Night fruit

April 1.

The fruit a thinker bears is sentences, - statements or opinions. He seeks to affirm something as true.

I am surprised that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, - not fore-thought, - so that I occasionally awake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I had never consciously considered before, and as surprising and novel and agreeable to me as anything can be. As if we only thought by sympathy with the universal mind, which thought while we were asleep. 

There is such a necessity to make a definite statement that our minds at length do it without our consciousness.

This occurred to me last night, but I was so surprised by the fact which I have just endeavored to report that I have entirely forgotten what the particular observation was.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 1, 1860

As if we only thought by sympathy with the universal mind ... while we were asleep. See 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, and, in the act of reentering its native body, had diffused an elysian fragrance around.");  March 17, 1852 ("I make the truest observations and distinctions then, when the will is yet wholly asleep and the mind works like a machine without friction. I am conscious of having, in my sleep, transcended the limits of the individual, and made observations and carried on conversations which in my waking hours I can neither recall nor appreciate. As if in sleep our individual fell into the infinite mind . . . On awakening we resume our enterprise, take up our bodies and become limited mind again."); February 19, 1854  ("The mind of the universe . . . which we share."); October 29, 1857 ("Such early morning thoughts as I speak of . . . are a sort of permanent dream in my mind . . . we cannot tell what we have dreamed from what we have actually experienced."); See also  March 11, 1859 ("What we do best or most perfectly is what we have most thoroughly learned by the longest practice, and at length it falls from us without our notice, as a leaf from a tree. It is the last time we shall do it, — our unconscious leavings.")

Sentences, statements,

opinions. affirmations — 

fruit a thinker bears.

 Thoughts by sympathy

with the universal mind 

while we are asleep