A remarkably cold, as well as snowy, January.

January 26

When I took the ether my consciousness amounted to this: I put my finger on myself in order to keep the place, otherwise I should never have returned to this world. 

They have cut and sawed off the butt of the great elm at nine and a half feet from the ground, and I counted the annual rings there with the greatest ease and accuracy. Indeed I never saw them so distinct on a large butt. The tree was quite sound there, not the least hollow even at the pith. 

There were one hundred and twenty—seven rings. Supposing the tree to have been five years old when nine and a half feet high, then it was one hundred and thirty-two years old, or came up in the year 1724, just before Lovewell’s Fight. 

There were two centres, fourteen inches apart. There were thirteen distinct rings about each centre, before they united and one ring inclosed both. Then there was a piece of bark,  say six or eight inches long. This was not overgrown but by the twenty—fourth ring. 

These two centres of growth corresponded in position to the two main branches six feet above, and I inferred that when the tree was about eighteen years old, the fork commenced at nine and a half feet from the ground, but as it increased in diameter, it united higher and higher up. 

I remember that the bark was considerably nearer one centre than the other. There was bark in several places completely overgrown and included on the extreme butt end where cut off, having apparently overgrown its own furrows. 

Its diameter, where I counted the rings, was, one way, as near as I could measure in spite of the carf, four feet and three inches; another, four feet and eight inches; and five feet. On the line by which I counted, which was the long way of the tree, it had grown in the first fifty years twenty inches, or two fifths of an inch a year; the last fifty, five and three quarters inches or about one ninth of an inch a year; and there was a space of about five inches between the two, or for the intermediate twenty-seven years.

At this height, it had grown on an average annually nearly twenty-four one-hundredths of an inch from the centre on one side. 

The white or sap wood averaged about two inches thick. The bark was from one to two inches thick, and in the last case I could count from twelve to fifteen distinct rings in it, as if it were regularly shed after that period. 

The court-house elm measured, at six feet from the ground on the west side, twelve feet one and one half inches in circumference. The willow by the Jim Jones house, fourteen feet at about eighteen inches from ground; thirteen feet eight inches, at about six inches from ground; and it bulged out much larger above this. 

P. M. —Walk down the river as far as the south bend behind Abner Buttrick’s. I also know its condition as far as the Hubbard Bridge in the other direction.

There is not a square foot open between these extremes, and, judging from what I know of the river beyond these limits, I may safely say that it is not open (the main stream, I mean) anywhere in the town. (Of the North Branch above the Bath Place, the goose ground, say to the stone bridge, I cannot speak confidently?) The same must have been the case yesterday, since it was colder. Probably the same has been true of the river, excepting the small Space against Merrick’s below the Rock (now closed), since January 7th, when it closed at the Hubbard Bath, or nearly three weeks, —a long time, methinks, for it to be frozen so solidly. 

A sleigh might safely be driven now from Carlisle Bridge to the Sudbury meadows on the river.

Methinks it is a remarkably cold, as well as snowy, January, for we have had good sleighing ever since the 26th of December and no thaw. 

Walk as far as Flint’s Bridge with Abel Hunt, where I take to the river. I tell him I have come to walk on the river as the best place, for the snow has drifted somewhat in the road, while it was converted into ice almost entirely on the river. 

“But,” asks he, “are you not afraid that you will get in?” 

“Oh, no, it will bear a load of wood from one end to the other.” 

"But then there may be some weak places.” 

Yet he is some seventy years old and was born and bred immediately on its banks. Truly one half the world does not know how the other half lives.  

Men have been talking now for a week at the post office about the age of the great elm, as a matter interesting but impossible to be determined. The very choppers and travellers have stood upon its prostrate trunk and speculated upon its age, as if it were a profound mystery. I stooped and read its years to them (127 at nine and a half feet), but they heard me as the wind that once sighed through its branches. They still surmised that it might be two hundred years old, but they never stooped to read the inscription. 

Truly they love darkness rather than light. One said it was probably one hundred and fifty, for he had heard somebody say that for fifty years the elm grew, for fifty it stood still, and for fifty it was dying. (Wonder what portion of his career he stood still!) 

Truly all men are not men of science. They dwell within an integument of prejudice thicker than the bark of the cork tree, but it is valuable chiefly to stop bottles with. Tied to their buoyant prejudices, they keep themselves afloat when honest swimmers sink.

The white maple buds look large, with bursting downy scales as in spring. 

I observe that the crust is strongest over meadows, though the snow is deep there and there is no ice nor water beneath, but in pastures and upland generally I break through. Probably there is more moisture to be frozen in the former places, and the snow is more compact.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 26, 1856

When I took the ether ... See May 12, 1851

Lighting up the Mist.

February 27.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance. For what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?

Which is the best man to deal with,—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.

The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.

I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.

It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know in any higher sense than this.

H.D. Thoreau, Walking (1861) 

See February 27, 1851("I do not know that knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise, or a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we had called knowledge before; an indefinite sense of the grandeur and glory of the universe. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. But man cannot be said to know in any higher sense,  than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun.")