The forcible writer does not go far for his themes.

January 29

We must be very active if we would be clean and live our own life, and not a languishing and scurvy one. 

The trees, which are stationary, are covered with parasites, especially those which have grown slowly. 

The air is filled with the fine sporules of countless mosses, algae, lichens, fungi, which settle and plant themselves on all quiet surfaces.

Under the nails and between the joints of the fingers of the idle, flourish crops of mildew, algae, and fungi, and other vegetable sloths, though they may be invisible, – the lichens where life still exists, the fungi where decomposition has begun to take place. 

And the sluggard is soon covered with sphagnum. Algae take root in the corners of his eyes, and lichens cover the bulbs of his fingers and his head, etc., etc., the lowest forms of vegetable life. '

This is the definition of dirt. We fall a prey to others of nature's tenants, who take possession of the unoccupied house. 

With the utmost inward activity we have to wash and comb ourselves beside, to get rid of the adhering seeds. Cleanliness is by activity not to give any quiet shelf for the seeds of parasitic plants to take root on. 

If he cuts pines, the woodchopper's hands are covered with pitch.

The names of plants are for the most part traced to Celtic and Arabian roots. 

The forcible writer does not go far for his themes. His ideas are not far-fetched. IIe derives inspiration from his chagrins and his satisfactions.  His theme being ever an instant one, his own gravity assists him, gives  impetus to what he says. He minds his business. He does not speculate while others drudge for him. 

I am often reminded that if I had bestowed on me the wealth of Croesus, my aims must still be the same and my means essentially the same. 

It still melts. 

I observed this afternoon that the ground where they are digging for some scales near the depot was frozen about nine inches where the snow has lain most and sixteen inches where the road was. 

I begin to see the tops of the grasses and stubble in the fields, which deceive me as if it were the ground itself. 

That point where the sun goes down is the cynosure which attracts all eyes at sundown and half an hour before. What do all other parts of the horizon concern us ? Our eyes follow the path of that great luminary. We watch for his rising, and we observe his setting. He is a companion and fellow-traveller we all have. We pity him who has his cheerless dwelling elsewhere, even in the northwest or southwest, off the high road of nature. 

The snow is nearly gone from the railroad causeway. 

Few are the days when the telegraph harp rises into a pure, clear melody.  Though the wind may blow strong or soft, in this or that direction, naught will you hear but a low hum or murmur, or even a buzzing sound; but at length, when some undistinguishable zephyr blows, when the conditions not easy to be detected arrive, it suddenly and unexpectedly rises into melody, as if a god had touched it, and fortunate is the walker who chances to be within hearing. 

So is it with the lyres of bards, and for the most part it is only a feeble and ineffectual hum that comes from them, which leads you to expect the melody you do not hear.  When the gale is modified, wlen the favorable conditions occur, and the indescribable coincidence takes place, then there is music. 

Of a thousand buzzing strings, only one yields music. It is like the hum of the shaft, or other machinery, of a steamboat, which at length might become music in a divine hand. I feel greatly enriched by this telegraph. 

I have come to see the clay and sand in the Cut. A reddish tinge in the earth, stains. An Indian hue is singularly agreeable, even exciting, to the eye. Here the whole bank is sliding. Even the color of the subsoil excites me, as if I were already getting near to life and vegetation. This clay is faecal in its color also. It runs off at bottom info mere shoals, shallows, vasa, vague sand-bars, like the mammoth leaves, –– makes strands. 

Perhaps those mother-o'-pearl clouds I described some time ago might be called rainbow flocks. 

The snow on the slope of the Cliffs is dotted with black specks, the seeds of the mullein which the wind has shaken out. When I strike the dry stalks, the seeds fall in a shower and color the snow black like charcoal dust or powder. 

The green mosses on the rocks are evidently nourished and kept bright by the snows lying on them a part of the year. 

Day before yesterday, I saw the hunters out with a dozen dogs, but only two pussies, one white and one lithe gray one, did I see, for so many men and dogs, who seem to set all the village astir as if the fox's trail led through it. 

And Stedman Buttrick, with whom I was walking, was excited as if in the heyday of his youth.

Heard C. lecture to-night. It was a bushel of nuts. Perhaps the most original lecture I ever heard. Ever so unexpected, not to be foretold, and so sententious that you could not look at him and take his thought at. the same time. 

You had to give your undivided attention to the thoughts, for you were not assisted by set phrases or modes of speech intervening. There was no sloping up or down to or from his points. It was all genius, no talent. It required more close attention, more abstraction from surrounding circumstances, than any lecture I have heard. 

For, well as I know C., he more than any man disappoints my expectation. When 1 see him in the desk, hear him, I cannot realize that I ever saw him before. He will be strange, unexpected, to his best acquaintance. I cannot associate the lecturer with the companion of my walks. 

