The art of life

September 7.

The art of life! Was there ever anything memorable written upon it? I do not remember any page which will tell me how to spend this afternoon.

How to live. How to get the most life. The art of spending a day. Can a youth, a man, do more wisely than to go where his life is to be found? To observe what transpires, not in the street, but in the mind and heart of me!

I do not so much wish to know how to economize time as how to spend it, that the day may not have been in vain. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my every-day business.

The discoveries which we make abroad are special and particular; those which we make at home are general and significant. The further off, the nearer the surface. The nearer home, the deeper.

We are receiving our portion of the infinite. We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery. May we not probe it, pry into it, employ ourselves about it, a little? To watch for, describe, all the divine features which I detect in Nature. My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas, in nature.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 7, 1851

The art of life

I don’t remember 

a page to tell me how to 

spend this afternoon . . .

how to receive our

portion of this infinite.

fertile mystery,

September 7, 1851

The art of life. See January 12, 1852 ("Do the things which lie nearest to you – but which are
difficult to do.");; April 29, 1852 (“The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.”); Walden ("To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”) and ("In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God Himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. . . .Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, . . .— determined to make a day of it.”);  see also October 18, 1855 (“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”); November 18, 1857 "Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of . . .”)

My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas, in nature. See August 30, 1856 ("I get my new experiences still, not at the opera listening to the Swedish Nightingale, but at Beck Stow's Swamp listening to the native wood thrush.”)



Sept. 7.

We sometimes experience a mere fullness of life, which does not find any channels to flow into.

We are stimulated, but to no obvious purpose. 

I feel myself uncommonly prepared for some literary work, but I can select no work.

I am prepared not so much for contemplation, as for forceful expression.

I am braced both physically and intellectually.

It is not so much the music as the marching to the music that I feel.

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 nervously.

Carlyle ' s writing is for the most part of this character.

Miss Martineau ' s last book is not so bad as the timidity which fears its influence.

As if the popularity of this or that book would be so fatal, and man would not still be man in the world. 

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

Atheism may comparatively be popular with God himself.

What shall we say of these timid folk who carry the principle of thinking nothing and doing nothing and being nothing to such an extreme?­

As if, in the absence of thought, that vast yearning of their natures for something to fill the vacuum made the least traditionary expression and shadow of a thought to be clung to with instinctive tenacity.

They atone for their producing nothing by a brutish respect for something.

They are as simple as oxen, and as guiltless of thought and reflection.

Their reflections are reflected from other minds.

The creature of institutions, bigoted and a conservatist, can say nothing hearty.

He cannot meet life with life, but only with words.

He rebuts you by avoiding you.

He is shocked like a woman. 

Our ecstatic states, which appear to yield so little fruit, have this value at least : though in the seasons when our genius reigns we may be powerless for expression, yet, in calmer seasons, when our talent is active, the memory of those rarer moods comes to color our picture and is the permanent paint-pot, as it were, into which we dip our brush.

Thus no life or experience goes unreported at last; but if it be not solid gold it is gold-leaf, which gilds the furniture of the mind.

It is an experience of infinite beauty on which we unfailingly draw, which enables us to exaggerate ever truly.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

Their truth subsides, and in cooler moments we can use them as paint to gild and adorn our prose.

When I despair to sing them, I will remember that they will furnish me with paint with which to adorn and preserve the works of talent one day.

They are like a pot of pure ether.

They lend the writer when the moment comes a certain superfluity of wealth, making his expression to overrun and float itself.

It is the difference between our river, now parched and dried up, exposing its unsightly and weedy bottom, and the same when, in the spring, it covers all the meads with a chain of placid lakes, reflecting the forests and the skies.


We are receiving our portion of the infinite.

The art of life! Was there ever anything memorable written upon it?­

By what disciplines to secure the most life, with what care to watch our thoughts.

To observe what transpires, not in the street, but in the mind and heart of me!

I do not remember any page which will tell me how to spend this afternoon.

I do not so much wish to know how to economize time as how to spend it, by what means to grow rich, that the day may not have been in vain.

What if one moon has come and gone with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, its oracular suggestions?­ So divine a creature, freighted with hints for me, and I not use her! One moon gone by unnoticed! ! 

Suppose you attend to the hints, to the suggestions, which the moon makes for one month, — commonly in vain, — will they not be very different from anything in literature or religion or philosophy?­

The scenery, when it is truly seen, reacts on the life of the seer.

How to live.

How to get the most life.

As if you were to teach the young hunter how to entrap his game.

How to extract its honey from the flower of the world.

That is my every-day business.

I am as busy as a bee about it.

I ramble over all fields on that errand, and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax.

I am like a bee searching the livelong day for the sweets of nature.

Do I not impregnate and intermix the flowers, produce rare and finer varieties by transferring my eyes from one to an other?­

I do as naturally and as joyfully, with my own humming music, seek honey all the day.

With what honeyed thought any experience yields me I take a bee line to my cell.

It is with flowers I would deal.

Where is the flower, there is the honey, — which is perchance the nectareous portion of the fruit, — there is to be the fruit, and no doubt flowers are thus colored and painted to attract and guide the bee.

So by the dawning or radiance of beauty are we advertised where is the honey and the fruit of thought, of discourse, and of action.

We are first attracted by the beauty of the flower, before we discover the honey which is a foretaste of the future fruit.

Did not the young Achilles (?) spend his youth learning how to hunt?­

The art of spending a day.

If it is possible that we may be addressed, it behooves us to be attentive.

If by watching all day and all night I may detect some trace of the Ineffable, then will it not be worth the while to watch?­

Watch and pray without ceasing, but not necessarily in sadness.

