All nature is a new impression every instant.

May 23. 

Sunday. Barn. - The distant woods are but the tassels of my eye.

Books are to be attended to as new sounds merely.

Most would be put to a sore trial if the reader should assume the attitude of a listener.

They are but a new note in the forest.

To our lonely, sober thought the earth is a wild unexplored. Wildness as of the jay and muskrat reigns over the great part of nature. The oven-bird and plover are heard in the horizon.

Here is a new book of heroes, come to me like the note of the chewink from over the fen, only over a deeper and wider fen.

The pines are unrelenting sifters of thought; nothing petty leaks through them.

Let me put my ear close, and hear the sough of this book, that I may know if any inspiration yet haunts it.

There is always a later edition of every book than the printer wots of, no matter how recently it was published.

All nature is a new impression every instant. 

May 23, 2020

The aspects of the most simple object are as various as the aspects of the most compound.

Observe the same sheet of water from different eminences.

When I have travelled a few miles I do not recognize the profile of the hills of my native village.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 23, 1841

When I have travelled a few miles I do not recognize the profile of the hills of my native village. See June 4, 1858 ("It is remarkable how, as you are leaving a mountain and looking back at it from time to time, it gradually gathers up its slopes and spurs to itself into a regular whole, and makes a new and total impression.")


All nature is a new impression every instant. See June 6, 1857 (“We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact”); August 19, 1851("Nature rests no longer at her culminating point than at any other. If you are not out at the right instant, the summer may go by and you not see it.”); Walden: Where I lived and what I lived for ("God Himself culminates in the present moment,"); April 24, 1859 ("There is a season for everything, and we do not notice a given phenomenon except at that season")

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

I drink at it; but while I drink

I see the sandy bottom and

detect how shallow it is.

Its thin current slides away,

but eternity remains.

I would drink deeper;

fish in the sky, whose bottom

is pebbly with stars.

I cannot count one.

I know not the first 

letter of the alphabet.

I have always been regretting that

I was not as wise as the day I was born.

Walden, Where I lived and what I lived for

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 © 2009-2021