Monday, August 2, 2021

A Book of the Seasons: August 2 (midsummer standstill, haymaking, concave earth, pensive moods, seeds carried by birds)





The year is but a succession of days,
and I see that I could assign some office to each day
which, summed up, would be the history of the year.
Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852


Midsummer standstill.
That fine z-ing of locusts
is an August sound.

Sit on the hilltop –
this rock warm with the heat of
the departed sun.

Here on this rock are
the seeds of berries in the
droppings of some bird.

Sitting on this rock
suddenly my life is a
fathomless ocean.

I see the seeds of 
berries recently left on 
rocks where birds have perched.
August 2, 1860


In many moods it is cheering to look across hence to that blue rim of the earth . . . These hills extend our plot of earth; they make our native valley or indentation in the earth so much the larger. August 2, 1852

Heavy, long-continued, but warm rain in the night, raising the river already eight or nine inches and disturbing the meadow haymakers. August 2, 1853

July has been to me a trivial month. It began hot and continued drying, then rained some toward the middle, bringing anticipations of the fall, and then was hot again about the 20th. It has been a month of haying, heat.  August 2, 1854

That fine z-ing of locusts in the grass which I have heard for three or four days is an August sound. It suggests a certain maturity in the year -- a certain moral and physical sluggishness and standstill at midsummer. August 2, 1859

In huckle-berry fields I see the seeds of berries recently left on the rocks where birds have perched. How many of these small fruits they may thus disseminate! August 2, 1860

The waxwork berries are yellowing. August 2, 1853

Some waxwork leaves have felt the heat and slight drought. Their green is spotted with yellow, distinct yellow and green; others a very delicate clear yellow; others faded quite white. August 2, 1856

I am not sure but the bunches of the smooth sumach berries are handsomest when but partly turned, the crimson contrasting with the green, the green berries showing a velvety crimson cheek. August 2, 1853

The green fruit of the carrion-flower forms dense, firm, spherical umbels (?) at the end of stems five or six inches long; umbels two inches in diameter, formed, one of them, of eighty-four berries, size of peas, three to six sided, closely wedged together on peduncles three quarters of an inch long. The whole feels hard and solid in the hand. August 2, 1853

Mulgedium out. August 2, 1853

Very common now are the few green emerald leafets of the Bidens Beckii, which will ere long yellow the shallow parts. August 2, 1856

A three-ribbed goldenrod by small apple, by wall at foot east side of Hill Very tall. August 2, 1856

Birds have grown up and flown more or less in small flocks, though I notice a new sparrow's nest and eggs and perhaps a catbird's eggs lately. 
August 2, 1854

The woodland quire has steadily diminished in volume. August 2, 1854

A few sparrows sing as in the morning and the spring; also a peawai and a chewink. August 2, 1854.

As we rest in our boat under a tree, we hear from time to time the loud snap of a wood pewee’s bill overhead. The bird is incessantly diving to this side and that after an insect and returning to its perch on a dead twig. We hear the sound of its bill when it catches one. August 2, 1860

I see there what I take to be a marsh hawk of this year, hunting by itself. It has not learned to be very shy yet, so that we repeatedly get near it. What a rich brown bird! almost, methinks, with purple reflections. August 2, 1858.

A green bittern comes, noiselessly flapping, with stealthy and inquisitive looking to this side the stream and then that, thirty feet above the water. This antediluvian bird, creature of the night, is a fit emblem of a dead stream like this Musketicook. August 2, 1856

There is a sympathy between its sluggish flight and the sluggish flow of the stream, — its slowly lapsing flight, even like the rills of Musketicook and my own pulse sometimes. August 2, 1856

I noticed meandering down that meadow, which is now quite dry, a very broad and distinct musquash-trail, where they went and came continually when it was wet or under water in the winter or spring. August 2, 1858 

The black willow down is even yet still seen here and there on the water. August 2, 1860.

It is a new era with the flowers when the small purple fringed orchis, as now, is found in shady swamps standing along the brooks. It appears to be alone of its class. Not to be overlooked, it has so much flower, August 2, 1852

Up Assabet. The young red maples have sprung up chiefly on the sandy and muddy shores, especially where there is a bay or eddy. August 2, 1860

Wachusett from Fair Haven Hill looks like this:



the dotted line being the top of the surrounding forest. There is a whitish line along the base of Wachusett more particularly, as if the reflection of bare cliffs there in the sun. Undoubtedly it is the slight vaporous haze in the atmosphere seen edgewise just above the top of the forest, though it is a clear day. It, this line, makes the mountains loom, in fact, a faint whitish line; separating the mountains from their bases and the rest of the globe. August 2, 1852. 

I am inclined now for a pensive evening walk .
I am inclined now for a pensive evening walk .
I am inclined now to go for a pensive evening walk. August 2, 1854

As I go up the hill, surrounded by its shadow, while the sun is setting . . . For the first time for a month, at least, I am reminded that thought is possible. The din of trivialness is silenced. I float over or through the deeps of silence. It is the first silence I have heard for a month. 
August 2, 1854



Meanwhile the moon in her first quarter is burnishing her disk.

The sun has been set fifteen minutes, and a long cloudy finger, stretched along the northern horizon, is held over the point where it disappeared. August 2, 1854

I see dark shadows formed on the south side of the woods east of the river. After a little while the western sky is suddenly suffused with a pure white light. August 2, 1854 

I am compelled to stand to write where a soft, faint light from the western sky came in between two willows. August 2, 1854

The nighthawk flies low, skimming over the ground now. August 2, 1854

The crickets on the causeway make a steady creak. August 2, 1854

A few fireflies in the meadows. I am uncertain whether that so large and bright and high was a firefly or a shooting star. Shooting stars are but fireflies of the firmament. August 2, 1854

Meanwhile the moon in her first quarter is burnishing her disk.  August 2, 1854.