It was from so original and peculiar a point of view, yet just to himself in the main, that I doubt if three in the audience apprehended a tithe that he said. It was so hard to hear that doubtless few made the exertion. 

A thick succession of mountain passes and no intermediate slopes and plains. Other lectures, even the best, in which so much space is given to the elaborate development of a few ideas, seemed somewhat meagre in comparison. 

Yet it would be how much more glorious if talent were added to genius, if there [were] a just arrangement and development of the thoughts, and each step were not a leap, but he ran a space to take a yet higher leap! 

Most of the spectators sat in front of the performer but here was one who, by accident, sat all the while on one side, and his report was peculiar and startling.

H. D. Thoreau Journal, January 29, 1852

The forcible writer does not go far for his themes.  See January 30, 1852 ("It is in vain to write on chosen themes. We must wait till they have kindled a flame in our minds. ");  February 3, 1852 ("The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person.") See also November 12, 1851 ("Write often, write upon a thousand themes"); February 3, 1859 ("The writer has much to do even to create a theme for himself . . . It is only when many observations of different periods have been brought together that he begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent and just observation.");Compare March 18, 1861 ("A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of others, but a genius - a Shakespeare, for instance — would make the history of his parish more interesting than another's history of the world.")

The green mosses on the rocks are evidently nourished and kept bright by the snows lying on them a part of the year. See February 18, 1852 ("The mosses on the rocks look green where the snow has melted. This must be one of the spring signs."); March 4, 1852 ("The snow is melting on the rocks; the water trickles down in shining streams; the mosses look bright."); March 28, 1859 ("These earth colors, methinks, are never so fair as in the spring. Now the green mosses and lichens contrast with the brown grass, but ere long the surface will be uniformly green."); April 25, 1857 ("The dense, green, rounded beds of mosses in springs and old water-troughs are very handsome now, — intensely cold green cushions.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: Mosses Bright Green

I begin to see the tops of the grasses and stubble in the fields . . . When I strike the dry [mullein ] stalks, the seeds fall in a shower and color the snow black. See December 31, 1859 ("The mulleins are full of minute brown seeds, which a jar sprinkles over the snow, and [they] look black there; also the primrose, of larger brown seeds, which rattle out in the same manner"); March 24, 1859 ("They [goldfinches] are eating the seeds of the mullein and the large primrose, clinging to the plants sidewise in various positions and pecking at the seed-vessels."); see also January 30, 1853 ("The most common and conspicuous green leaf on the ground when the snow is off at this season, as at present, is that of the buttercup. Sorrel is also very common, and johnswort, and the purplish gnaphaliums. There is also the early crowfoot in some places, strawberry, mullein, and thistle leaves, and hawkweeds, etc., etc.")

Perhaps those mother-o'-pearl clouds I described some time ago might be called rainbow flocks. See January 13, 1852 ("Here I am on the Cliffs at half past three or four o'clock. . . .I see. . .in the west, flitting mother-o'-pearl clouds, which change their loose-textured form and melt rapidly away, even while I write."); January 22, 1852 ("One mother-o'-pearl tint is common to the winter sky half an hour before sundown."); See also December 18, 1852 ("Loring's Pond beautifully froze . . . it was so exquisitely polished that the sky and scudding dun-colored clouds, with mother-o'-pearl tints, were reflected in it as in the calmest water."); December 26, 1855 ("The sun is gone before five. Just before I looked for rainbow flocks in the west, but saw none,"); December 27, 1853 ("I look far, but see no rainbow flocks in the sky."); December 30, 1855 ("Looking up over the top of the hill now, southwest, at 3.30 P.M., I see a few mother-o’-pearl tints, and methinks the same or rainbow tints in the drifting snow there, against the bright light of the unseen sun. Only in such clear cold air as this have the small clouds in the west that fine evanishing edge. It requires a state of the air that quickly dissipates all moisture. It must be rare in summer. In this rare atmosphere all cloud is quickly dissipated and mother-o’-pearl tinted as it passes away."); January 9, 1854 ("Looking for rainbow-tinted clouds, small whiffs of vapor which form and disperse, this clear, cold afternoon");  January 22, 1854 ("Once or twice of late I have seen the mother-o'-pearl tints and rainbow flocks in the western sky. The usual time is when the air is clear and pretty cool, about an hour before sundown. . . .Methinks the summer sky never exhibits this so finely."); February 13, 1860 ("It is surprising what a variety of distinct colors the winter can show us . . .There is the red of the sunset sky, and of the snow at evening, and in rainbow flocks during the day, and in sun-dogs."); February 24, 1860 ("some [clouds]most brilliant mother-o'-pearl. I never saw the green in it more distinct. This on the thin white edges of clouds as if it were a small piece of a rainbow.")

Green mosses on rocks

nourished and kept bright by the

snows lying on them 

A time to see the character of the tree.

