The perfect correspondence of a life and the year.

September 8

September 8, 2019

While the grass is fresh, the earth is in its vigor. The greenness of the grass is the best symptom or evidence of the earth's youth or health.

Perhaps it will be found that when the grass ceases to be fresh and green, or after June, the birds have ceased to sing, and that the fireflies, too, no longer in myriads sparkle in the meadows.

Perhaps a history of the year would be a history of the grass, or of a leaf, regarding the grass blades as leaves, for it is equally true that the leaves soon lose their freshness and soundness, and become the prey of insects and of drought.

Plants commonly soon cease to grow for the year, unless they may have a fall growth, which is a kind of second spring.

In the feelings of the man, too, the year is already past, and he looks forward to the coming winter.  His occasional rejuvenescence and faith in the current time is like the aftermath, a scanty crop.

The enterprise which he has not already undertaken cannot be undertaken this year.  The period of youth is past.

The year may be in its summer, in its manhood, but it is no longer in the flower of its age.  It is a season of withering, of dust and heat, a season of small fruits and trivial experiences.  Summer thus answers to manhood.

But there is an aftermath in early autumn, and some spring flowers bloom again, followed by an Indian summer of finer atmosphere and of a pensive beauty.

May my life be not destitute of its Indian summer, a season of fine and clear, mild weather in which I may prolong my hunting before the winter comes, when I may once more lie on the ground with faith, as in spring, and even with more serene confidence.

And then I will [wrap the] drapery of summer about me and lie down to pleasant dreams. As one year passes into another through the medium of winter, so does this our life pass into another through the medium of death.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 8, 1851

The year may be in its summer, in its manhood, but it is no longer in the flower of its age. See August 23, 1853 ("I am again struck by the perfect correspondence of a day — say an August day — and the year. I think that a perfect parallel may be drawn between the seasons of the day and of the year.”); Walden, "Spring" ("The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer."); July 3, 1840 (We will have a dawn, and noon, and serene sunset in ourselves.); March 18, 1853 ("This the foreglow of the year, when the walker goes home at eve to dream of summer”); June 15, 1852 ("The year is in its manhood now."); July 27, 1853 ("This the afternoon of the year. How apt we are to be reminded of lateness, even before the year is half spent!"); August 18, 1853 ("What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now? — now is the season of fruits; but where is our fruit? The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life."); August 18, 1853 ("The night of the year is approaching"); November 14, 1853. ("October answers to that period in the life of man when . . . all his experience ripens into wisdom, but every root, branch, leaf of him glows with maturity. What he has been and done in his spring and summer appears. He bears his fruit."); November 17, 1853 ("So some human beings in the November of their days exhibit some fresh radical greenness, which, though the frosts may soon nip it, indicates and confirms their essential vitality. When their summer leaves have faded and fallen, they put forth fresh radical leaves which sustain the life in their root still, against a new spring"); January 30, 1854 ("The winter was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of his brain, to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. Then is the great harvest of the year, the harvest of thought. Now we burn with a purer flame like the stars… ") See also January 8 1854 ("We love not so well the landscape represented as in broad noon, but in a morning or evening twilight, those seasons when the imagination is most active, the more hopeful or pensive seasons of the day.")

As one year passes into another through the medium of winter, so does this our life pass into another through the medium of death. See Basho:

Somehow not yet dead

at the end of my journey –

this autumn evening.

Perhaps a history of the year would be a history of the grass, or of a leaf.  See April 7, 1853  ("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.")

the coming winter

the year is already past

in  a man's feelings. 

Rainy day.

November 6. 

Yesterday was a still and cloudy day. This is another rainy day. 

On the whole, we have had a good deal of fair weather the last three months. Mr. Buttrick, the marketman, says he has been to Boston twenty-seven times since the first of August, and has not got wet till to-day, though he rides in an open wagon. 

I guessed at Goodwin’s age on the 1st. He is hale and stout and looks younger than he is, and I took care to set him high enough. I guessed he was fifty-five, and he said that if he lived two or three months longer he would be fifty-six.

He then guessed at my age, thought I was forty. 

He thought that Emerson was a very young-looking man for his age, “But,” said he, “he has not been out o’ nights as much as you have.” 

Some horse-chestnuts are still thickly leaved and yellow, not withered.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 6, 1858

I guessed at Goodwin’s age on the 1st. See November 4, 1858 ("On the 1st, when I stood on Poplar Hill, I saw a man. . .took out my glass, and beheld Goodwin, the one-eyed Ajax, in his short blue frock, short and square-bodied, as broad as for his height he can afford to be.")

The warmth of the fire is carried off by the draught,

March 5.

P. M. — To Hill. 

See the tracks of a woodchuck in the sand-heap about the mouth of his hole, where he has cleared out his entry. 

The red ground under a large pitch pine is strewn with scales of the ashy-brown bark over a diameter of ten or twelve feet, where some woodpecker has searched and hammered about the stem. 

I scare up six male sheldrakes, with their black heads, in the Assabet,—the first ducks I have seen. Methought I heard a slight frog-like croak from them before.

The sap of the buttonwood flows; how long? 

The lilac buds cannot have swollen any since the 25th of February, on account of the cold. On examining, they look as if they had felt the influence of the previous heat a little. There are narrow light-green spaces laid bare along the edges of the brown scales, as if they had expanded so much. 

This and the last four or five days very gusty. Most of the warmth of the fire is carried off by the draught, which consumes the wood very fast, faster than a much colder but still day in winter. My kindlings spend very fast now, for I do not commonly keep fire at night.

Thomas Morton in his “New English Canaan” has this epitaph on an infant that died apparently as soon as born, without being baptized: — 

“Underneath this heap of stones Lieth a parcel of small bones, What hope at last can such imps have, That from the womb go to the grave?” 

Winckelmann in his “History of Ancient Art,” vol. ii, page 27, says of Beauty, “I have meditated long upon it, but my meditations commenced too late, and in the brightest glow of mature life its essential has remained dark to me; I can speak of it, therefore, only feebly and spiritlessly.” —Lodge’s translation.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 5, 1857

Most of the warmth of the fire is carried off by the draught, which consumes the wood very fast . . . See February 3, 1856 ("It is a cold and windy Sunday. . . .Such a day makes a great hole in the wood-pile.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring; I begin to think that my wood will last

Winckelmann says of Beauty '. . . my meditations commenced too late, and in the brightest glow of mature life its essential has remained dark to me . . .’  See February 6, 1857 ("Winckelmann says . . . 'I am now past forty, and . . . perceive, also, that a certain delicate spirit begins to evaporate, with which I raised myself, by powerful soarings, to the contemplation of the beautiful.')