Speed perspective

January 14

January 14, 2025

Skate to Baker Farm with a rapidity which astonished myself, before the wind, feeling the rise and fall, — the water having settled in the suddenly cold night,—which I had not time to see. 

(See the intestines of (apparently) a rabbit, — betrayed by a morsel of fur left on the ice — probably the prey of a fox.) 

A man feels like a new creature, a deer, perhaps, moving at this rate. He takes new possession of nature in the name of his own majesty. There was I, and there, and there. I judged that in a quarter of an hour I was three and a half miles from home without having made any particular exertion.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 14, 1855

Skate . . . with a rapidity which astonished myself. See January 15, 1855 (“Skate into a crack, and slide on my side twenty-five feet.”); December 29, 1858 ("We never cease to be surprised when we observe how swiftly the skater glides along.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Winter of Skating

The intestines of (apparently) a rabbit, — betrayed by a morsel of fur left on the ice — probably the prey of a fox.  See  February 27, 1856 ("Found, in the snow in E. Hosmer’s meadow, a gray rabbit’s hind leg, freshly left there, perhaps by a fox. "); Compare January 2, 1856  (“As for the fox and rabbit race described yesterday, I find that the rabbit was going the other way, and possibly the fox was a rabbit.”); January 4, 1860 ("The snow . . . is somewhat bloody and is covered with flocks of slate-colored and brown fur, but only the rabbit's tail,. . . and the contents of its paunch or of its entrails are left, — nothing more . . . There were many tracks of the fox about that place, and I had no doubt then that he had killed that rabbit . . . But as it turned out, though the circumstantial evidence against the fox was very strong, I was mistaken.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Fox

January 14. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 14

Skate before the wind –

there was I, and there, and there

astonishing myself.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Speed perspective

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 ©  2009-2025

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