December 17

December 17, 2017

A piercing cold afternoon, wading in the snow.

R. Rice was going to Sudbury to put his bees into the cellar for fear they would freeze. He had a small hive; not enough to keep each other warm.

The pitch pine woods on the right of the Corner road.

The pitch pines hold the snow well. It lies now in balls on their plumes and in streaks on their branches, their low branches rising at a small angle and meeting each other.

A certain dim religious light comes through this roof of pine leaves and snow. It is a sombre twilight, yet in some places the sun streams in, producing the strongest contrasts of light and shade.

The winter morning is the time to see the woods and shrubs in their perfection, wearing their snowy and frosty dress. Even he who visits them half an hour after sunrise will have lost some of their most delicate and fleeting beauties. The trees wear their snowy burden but coarsely after midday, and it no longer expresses the character of the tree.

I observed that early in the morning every pine-needle was covered with a frosty sheath, but soon after sunrise it was all gone.

You walk in the pitch pine wood as under a penthouse. The stems and branches of the trees look black by contrast. You wander zigzag through the aisles of the wood, where stillness and twilight reign.

Improve every opportunity to express yourself in writing, as if it were your last.

I do not know but a pine wood is as substantial and as memorable a fact as a friend. I am more sure to come away from it cheered, than from those who come nearest to being my friends.

It is unfortunate for the chopper and the walker when the cold wind comes from the same side with the sun, for then he cannot find a warm recess in which to sit.

It is pleasant to walk now through open and stately white pine woods. Their plumes do not hold so much snow commonly, unless where their limbs rest or are weighed down on to a neighboring tree.

It is cold but still in their midst, where the snow is untracked by man, and ever and anon you see the snow-dust, shone on by the sun, falling from their tops and, as it strikes the lower limbs, producing innumerable new showers. For, as after a rain there is a second rain in the woods, so after a light snow there is a second snow in the woods, when the wind rises.

The branches of the white pine are more horizontal than those of the pitch, and the white streaks of snow on them look accordingly.

I perceive that the young black oaks and the red oaks, too, methinks, still keep their leaves as well as the white.

This piercing wind is so nearly from the west this afternoon that, to stand at once in a sheltered and a sunny place, you must seek the south-southeast side of the woods.

What slight but important distinctions between one creature and another! What little, but essential, advantages one enjoys over another! I noticed this afternoon a squirrel's nest high in the fork of a white pine. Thither he easily ascends, but many creatures strive in vain to get at him.

The lower branches of the hemlock point down, and even trail on the ground, the whole tree making a perfect canopy.

When they who have aspired to be friends cease to sympathize, it is the part of religion to keep asunder.

One of the best men I know often offends me by uttering made words — the very best words, of course, or dinner speeches, most smooth and gracious and fluent repartees, a sort of talking to Buncombe, a dash of polite conversation, a graceful bending, as if I were Master Slingsby of promising parts, from the University. O would you but be simple and downright! Would you but cease your palaver! It is the misfortune of being a gentleman and famous. The conversation of gentlemen after dinner! One of the best of men and wisest, to whom this diabolical formality will adhere. Repeating himself, shampooing himself! Passing the time of day, as if he were just introduced! No words are so tedious. Never a natural or simple word or yawn. It produces an appearance of phlegm and stupidity in me the auditor. I am suddenly the closest and most phlegmatic of mortals, and the conversation comes to naught. Such speeches as an ex-Member of Congress might make to an ex-Member of Parliament.

To explain to a friend is to suppose that you are not  intelligent of one another. If you are not, to what purpose will you explain?

My acquaintances will sometimes wonder why I will impoverish myself by living aloof from this or that company, but greater would be the impoverishment if I should associate with them.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 17, 1851

A squirrel's nest high in the fork of a white pine. Thither he easily ascends. See December 17, 1855 ("A remarkably fine, springlike morning . . . Methinks every squirrel will be out now. "); December 17, 1859 ("I see many tracks of squirrels . . . I see no nests in the trees, but numerous holes through the snow into the earth, whence they have emerged . . . they will dig down through the snow and come right upon a pine cone or a hickory-nut or an acorn, which you and I cannot do")

The pitch pines hold the snow well. It lies now in balls on their plumes and in streaks on their branches. See  January 30, 1841("The snow collects upon the plumes of the pitch pine in the form of a pineapple."); January 31, 1852 ("The value of the pitch pine in winter is that it holds the snow so finely. . . .It makes the most cheerful winter scenery beheld from the window, you know so well the nature of the coverts and the sombre light it makes"); January 19, 1855 ("The snow lay in great continuous masses  . . . On some pitch pines it lay in fruit-like balls as big as one’s head, like cocoanuts.. . . Under one pitch pine, which shut down to the ground on every side, you could not see the sky at all, but sat in a gloomy light as in a tent"); February 16, 1860 ("Snow, lodging on trees, — leaf, bough, and trunk. The pines are well laden with it. How handsome, though wintry, the side of a high pine wood, well grayed with the snow that has lodged on it, and the smaller pitch pines converted into marble or alabaster with their lowered plumes like rams' heads! The character of the wood-paths is wholly changed by the new-fallen snow..") See also December 19, 1851 (" Why should it be so pleasing to look into a thick pine wood where the sunlight streams in and gilds it?")

