors. . . .Though a single stalk would not attract attention, when seen in the mass they have this singular effect. I call it, therefore, the rainbow rush.")