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| March 30, 2013 |
I see again that same kind of clouds that I saw the 10th of last April, low in the sky; higher and over head those great downy clouds, equal to the intervals of celestial blue, with glowing edges and with wet bases.
The sky is mapped with them as with New Hollands and Borneos. There are mares’-tails and rosettes in the west.
The motions of a hawk correcting the flaws in the wind by raising his shoulder from time to time, are much like those of a leaf yielding to them. For the little hawks are hunting now. You have not to sit long on the Cliffs before you see one.
I still see fresh earth where the skunk, if it is he, has been probing last night for insects about the pines in pastures and any dead twigs that afford lurking-places. Saw a dead cricket in one. They make a hole sometimes so deep and pointed that only two fingers will fathom it. If dor-bugs make such holes as the spiders, they can easily find them.
I am surprised to find many of the early sedge already out. It may have been out a day or two. I should put it between the skunk-cabbage and the aspen, at any rate, before the last.
Little black ants in the pitchy-looking earth about the base of white pines in woods are still dormant.
Ah, those youthful days! are they never to return? when the walker does not too curiously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself, - the phenomena that show themselves in him, - his expanding body, his intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quadruped or bird, confined his view, but the unbounded universe was his. A bird is now become a mote in his eye.
Hawks are hunting now. See March 30, 1856 ("The south hillsides no sooner begin to be bare, and the striped squirrels and birds resort there, than the hawks come from southward to prey on them.")
Ah, those youthful days! See June 1850 ("My imagination, my love and reverence and admiration, my sense of the miraculous, is not so excited by any event as by the remembrance of my youth."); July 16, 1851 ("I am all alive, and inhabit my body with inexpressible satisfaction. . . . To have such sweet impressions made on me, such ecstasies begotten of the breezes! . . . There comes to me such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion"); January 9. 1853 (" How much - how, perhaps, all - that is best in our experience in middle life may be resolved into the memory of our youth! I remember how I expanded")
When the walker does not too curiously observe particulars. See March 5, 1852 ("Such is the mood of my mind, and I call it studying lichens. The habit of looking at things microscopically, as the lichens on the trees and rocks, really prevents my seeing aught else in a walk"); September 13, 1852 (“I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest, but suffer from a constant strain. When I have found myself ever looking down and confining my gaze to the flowers, I have thought it might be well to get into the habit of observing the clouds as a corrective; but no! that study would be just as bad. It is as bad to study stars and clouds as flowers and stones.”): March 23, 1853 (“I feel that I am dissipated by so many observations. . . . I have almost a slight, dry headache as the result of all this observing.”)
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 30, 1853
Ah, those youthful days! See June 1850 ("My imagination, my love and reverence and admiration, my sense of the miraculous, is not so excited by any event as by the remembrance of my youth."); July 16, 1851 ("I am all alive, and inhabit my body with inexpressible satisfaction. . . . To have such sweet impressions made on me, such ecstasies begotten of the breezes! . . . There comes to me such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion"); January 9. 1853 (" How much - how, perhaps, all - that is best in our experience in middle life may be resolved into the memory of our youth! I remember how I expanded")
When the walker does not too curiously observe particulars. See March 5, 1852 ("Such is the mood of my mind, and I call it studying lichens. The habit of looking at things microscopically, as the lichens on the trees and rocks, really prevents my seeing aught else in a walk"); September 13, 1852 (“I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest, but suffer from a constant strain. When I have found myself ever looking down and confining my gaze to the flowers, I have thought it might be well to get into the habit of observing the clouds as a corrective; but no! that study would be just as bad. It is as bad to study stars and clouds as flowers and stones.”): March 23, 1853 (“I feel that I am dissipated by so many observations. . . . I have almost a slight, dry headache as the result of all this observing.”)
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