Improve every opportunity to express yourself in writing, as if it were your last. See July 7, 1851 ("The writer expressing his thought must be . . .well poised upon the facts, the experience, that secures his whole attention! All the faculties in repose but the one you are using, the whole energy concentrated in that. . . . I express adequately only the thought which I love to express."); August 19, 1851 ("How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!"); September 2, 1851 ("We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. . . . Expression is the act of the whole man. . . A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.”); September 4-7, 1851 (“I feel that the juices of the fruits which I have eaten, the melons and apples, have ascended to my brain and are stimulating it. They give me a heady force. Now I can write.”); November 9, 1851 ("Facts to tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought. . . Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought -- with these I deal."); November 12, 1851 ("Write often, write upon a thousand themes . . .");  February, 5, 1852 ("Time never passes so rapidly and unaccountably as when I am engaged in recording my thoughts"); February 10, 1852 ("Write while the heat is in you.")

After a light snow 

a second snow in the woods

when the wind rises.

Ever and anon 

 snow-dust, shone on by the sun, 

falling from pine tops 

A Book of the Seasons: December 10 (glorious short winter days)

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

December 10

A fine, clear, cold winter morning --

The sun is rising 

and the smokes from the chimneys 

blush like sunset clouds

. . .

I hardly get out 

a couple of miles before 

the sun is setting

. . .

I see the sun set 

and make haste with the red sky

over my shoulder. 

It has been a warm, clear, glorious winter day.

December 10 1856

December 10, 2022

A fine, clear, cold winter morning, with a small leaf frost on trees, etc. December 10, 1856

These are among the finest days in the year, on account of the wholesome bracing coolness and clearness. December 10, 1853

Going to the post-office . . . I notice those level bars, as it were, of frozen mist against the Walden wood. December 10, 1856

When I return, the sun is rising and the smokes from the chimneys . . . blush like sunset clouds. December 10, 1856

Get in my boat, in the snow. The bottom is coated with a glaze. December 10, 1859

Paddled Cheney’s boat up Assabet. December 10, 1853

Passed in some places between shooting ice-crystals, extending from both sides of the stream. December 10, 1853

Weather warmer; snow softened. December 10, 1854

How quickly the snow feels the warmer wind! The crust which was so firm and rigid is now suddenly softened and there is much water in the road. December 10, 1854

Snow-fleas in paths; first I have seen. December 10, 1854

Hear the small woodpecker’s whistle; not much else; only crows and partridges else, and chickadees. December 10, 1854

See a large flock of snow buntings (quite white against woods, at any rate), though it is quite warm. December 10, 1854

Gathered this afternoon quite a parcel of walnuts on the hill. It has not been better picking this season there. December 10, 1856

They lie on the snow, or rather sunk an inch or two into it. And some trees hang quite full. December 10, 1856

See the squirrel-tracks leading straight from tree to tree. December 10, 1856

I see the sun set from the side of Nawshawtuct, and make haste to the post-office with the red sky over my shoulder. December 10, 1856

How short the afternoons! I hardly get out a couple of miles before the sun is setting. December 10, 1856

On my return, the apparently full moon has fairly commenced her reign, and I go home by her light. December 10, 1856

The nights are light on account of the snow, and, there being a moon, there is no distinct interval between the day and night. December 10, 1856

What I write about at home I understand so well, comparatively! and I write with such repose and freedom from exaggeration. December 10, 1853

It is remarkable how suggestive the slightest drawing as a memento of things seen . . . though the fullest accompanying description may fail to recall my experience, these rude outline drawings . . . carry me back to that time and scene. It is as if I saw the same thing again, and I may again attempt to describe it in words if I choose. December 10, 1856

It has been a warm, clear, glorious winter day, the air full of that peculiar vapor. December 10, 1856 

December 11, 2011

*********

A Book of the Seasons: by Henry Thoreau, Boat in. Boat out.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Snow-flea

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Chickadee in Winter

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Snow Bunting

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  The Downy Woodpecker

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Winter Sunsets

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, 

The world can never be more beautiful than now.

*********

 

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.")

May 5, 1852 ("Every part of the world is beautiful today.”)

May 18, 1852 (The world can never be more beautiful than now”)

May 21, 1854 (“The finest days of the year, days long enough and fair enough for the worthiest deeds.”)

July 7, 1851 (“All the faculties in repose but the one you are using, the whole energy concentrated in that.”)

