August 2.
My attic chamber has compelled me to sit below with the family at evening for a month.
I feel the necessity of deepening the stream of my life; I must cultivate privacy. It is very dissipating to be with people too much. I am inclined now for a pensive evening walk. I go via Hubbard Path.
My attic chamber has compelled me to sit below with the family at evening for a month.
I feel the necessity of deepening the stream of my life; I must cultivate privacy. It is very dissipating to be with people too much. I am inclined now for a pensive evening walk. I go via Hubbard Path.
July has been to me a trivial month. It began hot and continued drying, then rained some toward the middle, bringing anticipations of the fall, and then was hot again about the 20th. It has been a month of haying, heat, low water, and weeds. Birds have grown up and flown more or less in small flocks, though I notice a new sparrow's nest and eggs and perhaps a catbird's eggs lately. The woodland quire has steadily diminished in volume.
As I go up the hill, surrounded by its shadow, while the sun is setting, I am soothed by the delicious stillness of the evening, save that on the hills the wind blows. I am surprised by the sound of my own voice. It is an atmosphere burdensome with thought. For the first time for a month, at least, I am reminded that thought is possible.
The din of trivialness is silenced. I float over or through the deeps of silence. It is the first silence I have heard for a month. My life had been a River Platte, tinkling over its sands but useless for all great navigation, but now it suddenly became a fathomless ocean. It shelved off to unimagined depths.
I sit on rock on the hilltop, warm with the heat of the departed sun, in my thin summer clothes. Here are the seeds of some berries in the droppings of some bird on the rock.
The sun has been set fifteen minutes, and a long cloudy finger, stretched along the northern horizon, is held over the point where it disappeared.
I see dark shadows formed on the south side of the woods east of the river. After a little while the western sky is suddenly suffused with a pure white light, against which the hickories further east on the hill show black with beautiful distinctness. A few sparrows sing as in the morning and the spring; also a peawai and a chewink.
Meanwhile the moon in her first quarter is burnishing her disk.
Now suddenly the cloudy finger and the few scattered clouds glow with the parting salute of the sun, which has so long sunk below the convex earth.
The surface of the forest on the east of the river presents a singularly cool and wild appearance.
A few fireflies in the meadows. I am uncertain whether that so large and bright and high was a firefly or a shooting star. Shooting stars are but fireflies of the firmament.
The crickets on the causeway make a steady creak.
I am compelled to stand to write where a soft, faint light from the western sky came in between two willows.
Fields to-day sends me a specimen copy of my "Walden." It is to be published on the 12th inst.
I sit on rock on the hilltop, warm with the heat of the departed sun, in my thin summer clothes. Here are the seeds of some berries in the droppings of some bird on the rock.
The sun has been set fifteen minutes, and a long cloudy finger, stretched along the northern horizon, is held over the point where it disappeared.
I see dark shadows formed on the south side of the woods east of the river. After a little while the western sky is suddenly suffused with a pure white light, against which the hickories further east on the hill show black with beautiful distinctness. A few sparrows sing as in the morning and the spring; also a peawai and a chewink.
Meanwhile the moon in her first quarter is burnishing her disk.
Now suddenly the cloudy finger and the few scattered clouds glow with the parting salute of the sun, which has so long sunk below the convex earth.
The surface of the forest on the east of the river presents a singularly cool and wild appearance.
A few fireflies in the meadows. I am uncertain whether that so large and bright and high was a firefly or a shooting star. Shooting stars are but fireflies of the firmament.
The crickets on the causeway make a steady creak.
I am compelled to stand to write where a soft, faint light from the western sky came in between two willows.
Fields to-day sends me a specimen copy of my "Walden." It is to be published on the 12th inst.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 2, 1854
Scattered clouds glow with the parting salute of the sun, which has so long sunk below the convex earth. See August 2, 1852 ("In many moods it is cheering to look across . . .to that blue rim of the earth").
I sit on rock on the hilltop, warm with the heat of the departed sun, in my thin summer clothes. See January 1, 1852 ("Perhaps the only thing that spoke to me on this walk was the bare, lichen-covered gray rock at the Cliff, in the moonlight, naked and almost warm as in summer.”); January 9, 1853 ("As I climb the Cliff, I pause in the sun and sit on a dry rock, dreaming. I think of those summery hours when time is tinged with eternity . . ."); May 23, 1854 ("I sat for hours on rocks and wrestled with the melody which possessed me."); February 20, 1857 ("I am that rock by the pond-side.")
Shooting stars are but fireflies of the firmament. . . See June 16, 1852 ("Do not the stars, too, show their light for love, like the fireflies ?”); June 25, 1852 (“What were the firefly's light, if it were not for darkness?”)
Scattered clouds glow with the parting salute of the sun, which has so long sunk below the convex earth. See August 2, 1852 ("In many moods it is cheering to look across . . .to that blue rim of the earth").
I sit on rock on the hilltop, warm with the heat of the departed sun, in my thin summer clothes. See January 1, 1852 ("Perhaps the only thing that spoke to me on this walk was the bare, lichen-covered gray rock at the Cliff, in the moonlight, naked and almost warm as in summer.”); January 9, 1853 ("As I climb the Cliff, I pause in the sun and sit on a dry rock, dreaming. I think of those summery hours when time is tinged with eternity . . ."); May 23, 1854 ("I sat for hours on rocks and wrestled with the melody which possessed me."); February 20, 1857 ("I am that rock by the pond-side.")
Shooting stars are but fireflies of the firmament. . . See June 16, 1852 ("Do not the stars, too, show their light for love, like the fireflies ?”); June 25, 1852 (“What were the firefly's light, if it were not for darkness?”)
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