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.")