Now suddenly the cloudy finger and the few scattered clouds glow with the parting salute of the sun, which has so long sunk below the convex earth. August 2, 1854


I sit on rock on the hilltop, warm with the heat of the departed sun, in my thin summer clothes.  August 2, 1854

My life had been a River Platte, tinkling over its sands but useless for all great navigation, but now it suddenly became a fathomless ocean. It shelved off to unimagined depths. August 2, 1854

Here are the seeds of some berries in the droppings of some bird on the rock. August 2, 1854

Fields to-day sends me a specimen copy of my "Walden." It is to be published on the 12th. August 2, 1854


*****

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Haymaking
  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Western Sky
 A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Horizon
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Fireflies
 A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Nighthawk
 A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Musquash

January 1, 1852 ("Perhaps the only thing that spoke to me on this walk was the bare, lichen-covered gray rock at the Cliff, in the moonlight, naked and almost warm as in summer.”)
March 28, 1858 ("From this hilltop I overlook,. . . this seemingly concave circle of earth, in the midst of which I was born and dwell, which in the northwest and southeast has a more distant blue rim to it."); 
March 28, 1858 (" On ascending the hill next his home, every man finds that he dwells in a shallow concavity whose sheltering walls are the convex surface of the earth, beyond which he cannot see..")
March 31, 1853 ("It is affecting to see a distant mountain-top,. . . still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it.')
June 3, 1850 ("The landscape is a vast amphitheatre rising to its rim in the horizon.")
June 16, 1852 ("Do not the stars, too, show their light for love, like the fireflies ?”)  
June 25, 1852 (“What were the firefly's light, if it were not for darkness?”)
June 25, 1852 ("The mountain outline is remarkably distinct, and the intermediate earth appears . . . like a vast saucer sloping up ward to its sharp mountain rim.")
July 14, 1856 (“While drinking at Assabet Spring in woods, noticed a cherry-stone on the bottom. A bird that came to drink must have brought it half a mile. So the tree gets planted!”)
July 24, 1852 (“The smooth sumach berries are red.”)
July 27, 1852 ("The whole surface of the earth a succession of these great cups, falling away from dry or rocky edges to gelid green meadows and water in the midst, where night already is setting in!")
July 30, 1856 ("A green bittern. . .with heavy flapping flight")
July 31, 1856 ("The Solidago gigantea (?), three-ribbed, out a long time at Walden shore by railroad, more perfectly out than any solidago I have seen")
July 31,1856 (“The smooth sumach is pretty generally crimson-berried on the Knoll”)
July 31, 1856 (" As I make my way amid rank weeds still wet with the dew, the air filled with a decaying musty scent and the z-ing of small locusts, I hear the distant sound of a flail, and thoughts of autumn occupy my mind, and the memory of past years. ") 
August 1, 1852 ("Sumach berries now generally red.")
August 1, 1856 (“Unfortunate those who have not got their hay. I see them wading in overflowed meadows and pitching the black and mouldy swaths about in vain that they may dry.")
August 1, 1859 ("The B. Beckii (just beginning to bloom) just shows a few green leafets.")
August 1, 1860 ("You will be surprised, on looking through a large maple swamp which two months ago was red with maple seed falling in showers around, at the very small number of maple seeds to be found there") 

August 3, 1852 ("By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe,")
August 3, 1852 ("The Great Meadows alive with farmers getting their hay. I could count four or five great loads already loaded in different parts.")
August 3, 1859 (" It being remote from public view, some of them work in their shirts or half naked")
August 5, 1854 ("All farmers are anxious to get their meadow-hay as soon as possible for fear the river will rise. ")
August 5, 1852 ("For the hundredth time surprised by the landscape of the river valley and the horizon with its distant blue scalloped rim.")
August 7, 1856 ("Mulgedium, perhaps a fortnight. . . .One mulgedium at Corner Spring is at least ten feet high and hollow all the way. ");
August 8, 1858. ("Saw yesterday a this year’s (?) marsh hawk, female . . .I took it to be a young bird, it came so near and looked so fresh. It is a fine rich-brown, full-breasted bird, with a long tail.”)
August 9, 1854 ("Waxwork yellowing.")
August 18, 1858 (“In the meanwhile, as it was perched on the twig, it was incessantly turning its head about, looking for insects, and suddenly would dart aside or downward a rod or two, and I could hear its bill snap as it caught one. Then it returned to the same or another perch..")
August 19, 1852 ("The small fruits of most plants are now generally ripe or ripening, and this is coincident with the flying in flocks of such young birds now grown as feed on them.”); 
August 23, 1854 ("I improve the dry weather to examine the middle of Gowing's Swamp. . . . This is marked by the paths of muskrats, which also extend through the green froth of the pool.")
August 23, 1858("Smooth sumach berries all turned crimson.")
September 3, 1856 ("One carrion-flower berry is turning blue in its dense spherical cluster.") 
September 21, 1860 ("I suspect that ... those [seeds] the wind takes are less generally the food of birds and quadrupeds than the heavier and wingless seeds")
September 27, 1852 ("From our native hills we look out easily to the far blue mountains, which seem to preside over them." )
October 22, 1857("But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it? ")
November 1, 1858 ("A man dwells in his native valley like a corolla in its calyx, like an acorn in its cup. Here, of course, is all that you love, all that you expect, all that you are.")

August 2, 2021

If you make the least correct 
observation of nature this year,
 you will have occasion to repeat it
 with illustrations the next, 
and the season and life itself is prolonged.

August 1  <<<<<  August 2  >>>>>   August 3

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  August 2
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 ©  2009-2022


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