An east wind.

East window at noon –

the sound of crickets and a

distant piano.

There once was a time

when the beauty and the music
were all within me.

I sat and listened

to a positive though faint

and distant music.

I sat and listened

possessed by the melody,

a song in my thoughts.

This was a time when

I felt a joy that knew not

its own origin.

A pleasure, a joy, 

an existence which I had

not procured myself.

Astonished, I saw 

that I am dealt with by 

superior powers.

That this earth is a

musical instrument and 

I its audience 

awake to music
calmed like a lake when there is
not a breath of wind.

So without effort
our depths revealed to ourselves
all the world goes by.

We touch this world and
feel exquisite pleasure – our
Maker blessing us.

An east wind. I hear
the clock strike plainly ten
or eleven P.M.

zphx 20190521, 20240418

I have found all things thus far,

persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons,

strangely adapted to my resources.

Henry Thoreau, A Week (Wednesday)

June 22, 1851 ("There is the calmness of the lake when there is not a breath of wind . . . So is it with us. Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never were before in our lives,. . . so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves. All the world goes by us and is reflected in our deeps . . . I awoke into a music which no one about me heard. Whom shall I thank for it ? . . . I feel my Maker blessing me. To the sane man the world is a musical instrument . The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure. ")

July 16, 1851("This earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains. To have such sweet impressions made on us, such ecstasies begotten of the breezes ! I can remember how I was astonished. I said to myself, — I said to others, — " There comes into my mind such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion, and [I] have had nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself.”)

April 18, 1852 ("An east wind. I hear the clock strike plainly ten or eleven P.M."); May 3, 1852
(" The clock strikes distinctly, showing the wind is easterly. There is a grand, rich, musical echo trembling on the air long after the clock has ceased to strike, like a vast organ, filling the air with a trembling music like a flower of sound. Nature adopts it. Beautiful is sound. ")

August 3, 1852 (" At the east window. — A temperate noon. I hear a cricket creak in the shade; also the sound of a distant piano. . . . At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody,

May 23, 1854 ("There was a time when the beauty and the music were all within, and I sat and listened to my thoughts, and there was a song in them. I sat for hours on rocks and wrestled with the melody which possessed me. I sat and listened by the hour to a positive though faint and distant music . . .. When I walked with a joy which knew not its own origin.”)

A thrumming guitar reminds me of moments that I have lived.

January 13.

I hear one thrumming a guitar below stairs. It reminds me of moments that I have lived. 

What a comment on our life is the least strain of music! It lifts me up above all the dust and mire of the universe. I soar or hover with clean skirts over the field of my life. It is ever life within life, in concentric spheres. 

The field wherein I toil or rust at any time is at the same time the field for such different kinds of life! The farmer's boy or hired man has an instinct which tells him as much indistinctly, and hence his dreams and his restlessness; hence, even, it is that he wants money to realize his dreams with. The identical field where I am leading my humdrum life, let but a strain of music be heard there, is seen to be the field of some unrecorded crusade or tournament the thought of which excites in us an ecstasy of joy. 

The way in which I am affected by this faint thrumming advertises me that there is still some health and immortality in the springs of me. What an elixir is this sound! I, who but lately came and went and lived under a dish cover, live now under the heavens. It releases me; it bursts my bonds. 

Almost all, perhaps all, our life is, speaking comparatively, a stereotyped despair; i. e., we never at any time realize the full grandeur of our destiny. We forever and ever and habitually underrate our fate. 

Talk of infidels! Why, all of the race of man, except in the rarest moments when they are lifted above themselves by an ecstasy, are infidels. With the very best disposition, what does my belief amount to? This poor, timid, unenlightened, thick-skinned creature, what can it believe? I am, of course, hopelessly ignorant and unbelieving until some divinity stirs within me. 

Ninety-nine one-hundredths of our lives we are mere hedgers and ditchers, but from time to time we meet with reminders of our destiny. 

We hear the kindred vibrations, music! and we put out our dormant feelers unto the limits of the universe. We attain to a wisdom that passeth understanding. 

The stable continents undulate. The hard and fixed becomes fluid. "Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!" When I hear music I fear no danger, I am invulnerable, I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest. 

There are infinite degrees of life, from that which is next to sleep and death, to that which is forever awake and immortal. We must not confound man with man. We cannot conceive of a greater difference than between the life of one man and that of another. I am constrained to believe that the mass of men are never so lifted above themselves that their destiny is seen to be transcendently beautiful and grand.

 P. M. — On the river to Bittern Rock. 

The river is now completely concealed by snow. I come this way partly because it is the best walking here, the snow not so deep. 

The only wild life I notice is a crow on a distant oak. 

The snow is drifted and much deeper about the button-bushes, etc. It is surprising what an effect a thin barrier of bushes has on it, causing it to lodge there until often a very large drift is formed more or less abrupt on the south. 

Wool-grass still rises above the snow along the sides. In a very few places, for half a dozen feet the snow is blown off, revealing the dark transparent ice, in which I see numerous great white cleavages, which show its generous thickness, a foot at least. They cross each other at various angles and are frequently curved vertically, reflecting rainbow tints from within. Small triangles only a foot or two over are seen to be completely cracked around at the point of convulsion, yet it is as firm there as anywhere. 

I am proud of the strength of my floor, and love to jump and stamp there and bear my whole weight on it. As transparent as glass, yet you might found a house on it. Then there are little feathery flake-like twisted cleavages, which extend not more than an inch into it. 

