Already we begin to anticipate spring (a crossroad in the year of light).

February 2.

Another warm, melting day, like yesterday. You can see some softening and relenting in the sky. 

We go up the Corner road and take the ice at Potter's Meadow. The Cliff Hill is nearly bare on the west side, and you hear the rush of melted snow down its side in one place. 

The shade of pines on the snow is in some lights quite blue. 

The ice is about eighteen inches thick on Fair Haven. Saw some pickerel just caught there, with a fine lustre to them. 

Went to the pond in the woods which has an old ditch dug from it near Clematis Brook.  The red twigs of the cornels and the yellow ones of the sallows surrounding it are interesting at this season. We prize the least color now. 

The scream of the jay is a true winter sound. It is wholly without sentiment, and in harmony with winter.

I stole up within five or six feet of a pitch pine behind which a downy woodpecker was pecking. From time to time he hopped round to the side and observed me without fear. They are very confident birds, not easily scared, but incline to keep the other side of the bough to you , perhaps. 

As it is a melting day, the snow is everywhere peppered with snow-fleas, even twenty rods from the woods, on the pond and meadows. 

We stop awhile under Bittern Cliff, the south side, where it is very warm. There are a few greenish radical leaves to be seen, — primrose and johnswort, strawberry, etc., and spleenwort still green in the clefts. 

The winter gnat is seen in the warm air. 

Already we begin to anticipate spring, and this is an important difference between this time and a month ago. We begin to say that the day is springlike. 

Is not January the hardest month to get through? When you have weathered that, you get into the gulfstream of winter, nearer the shores of spring.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 2, 1854

Saw some pickerel just caught there, with a fine lustre to them. See January 29, 1853 ("Pickerel of at least three different forms and colors were lying on the ice of Walden this afternoon:") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Pickerel

The scream of the jay is a true winter sound. See February 12, 1854 ("the unrelenting steel-cold scream of a jay, unmelted, that never flows into a song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold; hard, tense, frozen music, like the winter sky itself; in the blue livery of winter's band. It is like a flourish of trumpets to the winter sky.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Blue Jay

A downy woodpecker was pecking . . .he hopped round to the side and observed me without fear. See December 14, 1855 ("I heard the sound of a downy woodpecker tapping a pitch pine in a little grove, and saw him inclining to dodge behind the stem.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Downy Woodpecker

As it is a melting day, the snow is everywhere peppered with snow-fleas. See January 30, 1860 ("The snow-flea seems to be a creature whose summer and prime of life is a thaw in the winter. . . .It is the creature of the thaw. Moist snow is its element. ."); February 11, 1854 ("Snow-fleas lie in black patches on the ice which froze last night. When I breathe on them I find them all alive and ready to skip") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,the Snow-flea

The winter gnat is seen in the warm air.  See January 6, 1854 ("A winter (?) gnat out on the bark of a pine");  March 2, 1860 ("We see one or two gnats in the air."); March 19, 1858 ("Are not these the winter gnat? They keep up a circulation in the air like water-bugs on the water."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Fuzzy Gnats (tipulidæ)

We begin to say that the day is springlike. See March 2, 1859 (“We thus commonly antedate the spring more than any other season, for we look forward to it with more longing. We talk about spring as at hand before the end of February, and yet it will be two good months, one sixth part of the whole year, before we can go a-maying. There may be a whole month of solid and uninterrupted winter yet”);  March 20, 1855 ("It is remarkable by what a gradation of days which we call pleasant and warm, beginning in the last of February, we come at last to real summer warmth. At first a sunny, calm, serene winter day is pronounced spring, or reminds us of it; and then the first pleasant spring day perhaps we walk with our greatcoat buttoned up and gloves on.”); April 26, 1860 ("What we should have called a warm day in March is a cold one at this date in April.”)  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February Belongs to Spring

February 2. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February 2

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

Already we begin to anticipate spring. 

Last night the snow was perfect for walking and fresh enough but not too fresh to reveal the abundance of life in the woods. So many tracks.  Out there in the dark I feel --  I think for the first time -- the hidden vital presence of all the woodland creatures.

Groundhog day is a crossroad in the year of light -- and one can feel it.  These earlier mornings and later nights, the memory of the dark is tugging. i could have survived worse. But the coming light and spring is inevitable.

these late winter days

the light is early

the snow, the cold, the dark

no longer a threat

now the deep solitude of winter

is a parting friend

winter lingers

one last wet kiss.

20120224

I am inspired to revisit my "Seasons" project. My book begins in early February and ends in late February because February is both spring and winter.

I have also spent part of the weekend on my quantum physics study, making a spreadsheet of dates and discoveries. And going back to reread Einstein's 1905  paper "On a heuristic point of view concerning the production and transformation of light":

The wave theory of light, with continuous spatial functions, leads to contradictions when applied to the phenomena of the emmission and transformation of light

According to the assumption considered here, in the propagation of a light ray emitted from a point source, the energy is not distributed continuously over ever increasing volumes of space, but consists of a finite number of energy quanta localized at points of space that move without dividing, and can be absorbed or generated only as complete units.

Still no one understands it. Here is Freeman Dyson in a recent blog :

Unfortunately, people writing about quantum mechanics often use the phrase “collapse of the wave-function” to describe what happens when an object is observed. This phrase gives a misleading idea that the wave-function itself is a physical object. A physical object can collapse when it bumps into an obstacle. But a wave-function cannot be a physical object. A wave-function is a description of a probability, and a probability is a statement of ignorance. Ignorance is not a physical object, and neither is a wave-function. When new knowledge displaces ignorance, the wave-function does not collapse; it merely becomes irrelevant.

It seems age 24 or 26 is the cutoff for making any discoveries in physics.  I am going to read more biographies but so far the story is over by chapter 3 and the rest is just a question of how and when will he die / loose integrity.

zphx

February 2, 2014

tinyurl.com/hdt18540204