July 22, 1851 ("These are our fairest days, which are born in a fog.")

August 5, 1851 (“When the moon is on the increase and half full it is already in mid-heaven at sunset so that there is no marked twilight intervening”)

August 19, 1853 (“A glorious and ever-memorable day.”

September 18, 1858 ("It is a wonderful day.")

September 18, 1860 ("If you are not happy to-day you will hardly be so to-morrow.”)

October 10, 1857 (" The sixth day of glorious weather, which I am tempted to call the finest in the year.")

October 10, 1856 ("These are the finest days in the year, Indian summer.”)

October 24, 1852 ("I see, far over the river, boys gathering walnuts.”)

October 26, 1853 ("You only need to make a faithful record of an average summer day's experience and summer mood, and read it in the winter, and it will carry you back to more than that summer day alone could show.")

October 27, 1857 ("Now it is time to look out for walnuts")

October 28, 1852 ("The boys are gathering walnuts. Their leaves are a yellowish brown.”) 

November 9, 1852 ("Fore part of November time for walnutting.")

November 16, 1850 ("The walnut trees spot the sky with black nuts")

November 20, 1858 ("When walnut husks have fairly opened, showing the white shells within, — the trees being either quite bare or with a few withered leaves at present, — a slight jar with the foot on the limbs causes them to rattle down in a perfect shower, and on bare, grass-grown pasture ground it is very easy picking them up.")

November 27, 1853 ("The days are short enough now. The sun is already setting before I have reached the ordinary limit of my walk")

November 28, 1859 ("We make a good deal of the early twilights of these November days, they make so large a part of the afternoon.”)

December 2, 1852 ("I do not remember when I have taken a sail or a row on the river in December before. We had to break the ice about the boat-house for some distance.")

December 2, 1854 ("Got up my boat and housed it, ice having formed about it")

December 5, 1853 ("Got my boat in. The river frozen over thinly in most places and whitened with snow, which was sprinkled on it this noon")

December 3, 1858 ("All the west is suffused with an extremely rich, warm purple or rose-color, while the edges of what were dove-colored clouds have a warm saffron glow, finally deepening to rose or damask when the sun has set.")

December 5, 1853 ("Now for the short days and early twilight. The sun goes down behind a low cloud, and the world is darkened . . . Before I got home the whole atmosphere was suddenly filled with a mellow yellowish light.”)

 December 5, 1856 ("It is a perfectly cloudless and simple winter sky. A white moon, half full, in the pale or dull blue heaven and a whiteness like the reflection of the snow, extending up from the horizon. . . like an aurora. . .  . The sun goes down and leaves not a blush in the sky.")

December 5, 1856 ("There are a great many walnuts on the trees, seen black against the sky, and the wind has scattered many over the snow-crust. It would be easier gathering them now than ever. “)

December 8, 1853 ("The twilights, morn and eve, are very clear and light, very glorious and pure, or stained with red, and prolonged, these days.")

December 8, 1854 ("There is a glorious clear sunset sky, soft and delicate and warm even like a pigeon’s neck.")

December 8, 1855 ("Still no snow, — nor ice noticeable. I might have left my boat out till now. ")

December 9, 1853 ("The third (at least) glorious day . . . with peculiarly long and clear cloudless silvery twilights morn and eve, with a stately, withdrawn after-redness.")

December 9, 1856 ("The worker who would accomplish much these short days must shear a dusky slice off both ends of the night”)

December 9, 1859 ("I observe at mid-afternoon that peculiarly softened western sky, which perhaps is seen commonly after the first snow has covered the earth. There is just enough invisible vapor, perhaps from the snow, to soften the blue, giving it a slight greenish tinge")

 

December 11, 1854 (“The day is short; it seems to be composed of two twilights merely; the morning and the evening twilight make the whole day. . . .I hear rarely a bird except the chickadee, or perchance a jay or crow”) 

December 11, 1855 ("Great winter itself looked like a precious gem, reflecting rainbow colors ")
December 12, 1859 ("The night comes on early these days, and I soon see the pine tree tops distinctly outlined against the dun (or amber) but cold western sky.")
December 14, 1855 (" getting over the wall under the walnut trees on the south brow of the hill, I see the broad tracks of squirrels, probably red, where they have ascended and descended the trees, and the empty shells of walnuts which they have gnawed left on the snow.”)
December 21, 1854 (“We are tempted to call these the finest days of the year.”)

December 10, 2013

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, 

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.

  April 7, 1853 

December 9 <<<<<<<< December 10  >>>>>>>> December 11

, 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, December 10

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 ©  2009-2023

tinyurl.com/HDT561210

The openness of the leafless woods by moonlight.

November 12.

November 12, 2021

Write often, write upon a thousand themes, rather than long at a time, not trying to turn too many feeble somersets in the air, and so come down upon your head at last. Antæus-like, be not long absent from the ground.

