February 3, 2019
About 6 P.M. walk to Cliffs via railroad. Snow quite deep. The sun has set without a cloud in the sky, - a rare occurrence. There is only a tinge of red along the horizon.
The moon is nearly full tonight, and the moment is passed when the light in the east (i. e. of the moon) balances the light in the west.
Venus is now like a little moon in the west, and the lights in the village twinkle like stars. It is perfectly still and not very cold.
The shadows of the trees on the snow are more minutely distinct than at any other season, finely reticulated, each limb and twig represented, as cannot be in summer.
The heavens appear less thickly starred than in summer, — rather a few bright stars, brought nearer by this splendid twinkling in the cold sky.
(Is not the sky unusually blue to-night? dark blue?
Is it not always bluer when the ground is covered with
snow in the winter than in summer? )
I hear my old acquaintance, the owl, from the Causeway.
As I stand over Deep Cut the cars do not make much noise, or else I am used to it. And now whizzes the boiling, sizzling kettle by me, in which the passengers make me think of potatoes, which a fork would show to be done by this time. The steam is denser for the cold, and more white; like the purest downy clouds in the summer sky, its volumes roll up between me and the moon, and far behind, when the cars are a mile off, it still goes shading the fields with its wreaths, - the breath of the panting traveller.
I now cross from the railroad to the road. This snow, the last of which fell day before yesterday, is two feet deep, pure and powdery. From a myriad little crystal mirrors the moon is reflected, which is the untarnished sparkle of its surface.
Here, in the midst of a clearing, where the choppers have been leaving the woods in pieces to-day, I hear the hooting of an owl, whose haunts the chopper is laying waste. The ground is all pure white powdery snow, which his sled, etc., has stirred up. I can see every track distinctly where the teamster drove his oxen to the choppers' piles and loaded his sled, and even the tracks of his dog in the moonlight, and plainly to write this.
The moonlight now is very splendid in the untouched pine woods above the Cliffs, alternate patches of shade and light. The light has almost the brightness of sunlight.
The stems of the trees are more obvious than by day, being simple black against the moonlight and the snow. I can tell where there is wood and where open land for many miles in the horizon by the darkness of the former and whiteness of the latter.
The landscape covered with snow two feet thick, seen by moonlight from these Cliffs, gleaming in the moon and of spotless white. Who can believe that this is the habitable globe? The scenery is wholly arctic. It looks as if the snow and ice of the arctic world, travelling like a glacier, had crept down southward and overwhelmed and buried New England. See if a man can think his summer thoughts now.
But the evening star is preparing to set, and I will return. Floundering through snow, sometimes up to my middle, my owl sounds hoo hoo hoo, ho-O.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 3, 1852
The moment is passed when the light in the east (i. e. of the moon) balances the light in the west. See August 5, 1851 (“he light from the western sky is stronger still than that of the moon, and when I hold up my hand, the west side is lighted while the side toward the moon is comparatively dark.”)
Is not the sky unusually blue to-night? See note to February 4, 1852 ("Coming home through the village by this full moonlight, . . . the sky is the most glorious blue I ever beheld, even a light blue on some sides, as if I actually saw into day . . . Has not this blueness of the sky the same cause with the blue- ness in the holes in the snow , and in some distant shadows on the snow? — if , indeed , it is true that the sky is bluer in winter when the ground is covered with snow.); February 5, 1852 ("The sky last night was a deeper, more cerulean blue than the far lighter and whiter sky of to-day."). See also January 21, 1853 (''The blueness of the sky at night — the color it wears by day — is an everlasting surprise to me . . .At midnight I see into the universal day. Walking at that hour, unless it is cloudy, still the blue sky o'erarches me."); May 11, 1853 ("Blue is the color of the day, and the sky is blue by night as well as by day, because it knows no night.")
From a myriad little crystal mirrors the moon is reflected, which is the untarnished sparkle of its surface. Compare June 13, 1851 ("I see the moon's inverted pyramid of light shimmering on its surface.. . . which, in fact, is made up of a myriad little mirrors reflecting the disk of the moon with equal brightness to an eye rightly placed.") See also January 12, 1860 ("The sun is now out very bright and going from the sun, I see a myriad sparkling points scattered over the snow surface -- little mirror-like facets -- which on examination I find each to be one of those star wheels fallen in the proper position, reflecting an intensely bright little sun."); February 8, 1856 ("At this hour the crust sparkles with a myriad brilliant points or mirrors, one to every six inches, at least. "); May 24, ,1860 ("How perfectly new and fresh the world is seen to be, when we behold a myriad sparkles of brilliant white sunlight on a rippled stream!")
Venus is now like a little moon in the west . . .But the evening star is preparing to set, See December 23, 1851 ("I find that the evening star is shining brightly, and, beneath all, the west horizon is glowing red . . . and I detect, just above the horizon, the narrowest imaginable white sickle of the new moon"); December 27, 1851 ("Venus - I suppose it is - is now the evening star, and very bright she is immediately after sunset in the early twilight"); April 3, 1852 ("Venus is very bright now in the west, and Orion is there, too, now"); May 8, 1852 ("Venus is the evening star and the only star yet visible"); June 15, 1852 ("The evening star, multiplied by undulating water, is like bright sparks of fire continually ascending. "); June 25, 1852 ("Moon half full . . .the evening star and one other bright one near the moon. It is a cool but pretty still night."); June 28, 1852 ("Now it is starlight; perhaps that dark cloud in the west has concealed the evening star before.")
The landscape covered with snow –
is this the habitable globe?
The scenery is arctic.
A glacier crept southward.
Who can think his summer thoughts now?
is this the habitable globe?
The scenery is arctic.
A glacier crept southward.
Who can think his summer thoughts now?
My owl sounds hoo hoo hoo, ho-O. See February 2, 1855 ("In the meanwhile we hear the distant note of a hooting owl."); January 7, 1854 ("I went to these woods partly to hear an owl, but did not; but, now that I have left them nearly a mile behind, I hear one distinctly, hoorer hoo. Strange that we should hear this sound so often, loud and far, — a voice which we call the owl, — and yet so rarely see the bird. Oftenest at twilight. It has a singular prominence as a sound; is louder than the voice of a dear friend. Yet we see the friend perhaps daily and the owl but few times in our lives. It is a sound which the wood or horizon makes.") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Voice of the Barred Owl
February 3. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February 3
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Winter Walk 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 © 2009-2024
tinyurl.com/hdt18520203
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