Expecting the Hunter's Azalea

20160531

Augustine deduced logically – from the existence of an infinite past and an infinite future – that the present moment must also be an infinity.

In today's journal entry, which I have extensively reorganized, Thoreau explains why the infinite present has its peculiar vibrancy. [The Hunter's Azalea and  The Significance of the Hunter's Azalea]

What distinguishes future from past? Have we not all experienced the sameness of now? The endless repetition of the infinite past. "What is new?" one is asked, and "Same old same old." is the reply.

What is the present moment?

Today, May 31, 1853, Thoreau explains that the experience of novelty is a matter of practice and discipline. Expect the unexpected and, paradoxically, the moment arrives in harmony, "perfectly in keeping with my life and characteristic."

Only a detailed study of the flowering plants of Concord, together with the right openness or receptiveness – what Thoreau calls "My subjective philosophy"  -- leads to the realization that the hunter's azalea is new.

The strangeness of now. The unexpected recognized as such. This present moment. Stunning and strange. And significant: "Events my imagination prepares me for, no matter how incredible."

Time is a vibration impelling the future to actuality. The future is distinguished from the past, now, only by relaxed attention to the unexpected present. Seeing without looking. Understanding without knowing.

"The boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations." 

We cross the river

Melvin and I and his dog

to the azalea.

May 31, 1853

~Zphx 20130531/20240531

20240531

See May 23, 1841 ("All nature is a new impression every instant"); November 21, 1850 ("I begin to see such an object when I cease to understand it"); February 14, 1851 ("We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see"); September 7, 1851 ("We are receiving our portion of the infinite. We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery."); November 18, 1851 ("The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work. (Mem. Wordsworth's observations on relaxed attention.)");April 18, 1852 ("Can I not by expectation affect the revolutions of nature, make a day to bring forth something new?"); March 29, 1853 ("Not till we are completely lost or turned round, - for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,- do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature . . . In fact, not till we are lost do we begin to realize where we are, and the infinite extent of our relations. ")Walden, Conclusion ("There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world. . . Only that day dawns to which we are awake.") See also Una Chaudhuri,Land/scape/theater, p366 ("a mode of knowledge that consists of the chronic presence of change . . . all within the sameness of every now, repetition of the now, the sameness of now that is always new.") and The sameness of now that is always new.

May 31. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, May 31

See also The Hunter's Azalea and The Significance of the Hunter's Azalea

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Expecting the Hunter's Azalea

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/HDTnow