I see no tracks but of mice, and apparently of foxes, which have visited every muskrat-house and then turned short away. 

Am surprised to see, returning, how much it has drifted in the Corner road. It has overflowed from the northern fields and lodged behind the north wall, forming drifts as high as the wall, which extend from one third to two thirds across the road for two long reaches, driving the traveller into the neighboring field, having some taken down the fence. 

It must be pleasant to ride along in the narrow path against the untouched and spotless edge of the drift, which curves over sharp like the visor of a cap. Sometimes this edge is bent down till it is almost vertical, yet a foot or two wide and only a few inches thick.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 13, 1857


We hear the kindred vibrations, music! and we put out our dormant feelers unto the limits of the universe. . . .I fear no danger, I am invulnerable, I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest.  See  December 31, 1853("I hear very distinctly from the railroad causeway the whistle of the locomotive on the Lowell road. . . . It, as it were, takes me out of my body and gives me the freedom of all bodies and all nature. . . . The contact of sound with a human ear whose hearing is pure and unimpaired is coincident with an ecstasy. ") August 3, 1852 (" At the east window. — A temperate noon. I hear a cricket creak in the shade; also the sound of a distant piano. The music reminds me of imagined heroic ages; it suggests such ideas of human life and the field which the earth affords as the few noblest passages of poetry. Those few interrupted strains which reach me through the trees suggest the same thoughts and aspirations that all melody, by whatever sense appreciated, has ever done. I am affected. What coloring variously fair and intense our life admits of! How a thought will mould and paint it! Impressed by some vague vision, as it were, elevated into a more glorious sphere of life, we no longer know this, we can deny its existence. We say we are enchanted, perhaps. But what I am impressed by is the fact that this enchantment is no delusion. So far as truth is concerned, it is a fact such as what we call our actual existence, but it is a far higher and more glorious fact. It is evidence of such a sphere, of such possibilities. It is its truth and reality that affect me. A thrumming of piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree.”) See also note to January 15, 1857 ("What is there in music that it should so stir our deeps?”)

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, I love you like I love the sky

January 13.  A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 13

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

Though fitted to drain Amazons, we ordinarily live with dry channels.

April 19.

Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, — passing travellers singing. 

My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to! Though, with respect to our channels, our valleys, and the country we are fitted to drain, we are Amazons, we ordinarily live with dry channels. 

The arbor-vita: by riverside behind Monroe’s appears to be just now fairly in blossom. 

I notice acorns sprouted. 

My birch wine now, after a week or more, has become pretty clear and colorless again, the brown part having settled and now coating the glass. 

Helped Mr. Emerson set out in Sleepy Hollow two over-cup oaks, one beech, and two arbor-vitaes. 

As dryness will open the pitch pine cone, so moisture closes it up again. I put one which had been open all winter into water, and in an hour or two it shut up nearly as tight as at first.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 19, 1856

I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. . . . See March 17, 1852  ("I am conscious of having, in my sleep, transcended the limits of the individual"); July 16, 1851(" I am astonished. I am daily intoxicated. There comes to me such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion -- . . . I am dealt with by superior powers"); May 24, 1851 ("My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning. I frequently awake with an atmosphere about me as if my unremembered dreams had been divine, as if my spirit had journeyed to its native place”).

A pitch pine cone which had been open all winter shut up. Compare January 25, 1856 ("A closed pitch pine cone gathered January 22d opened last night in my chamber. ") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Pitch Pine

Man is our contemporary.

May 21. 

The existence of man in nature is the divinest and most startling of all facts. Man, the crowning fact, the god we know.

It is a fact few have realized.

The standing miracle to man is man.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 21, 1851

The existence of

man in nature is the most

startling of all facts.

Only that thought and that expression are good which are musical.

***

I think that we are not commonly aware that man is our contemporary, — that in this strange, outlandish world, so barren, so prosaic, fit not to live in but merely to pass through, that even here so divine a creature as man does actually live. 

Man, the crowning fact, the god we know. 

While the earth supports so rare an inhabitant, there is somewhat to cheer us. 

Who shall say that there is no God, if there is a just man. 

It is only within a year that it has occurred to me that there is such a being actually existing on the globe. 

Now that I perceive that it is so, many questions assume a new aspect. 

We have not only the idea and vision of the divine ourselves, but we have brothers, it seems, who have this idea also. 

Methinks my neighbor is better than I, and his thought is better than mine. 

There is a representative of the divinity on earth, of [whom] all things fair and noble are to be expected. 

We have the material of heaven here. 

I think that the standing miracle to man is man. 

Behind the paling yonder, come rain or shine, hope or doubt, there dwells a man, an actual being who can sympathize with our sublimest thoughts.

The revelations of nature are infinitely glorious and cheering, hinting to us of a remote future, of possibilities untold; but startlingly near to us some day we find a fellow-man. . . .

From nature we turn astonished to this near but supernatural fact. 

I think that the existence of man in nature is the divinest and most startling of all facts. 

It is a fact which few have realized. 

I can go to my neighbors and meet on ground as elevated as we could expect to meet upon if we were now in heaven. . . . 

I do not think that man can understand the importance of man's existence, its bearing on the other phenomena of life, until it shall become a remembrance to him the survivor that such a being or such a race once existed on the earth. 

Imagine yourself alone in the world, a musing, wondering, reflecting spirit, lost in thought, and imagine thereafter the creation of man— man made in the image of God!


***

You have a wild savage in you, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as yours.