 aglow with yellow, red, and green |
P. M. — A-chestnutting down Turnpike and across to Britton's, thinking that the rain now added to the frosts would relax the burs which were open and let the nuts drop.
The sugar maples are now in their glory, all aglow with yellow, red, and green. They are remarkable for the contrast they afford of deep blushing red on one half and green on the other.
The chestnuts are not so ready to fall as I expected. Perhaps the burs require to be dried now after the rain. In a day or two they will nearly all come down. They are a pretty fruit, thus compactly stowed away in this bristly chest, — three is the regular number, and there is no room to spare, — the two outside nuts having each one convex side without and a flat side within; the middle nut has two flat sides. Sometimes there are several more nuts in a bur, but this year the burs are small, and there are not commonly more than two good nuts, very often only one, the middle one, both sides of which will then be convex, each way bulging out into a thin abortive mere reminiscence of a nut, all shell, beyond it.
It is a rich sight, that of a large chestnut tree with a dome-shaped top, where the yellowing leaves have become thin, — for most now strew the ground evenly as a carpet throughout the chestnut woods and so save some seed, — all richly rough with great brown burs, which are opened into several segments so as to show the wholesome-colored nuts peeping forth, ready to fall on the slightest jar.
The individual nuts are very interesting, of various forms, according to the season and the number in a bur. The base of each where it was joined to the bur is marked with an irregular dark figure on a light ground, oblong or crescent-shaped commonly, like a spider or other insect with a dozen legs, while the upper or small end tapers into a little white, woolly spire crowned with a star, and the whole upper slopes of the nuts are covered with the same hoary wool, which reminds you of the frosts on whose advent they peep forth.
Each nut stretches forth a little starry hand at the end of a slender arm — and by this, when mature, you may pull it out without fear of prickles. Within this thick prickly bur the nuts are about as safe until they are quite mature, as a porcupine behind its spines. Yet I see where the squirrels have gnawed through many closed burs and left the pieces on the stumps.
There are sometimes two meats within one chestnut shell, divided transversely, and each covered by its separate brown-ribbed skin.
The late goldenrod (S. latifolia) is all gone, on account of frost.
Men commonly exaggerate the theme. Some themes they think are significant and others insignificant. I feel that my life is very homely, my pleasures very cheap. Joy and sorrow, success and failure, grandeur and meanness, and indeed most words in the English language do not mean for me what they do for my neighbors. I see that my neighbors look with compassion on me, that they think it is a mean and unfortunate destiny which makes me to walk in these fields and woods so much and sail on this river alone.
But so long as I find here the only real elysium, I can not hesitate in my choice. My work is writing, and I do not hesitate, though I know that no subject is too trivial for me, tried by ordinary standards; for, ye fools, the theme is nothing, the life is everything.
All that interests the reader is the depth and intensity of the life excited. We touch our subject but by a point which has no breadth, but the pyramid of our experience, or our interest in it, rests on us by a broader or narrower base. That is, man is all in all, Nature nothing, but as she draws him out and reflects him. Give me simple, cheap, and homely themes.
I still see a yellow butterfly occasionally zigzagging by the roadside.
What a strong medicinal but rich scent now after the rain, from decaying weeds, perhaps ferns, by the road side! The rain, falling on the fresh dried herbs and filling the ditches into which they drooped, has converted them into tea.
Apple leaves are now pretty generally brown and crisp.
I see where the chestnut trees have been sadly bruised by the large stones cast against them in previous years and which still lie around.
That was an interesting sight described on the 12th, the winged insects of various kinds gathered on the last fragment of a watermelon in the garden, to taste the last sweets of the year. In midsummer they are dispersed and not observed, but now, as in the spring, they are congregated about the little sweet that is left.
Minott told me one of his hunting stories yesterday, how he saw a very large hen-hawk come sailing from over the hill, just this side of where Moore lives now. He didn't expect to reach her, but he knew that he had a plaguy smart little piece, — it was a kind of half- stocked one (he always speaks of the gun he used on a particular occasion as if it were a new one, describing it minutely, though he never had more than three, perhaps not more than two, in his life, I suspect), — so he thought he'd give her a try, and, faith, she pitched down into the little meadow on the north side the road there, and when he came up she bristled up to him so that he was obliged to give her another charge.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 18, 1856
The sugar maples are now in their glory, all aglow with yellow, red, and green. See October 18, 1858 ("The large sugar maples on the Common are now at the height of their beauty.")
We touch our subject but by a point which has no breadth. . . . See June 6, 1857 (" Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone
and hue to my thought. . . . We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, . . .") December 11, 1855 ("I am tickled by this or that I come in contact with, as if I touched the wires of a battery. The age of miracles is each moment thus returned. ”); January 26, 1852 ("The moment always spurs us. The spurs of countless moments goad us incessantly into life.")
All that interests the reader is the depth and intensity of the life excited. . . . That is, man is all in all, Nature nothing, but as she draws him out and reflects him. See May 24, 1857 ("We want no[t] completeness but intensity of life."); May 6, 1854 ("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."); May 23, 1853 ("The poet must bring to Nature the smooth mirror in which she is to be reflected.”) 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"); May 21, 1851 ("The existence of man in nature is the divinest and most startling of all facts. Man, the crowning fact, the god we know. . . .The standing miracle to man is man."):
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