Those sentences are good and well discharged which are like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our life, — a distinct fruit and kernel itself, springing from terra firma. Let there be as many distinct plants as the soil and the light can sustain.

Take as many bounds in a day as possible. Sentences uttered with your back to the wall. Those are the admirable bounds when the performer has lately touched the spring board.

A good bound into the air from the air (sic) is a good and wholesome experience, but what shall we say to a man's leaping off precipices in the attempt to fly? He comes down like lead.

In the meanwhile, you have got your feet planted upon the rock, with the rock also at your back, and, as in the case of King James and Roderick Dhu, can say, —

 “Come one, come all! this rock shall fly 

   From its firm base as soon as I.” 

Such, uttered or not, is the strength of your sentence. Sentences in which there is no strain. A fluttering and inconstant and quasi inspiration, and ever memorable Icarian fall, in which your helpless wings are expanded merely by your swift descent into the pelagos beneath.

C. is one who will not stoop to rise (to change the subject). He wants something for which he will not pay the going price. He will only learn slowly by failure, not a noble, but disgraceful, failure. This is not a noble method of learning, to be educated by inevitable suffering, like De Quincey, for instance.

Better dive like a muskrat into the mud, and pile up a few weeds to sit on during the floods, a foundation of your own laying, a house of your own building, however cold and cheerless.

Methinks the hawk that soars so loftily and circles so steadily and apparently without effort has earned this power by faithfully creeping on the ground as a reptile in a former state of existence. You must creep before you can run; you must run before you can fly. Better one effective bound upward with elastic limbs from the valley than a jumping from the mountain - tops in the attempt to fly.

The observatories are not built high but deep; the foundation is equal to the superstructure. It is more important to a distinct vision that it be steady than that it be from an elevated point of view.

Walking through Ebby Hubbard's wood this afternoon, with Minott, who was actually taking a walk for amusement and exercise, he said, on seeing some white pines blown down, that you might know that ground had been cultivated, by the trees being torn up so, for otherwise they would have rooted themselves more strongly.

Saw some very handsome canoe birches there, the largest I know, a foot in diameter and forty or fifty feet high. The large ones have a reddish cast, perhaps from some small lichen. Their fringes and curls give them an agreeable appearance.

Observed a peculiarity in some white oaks. Though they had a firm and close bark near the ground, the bark was very coarse and scaly, in loose flakes, above. Much coarser than the swamp white oak.

Minott has a story for every woodland path. He has hunted in them all. Where we walked last, he had once caught a partridge by the wing!


7 P. M. To Conantum.

A still, cold night.

The light of the rising moon in the east. Moonrise is a faint sunrise. And what shall we name the faint aurora that precedes the moonrise?

The ground is frozen and echoes to my tread. There are absolutely no crickets to be heard now. They are heard, then, till the ground freezes.

To-day I heard for the first time this season the crackling, vibrating sound which resounds from thin ice when a stone is cast upon it. So far have we got toward winter:

• It is doubtful if they who have not pulled their turnips will have a chance to get them.
• It is not of much use to drive the cows to pasture.
• I can fancy that I hear the booming of ice in the ponds.
• I hear no sound of any bird now at night, but sometimes some creature stirring, a rabbit, or skunk, or fox, betrayed now by the dry leaves which lie so thick and light.

The openness of the leafless woods is particularly apparent now by moonlight; they are nearly as bright as the open field.

It is worth the while always to go to the waterside when there is but little light in the heavens and see the heavens and the stars reflected. There is double the light that there is elsewhere, and the reflection has the force of a great silent companion.

There is no fog now o’nights.

I thought to-night that I saw glow-worms in the grass, on the side of the hill; was almost certain of it, and tried to lay my hand on them, but found it was the moonlight reflected from (apparently) the fine frost crystals on the withered grass, and they were so fine that they went and came like glow-worms. It had precisely the effect of twinkling glow-worms. They gleamed just long enough for glow-worms.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 12, 1851

The ground is frozen and echoes to my tread. See November 12, 1858 ("It is much the coldest day yet, and the ground is a little frozen and resounds under my tread.")

There are absolutely no crickets to be heard now. See note to November 12, 1853 ("I hear one cricket singing still, faintly deep in the bank, now after one whitening of snow. His theme is life immortal. The last cricket, full of cheer and faith, piping to himself, as the last man might.") See also November 9, 1851 (" I hear a cricket singing the requiem of the year . . . Soon all will be frozen up, and I shall hear no cricket chirp in the land.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Cricket in November

I heard for the first time this season the crackling, vibrating sound which resounds from thin ice when a stone is cast upon it. See November 22, 1860 ("Though you are finger-cold toward night, and you cast a stone on to your first ice, and see the unmelted crystals under every bank, it is glorious November weather, and only November fruits are out.")

