The beauty of the sunset is doubled by the reflection.

September 7.

September 7, 2014

Paddle to Baker Farm just after sundown, by full moon. 

The wind has gone down, and it is a still, warm night, and no mist. It is just after sundown. The moon not yet risen, one star, Jupiter, visible, and many bats over and about our heads, and small skaters creating a myriad dimples on the evening waters. 

There are many clouds about and a beautiful sunset sky, a yellowish golden sky, looking up the river. All this is reflected in the water. The beauty of the sunset is doubled by the reflection. Being on the water we have double the amount of lit and dun-colored sky above and beneath. 

The reflected sky is more dun and richer than the real one. We seem withal to be floating directly into it. This the first autumnal sunset.

In harmony with this fair evening we paddle over the liquid and almost invisible surface, floating directly toward those clouds in the sunset sky. We advance without  sound, by gentle influences, as the twilight gradually fades away. 

The height of the railroad bridge is doubled by the reflection, and the piers appear to rise from the lowest part of the reflection to the rail above, about fifty feet. We float directly under it, between the piers, as if in mid-air, not being able to distinguish the surface of the water, and look down more than twenty feet to the reflected flooring through whose intervals we see the starlit sky. The ghostly piers stretch downward on all sides, and only the angle made by their meeting the real ones betrays the water surface.

The reflected shadow of the Hill is black as night, and we seem to be paddling directly into it a rod or two before us, but we never reach it at all. The trees and hills are distinctly black between us and the moon, and the water black or gleaming accordingly. 

It is dry and warm. Above the Cliffs we hear one or two owls at a distance.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 7, 1854


Paddle to Baker Farm just after sundown, by full moon. See May 8, 1857 ("The full moon rises, and I paddle by its light."); July 12, 1859 ("In the evening, the moon being about full, I paddle up the river to see the moonlight and hear the bullfrogs.")

The reflected shadow of the Hill is black as night, and we seem to be paddling directly into it a rod or two before us, but we never reach it at all .See June 16, 1852 ("Owing to the reflections of the distant woods and hills, you seem to be paddling into a vast hollow country, doubly novel and interesting.") See also November 2, 1857("I think that most men, as farmers, hunters, fishers, etc., walk along a river's bank, or paddle along its stream, without seeing the reflections.")

Paddling without sound

toward clouds in the sunset sky

as the twilight fades.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  The beauty of the sunset

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 ©  2009-2024

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-540907

This is our black sea.

May 8

A. M. — To Nawshawtuct. 

A female red-wing. I have not seen any before. Hear a yellowbird in the direction of the willows. Its note coarsely represented by che-che-che-char-char-char. No great flocks of blackbirds on tree-tops now, nor so many of robins. 

Saw a small hawk flying low, about size of a robin – tail with black bars– probably a sparrow hawk; probably the same I have seen before. Saw one at Boston next day; mine was the pigeon hawk [No; for that is barred with white. Could mine have been the F. fuscus and so small?], slaty above (the male) and coarsely barred with black on tail. I saw these distinct bars at a distance as mine flew. It appeared hardly larger than a robin. 

Probably this the only hawk of this size that I have seen this season. The sparrow hawk is a rather reddish brown and finely and thickly barred above with black.  [Could the Boston pigeon hawk have been barred with black ?]

I hear the voices of farmers driving their cows past to their up-country pastures now. The first of any consequence go by now. 

P. M. — By boat to Fair Haven.

The water has fallen a foot or more, but I cannot get under the stone bridge, so haul over the road. There is a fair and strong wind with which to sail up stream, and then I can leave my boat, depending on the wind changing to southwest soon. 

It is long since I have sailed on so broad a tide. How dead would the globe seem, especially at this season, if it were not for these water surfaces! We are slow to realize water, — the beauty and magic of it. It is interestingly strange to us forever. Immortal water, alive even in the superficies, restlessly heaving now and tossing me and my boat, and sparkling with life!

I look round with a thrill on this bright fluctuating surface on which no man can walk, whereon is no trace of footstep, unstained as glass. I feel exhilaration, mingled with a slight awe, as I drive before this strong wind over the great black-backed waves, cutting through them, and hear their surging and feel them toss me. I am even obliged to head across them and not get into their troughs, for I can hardly keep my legs. 

They are so black, — as no sea I have seen, — large and powerful, and make such a roaring around me. You see a perfectly black mass about two feet high and perhaps four or five feet thick and of indefinite length, round-backed, or perhaps forming a sharp ridge with a dirty-white crest, tumbling like a whale unceasingly before you. 

They are melainai — what is the Greek for waves? This is our black sea. 

I am delighted to find that our usually peaceful river could toss me so. How much more exciting than to be planting potatoes with those men in the field! What a different world!

