Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Tell the story of your love.

May 6.

To-day it has spit a little snow and is very windy (northwest) and cold enough for gloves. 

Is not that the true spring when the F. hyemalis and tree sparrows are with us singing in the cold mornings with the song sparrows, and ducks and gulls are about?

There is no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i. e. to be significant, must be subjective. The sum of what the writer of whatever class has to report is simply some human experience, whether he be poet or philosopher or man of science. 

The man of most science is the man most alive, whose life is the greatest event. Senses that take cognizance of outward things merely are of no avail. It matters not where or how far you travel, — the farther commonly the worse, — but how much alive you are. If it is possible to conceive of an event outside to humanity, it is not of the slightest significance, though it were the explosion of a planet. 

Every important worker will report what life there is in him. All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind, is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love, — to sing; and, if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love. This alone is to be alive to the extremities.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 6, 1854

Is not that the true spring when the F. hyemalis and tree sparrows are with us singing in the cold mornings. See March 20, 1855 ("At my landing I hear the F. hyemalis, in company with a few tree sparrows. They take refuge from the cold wind, half a dozen in all, behind an arbor-vitae hedge, and there plume themselves with puffed-up feathers.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Dark-eyed Junco

Your observation, to be interesting, i. e. to be significant, must be subjective.  See September 2, 1851 ("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.”). June 30, 1852 ("Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; her scenes must be associated with humane affections... She is most significant to a lover."); May 10, 1853 ("I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant"); August 7, 1853 ("The objects I behold correspond to my mood"); February 20, 1857("If I were to discover that a certain kind of stone by the pond-shore was affected, say partially disintegrated, by a particular natural sound, as of a bird or insect, I see that one could not be completely described without describing the other. I am that rock by the pond-side. “); November 5, 1857 (“The object I caught a glimpse of as I went by haunts my thoughts a long time, is infinitely suggestive, and I do not care to front it and scrutinize it, for I know that the thing that really concerns me is not there, but in my relation to that. That is a mere reflecting surface. . . .I think that the man of science makes this mistake, and the mass of mankind along with him: that you should coolly give your chief attention to the phenomenon which excites you as something independent on you, and not as it is related to you. The important fact is its effect on me. . . . It is the subject of the vision, the truth alone, that concerns me. . . . the point of interest is somewhere between me and them (i. e. the objects)')

Poet or philosopher or man of science. See April 28, 1856 ("Again, as so many times, I am reminded of the advantage to the poet, and philosopher, and naturalist, and whomsoever, of pursuing from time to time some other business than his chosen one, — seeing with the side of the eye."); September 14, 1856 ("Let the traveller bethink himself, elevate and expand his thoughts somewhat, that his successors may oftener hereafter be cheered by the sight of an Aster Novae-Angliae or spectabilis here and there, to remind him that a poet or philosopher has passed this way. "); October 21, 1857("Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day."); October 27, 1857 ("The real facts of a poet's life would be of more value to us than any work of his art.");
April 2, 1858 ("It is not important that the poet should say some particular thing, but should speak in harmony with nature"); September 9, 1858 ("How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects! A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in the pursuit of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks.")

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