Canoe birches there, the largest I know, a foot in diameter and forty or fifty feet high.  See May 18, 1851 ("The log of a canoe birch on Fair Haven, cut down the last winter, more than a foot in diameter at the stump; one foot in diameter at ten feet from the ground. . . . I counted about fifty rings"); November 2, 1851 ("Saw a canoe birch beyond Nawshawtuct, growing out of the middle of a white pine stump, which still showed the mark of the axe, sixteen inches in diameter at its bottom, or two feet from the ground, or where it had first taken root on the stump. "); July 24, 1857 ("[On the shore of Moosehead Lake] I measured a canoe birch, five and a half feet in circumference at two and a half from the ground.")

The light of the rising moon in the east. See November 7, 1851 ("At Walden are three reflections of the bright full (or nearly) moon, one moon and two sheens further off") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November Moonlight

The openness of the leafless woods is particularly apparent now by moonlight. See November 12, 1853 ("Moon nearly full. Trees stand bare against the sky again. This the first month in which they do ")

November 12. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November 12

That faint aurora –

the light of the rising moon

precedes the moonrise.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The openness of the leafless woods by moonlight.

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

First of all a man must see, before he can say.

November 1.

November 1, 2021

It is a rare qualification to be able to state a fact simply and adequately, to digest some experience cleanly, to say “yes” and “no” with authority, to make a square edge, to conceive and suffer the truth to pass through us living and intact, even as a waterfowl an eel, as it flies over the meadows, thus stocking new waters.

First of all a man must see, before he can say.

Statements are made but partially. Things are said with reference to certain conventions or existing institutions, not absolutely.

A fact truly and absolutely stated is taken out of the region of common sense and acquires a mythologic or universal significance. Say it and have done with it. Express it without expressing yourself.  See not with the eye of science, which is barren, nor of youthful poetry, which is impotent. But taste the world and digest it.

It would seem as if things got said but rarely and by chance.

As you see, so at length will you say.

When facts are seen superficially, they are seen as they lie in relation to certain institutions, perchance.

But I would have them expressed as more deeply seen, with deeper references; so that the hearer or reader cannot recognize them or apprehend their significance from the platform of common life, but it will be necessary that he be in a sense translated in order to understand them; when the truth respecting his things shall naturally exhale from a man like the odor of the muskrat from the coat of the trapper.

At first blush a man is not capable of reporting truth; he must be drenched and saturated with it first.

What was enthusiasm in the young man must become temperament in the mature man. Without excitement, heat, or passion, he will survey the world which excited the youth and threw him off his balance.

As all things are significant, so all words should be significant.

It is a fault which attaches to the speaker, to speak flippantly or superficially of anything.

Of what use are words which do not move the hearer, are not oracular and fateful? 

A style in which the matter is all in all, and the manner nothing at all.

In your thoughts no more than in your walks do you meet men.

In moods I find such privacy as in dismal swamps and on mountain-tops.

Man recognizes laws little enforced, and he condescends to obey them. In the moment that he feels his superiority to them as compulsatory, he, as it were, courteously reënacts them but to obey them.

This on my way to Conantum, 2.30 P. M. 

November 1, 2018

It is a bright, clear, warm November day. I feel blessed. I love my life. I warm toward all nature.

The woods are now much more open than when I last observed them; the leaves have fallen, and they let in light, and I see the sky through them as through a crow's wing in every direction.

For the most part only the pines and oaks (white?) retain their leaves. At a distance, accordingly, the forest is green and reddish.

The crickets now sound faintly and from very deep in the sod.

Minott says that G. M. Barrett told him that Amos Baker told him that during Concord Fight he went over behind the hill to the old Whittaker place (Sam Buttrick's) and stayed. Yet he was described as the only survivor of Concord Fight. Received a pension for running away? 

Fall dandelions look bright still.

The grass has got a new greenness in spots.

At this season there are stranger sparrows or finches about.

The skunk-cabbage is already pushing up again.

The alders have lost their leaves, and the willows except a few shrivelled ones.

It is a remarkable day for fine gossamer cobwebs. Here in the causeway, as I walk toward the sun, I perceive that the air is full of them streaming from off the willows and spanning the road, all stretching across the road, and yet I cannot see them in any other direction, and feel not one. It looks as if the birds would be incommoded. They have the effect of a shimmer in the air. This shimmer, moving along them as they are waved by the wind, gives the effect of a drifting storm of light. It is more like a fine snow-storm which drifts athwart your path than anything else. What is the peculiar condition of the atmosphere, to call forth this activity? If there were no sunshine, I should never find out that they existed, I should not know that I was bursting a myriad barriers. Though you break them with your person, you feel not one.
Why should this day be so distinguished? 

The rain of night before last has raised the river at least two feet, and the meadows wear a late-fall look. The naked and weedy stems of the button-bush are suddenly submerged; you no longer look for pickerel from the bridges. The shallow and shrunken shore is also submerged.