Lee's Cliff is now a perfect natural rockery for flowers. These gray cliffs and scattered rocks, with upright faces below, reflect the heat like a hothouse. The ground is whitened with the little white cymes of the saxifrage, now shot up to six or eight inches, and more flower-like dangling scarlet columbines are seen against the gray rocks, and here and there the earth is spotted with yellow crowfoots and a few early cinque-foils (not to mention houstonias, the now mostly effete sedge, the few Viola ovata, — whose deep violet is another kind of flame, as the crowfoot is yellow, — hanging their heads low in the sod, and the as yet inconspicuous veronica); while the early Amelanchier Botryapium overhangs the rocks and grows in the shelves, with its loose, open-flowered racemes, curving downward, of narrow-petalled white flowers, red on the back and innocently cherry-scented, — as if it had drunk cherry-bounce and you smelled its breath. To which is to be added the scent of bruised catnep and the greenness produced by many other forward herbs, and all resounding with the hum of insects. And all this while flowers are rare elsewhere. It is as if you had taken a step suddenly a month forward, or had entered a greenhouse.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 8, 1854

Saw a small hawk flying low, the only hawk of this size that I have seen this season. See October 17, 1858 ("Saw a small hawk come flying over the Assabet, . . . it had a very distinct black head, with apparently a yellowish-brown , breast and beneath and a brown back, — both, however, quite light, — and a yellowish tail with a distinct broad black band at the tip. . . .Could it have been a sparrow hawk?")

There is a fair and strong wind with which to sail up stream, and then I can leave my boat, depending on the wind changing to southwest soon. See  May 28, 1855 (" Yesterday left my boat at the willow opposite this Cliff, the wind northwest. Now it is southeast, and I can sail back.")

 

The beauty and magic of it . . . strange to us forever.  See August 6, 1851 ("After how few steps, how little exertion, the student stands in pine woods . . .in a place still unaccountably strange and wild to him."); March 29, 1853 (“ A man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to...appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.”);  April 24, 1854 ("Go to new trees, like cedars and firs, and you hear new birds.  They increase the strangeness."); June 9, 1854 ("What musicians compose our woodland quire? They must be forever strange and interesting to me.")  June 21, 1854 ("Up the grassy hollows in the sprout-lands north of Goose Pond I feel as if in a strange country, — a pleasing sense of strangeness and distance."); July 24, 1857 ("How unexplored still are the realms of nature. . . We may any day take a walk as strange as Dante's imaginary one to L' Inferno or Paradiso.")

I feel exhilaration, mingled with a slight awe, as I drive before this strong wind over the great black-backed waves. See March 16, 1860 (" I make more boisterous and stormy voyages now than at any season. . . . I vastly increase my sphere and experience by a boat.”); April 29, 1856 ("It is flattering to a sense of power to make the wayward wind our horse and sit with our hand on the tiller. Sailing is much like flying, and from the birth of our race men have been charmed by it.”); October 15, 1851 (“It is delightful to be tossed about in such a harmless storm, and see the waves look so angry and black.”); October 27, 1857 (“It is exciting to feel myself tossed by the dark waves and hear them surge about me. . . .How they run and leap in great droves, deriving new excitement from each other!”) See also A Book of the Seasons  by Henry Thoreau, A Season for Sailing and  June 27, 1852 ("All the phenomena of nature need be seen from the point of view of wonder and awe") 


They are melaina — what is the Greek for waves?-- Greek μελαινα (melaina) meaning "black, dark”. See note  February 10, 1860 (“The river, where open, is very black, as usual when the waves run high, for each wave casts a shadow. [Call it Black Water.] Theophrastus notices that the roughened water is black, and says that it is because fewer rays fall on it and the light is dissipated.”)

Struck by the autumnal character of the day.

August 20

This day, too, has that autumnal character. I am struck by the clearness and stillness of the air, the brightness of the landscape, or, as it were, the reflection of light from the washed earth, the darkness and heaviness of the shade, as I look now up the river at the white maples and bushes, and the smoothness of the stream. 

If they are between you and the sun, the trees are more black than green. It must be owing to the clearness of the air since the rains, together with the multiplication of the leaves, whose effect has not been perceived during the mists of the dog-days.

But I cannot account for this peculiar smoothness of the dimpled stream — unless the air is stiller than before — nor for the peculiar brightness of the sun's reflection from its surface. 

I stand on the south bank, opposite the black willows, looking up the full stream, which, with a smooth, almost oily and sheeny surface, comes welling and dimpling onward, peculiarly smooth and bright now at 4 p.m., while the numerous trees seen up the stream — white maples, oaks, etc. — and the bushes look absolutely black in the clear, bright light.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 20, 1853