Be of good cheer.

Those Jews were too sad: to another people a still deeper revelation may suggest only joy.

Don't I know what gladness is?­

Is it but the reflex of sadness, its back side?­

In the Hebrew gladness, I hear but too distinctly still the sound of sadness retreating.

Give me a gladness which has never given place to sadness.

I am convinced that men are not well employed, that this is not the way to spend a day.

If by patience, if by watching, I can secure one new ray of light, can feel myself elevated for an instant upon Pisgah, the world which was dead prose to me become living and divine, shall I not watch ever? shall I not be a watchman hence forth?­

If by watching a whole year on the city's walls I may obtain a communication from heaven, shall I not do well to shut up my shop and turn a watchman?­

Can a youth, a man, do more wisely than to go where his life is to [be] found?­

As if I had suffered that to be rumor which may be verified.

We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery.

May we not probe it, pry into it, employ ourselves about it, a little­?

To devote your life to the discovery of the divinity in nature or to the eating of oysters, would they not be attended with very different results?­

I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are all ruled for dollars and cents.

If the wine, the water, which will nourish me grows on the surface of the moon, I will do the best I can to go to the moon for it.

The discoveries which we make abroad are special and particular; those which we make at home are general and significant.

The further off, the nearer the surface.

The nearer home, the deeper.

Go in search of the springs of life, and you will get exercise enough.

Think of a man's swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling in far-off pastures unsought by him! The seeming necessity of swinging dumb-bells proves that he has lost his way.

To watch for, describe, all the divine features which I detect in Nature.

My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas, in nature. 



The mind may perchance be persuaded to act, to energize, by the action and energy of the body.

Any kind of liquid will fetch the pump.

We all have our states of fullness and of emptiness, but we overflow at different points.

One overflows through the sensual outlets, another through his heart, another through his head, and another perchance only through the higher part of his head, or his poetic faculty.

It depends on where each is tight and open.

We can, perchance, then direct our nutriment to those organs we specially use.


September 7, 1851



If it is possible that we may be addressed, it behooves us to be attentive. See  January 1851 ("It is something to know when you are addressed by Divinity and not by a common traveller . . . How many communications may we not lose through inattention!")

Now I can write

September 4. 

It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many themes, Improve the opportunity to draw analogies. There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth. All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.

Improve the suggestion of each object however humble, however slight and transient the provocation. It is a wise man and experienced who has taken many views; to whom stones and plants and animals and a myriad objects have each suggested something,

Probe the universe in a myriad points You must try a thousand themes before you find the right one, as nature makes a thousand acorns to get one oak.

I feel myself uncommonly prepared for some literary work, but I can select no work. Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression.

I am prepared not so much for contemplation, as for forceful expression. I am braced both physically and intellectually It is not so much the music as the marching to the music that I feel. 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.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 4-7, 1851

The perception of truth. See February 27, 1851("a novel and grand surprise, or a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we had called knowledge before; an indefinite sense of the grandeur and glory of the universe.”); April 19 1852 ("How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact! suggesting what worlds remain to be unveiled. That phenomenon of the andromeda seen against the sun cheers me exceedingly. When the phenomenon was not observed, it was not at all. I think that no man ever takes an original or detects a principle, without experiencing an inexpressible, as quite infinite and sane, pleasure, which advertises him of the dignity of that truth he has perceived.”); June 19, 1852 (“Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth.”); August 8, 1852 ("No man ever makes a discovery, even an observation of the least importance, but he is advertised of the fact by a joy that surprises him."); September 2, 1856 (" I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I am in a thrilled and expectant mood, . . . I am prepared for strange things.”); November 1, 1857 ("A higher truth, though only dimly hinted at, thrills us"); November 4, 1858 ("We cannot see any thing until we are possessed with the idea of it.”); January 5, 1860 ("A man receives only what he is ready to receive. His observations make a chain. He does not observe the phenomenon that cannot be linked with the rest which he has observed, however novel and remarkable it may be. A man tracks himself through life, apprehending only what he already half knows.”); August 22, 1860 ("I never find a remarkable Indian relic but I have first divined its existence, and planned the discovery of it."); November 25, 1860 ("How is any scientific discovery made ? Why, the discoverer takes it into his head first. He must all but see it.")

 

Now I can write... See September 2, 1851 ("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.”); August 2, 1854 ("Fields to-day sends me a specimen copy of my "Walden." It is to be published on the 12th inst.”)

On writing

September 2.

We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member. Often I feel that my head stands out too dry, when it should be immersed. 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.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, September 2, 1851

It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart. See August 19, 1851 ("How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!"); May 6, 1854 ("Every important worker will report what life there is in him.”); October 18, 1855 (“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”); November 18, 1857 "Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of”); January 23, 1858. (" It is in vain to write on the seasons unless you have the seasons in you.")

Ripening fruit

September 1.

The fruit of the trilliums is very handsome. I found some a month ago, a singular red, angular-cased pulp, drooping, with the old anthers surrounding it three quarters of an inch in diameter; and now there is another kind, a dense crowded cluster of many ovoid berries turning from green to scarlet or bright brick color. 

Then there is the mottled fruit of the clustered Solomon's-seal, and also the greenish (with blue meat) fruit of the Convallaria multiflora dangling from the axils of the leaves.


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

The fruit of the trilliums is very handsome.. . .a dense crowded cluster of many ovoid berries turning from green to scarlet or bright brick color. See August 19, 1852("The trillium berries, six-sided, one inch in diameter, like varnished and stained cherry wood, glossy red, crystalline and ingrained, concealed under its green leaves in shady swamps.")