I see so far and distinctly, my eyes seem to slide in this clear air.

The river is peculiarly sky-blue to-day, not dark as usual.

It is all in the air.

The cinquefoil on Conantum.

Counted one hundred and twenty five crows in one straggling flock moving westward.

The red shrub oak leaves abide on the hills.

The witch-hazels have mostly lost their blossoms, perhaps on account of the snow.

The ground wears its red carpet under the pines.

The pitch pines show new buds at the end of their plumes. How long this?

Saw a canoe birch by road beyond the Abel Minott house; distinguished it thirty rods off by the chalky whiteness of its limbs.
It is of a more unspotted, transparent, and perhaps pinkish white than the common, has considerable branches as well as white ones, and its branches do not droop and curl downward like that. There will be some loose curls of bark about it.

The common birch is finely branched and has frequently a snarly head; the former is a more open and free-growing tree.

If at a distance you see the birch near its top forking into two or more white limbs, you may know it for a canoe birch. You can tell where it has grown after the wood has turned to mould by a small fragment of its bark still left,-if it divides readily.

The common birch is more covered with moss, has the aspect of having grown more slowly, and has many more branches.

I have heard of a man in Maine who copied the whole Bible on to birch bark.

It was so much easier than to write that sentence which the birch tree stands for.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 1, 1851

I feel blessed. I love my life. I warm toward all nature. See July 16, 1851 ("I love and worship myself with a love which absorbs my love for the world.");  August 15, 1851 ("May I love and revere myself above all the gods that men have ever invented.")

At first blush a man is not capable of reporting truth; he must be drenched and saturated with it first. See November 1, 1857 ("A higher truth, though only dimly hinted at, thrills us more than a lower expressed. ");  See also December 16, 1837("The fact will one day flower out into a truth.");June 19, 1852 (“Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth.”); February 18, 1852 ("I have a commonplace-book for facts and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in my mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success . . . I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant . . . I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all."); February 23. 1860 ("A fact stated barely is dry. It must be the vehicle of some humanity in order to interest us. It is like giving a man a stone when he asks you for bread.")

It is a rare qualification to be able to state a fact simply and adequately. See May 21, 1851 ("I think that the existence of man in nature is the divinest and most startling of all facts."); November 9, 1851 ("Facts should only be as the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology which I am writing;. . .facts to tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought:. . . I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought -- with these I deal."); February 18, 1852 ("I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant, ... I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all."); June 19, 1852 (“Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth, samara?, tinged with his expectation.”); May 10, 1853 (“I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant”); May 6, 1854 (“There is no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i. e. to be significant, must be subjective. ”); November 5, 1857 ("I think that the man of science makes this mistake, and the mass of mankind along with him: that you should coolly give your chief attention to the phenomenon which excites you as something independent on you, and not as it is related to you.”)

It is a remarkable day for fine gossamer cobwebs. See November 1, 1860 ("Gossamer on the withered grass is shimmering in the fields, and flocks of it are sailing in the air."). See also November 7, 1855 ("Looking west over Wheeler’s meadow, I see that there has been much gossamer on the grass, and it is now revealed by the dewy mist which has collected on it.”); November 15, 1858 ("Gossamer, methinks, belongs to the latter part of October and first part of November"); see also note to November 3, 1857 ("Looking westward now, at 4 P.M., I see against the sunlight, where the twigs of a maple and black birch intermingle, a little gossamer or fine cobwebs, but much more the twigs, especially of the birch, waving slightly, reflect the light like cobwebs. It is a phenomenon peculiar to this season, when the twigs are bare and the air is clear. I cannot easily tell what is cobweb and what twig,") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Gossamer Days

Counted one hundred and twenty five crows in one straggling flock moving westward. See November 1, 1853 ("I notice crows flying southwesterly in a very long straggling flock, of which I see probably neither end.") See also October 20, 1859 ("I see a large and very straggling flock of crows fly southwest from over the hill behind Bull's and contending with the strong and cold northwest wind. This is the annual phenomenon. They are on their migrations."); October 29, 1855 ("I see and count about a hundred crows advancing in a great rambling flock from the southeast and crossing the river on high, and cawing.");  October 28, 1860 ("See a very large flock of crows").Compare March 5, 1854 ("And crows, as I think, migrating northeasterly. They come in loose, straggling flocks, about twenty to each, commonly silent, a quarter to a half a mile apart, till four flocks have passed, perhaps more. Methinks I see them going southwest in the fall.") Also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau: The American Crow

November 1. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November 1

It is a bright clear

warm November day.

I feel blessed.

I love my life.

I warm toward all nature.

Gossamer cobwebs

shimmer in the air as a

drifting storm of light

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, First of all a man must see, before he can say.

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-511101