No thicket will seem so unexplored now that I know that a stake and stones may be found in it.

January 1.

Deer beds
January 1, 2018

There are many words which are genuine and indigenous and have their root in our natures, not made by scholars, and as well understood by the illiterate as others. There are also a great many words which are spurious and artificial, and can only be used in a bad sense, since the thing they signify is not fair and substantial, – such as the church, the judiciary, to impeach, etc., etc. They who use them do not stand on solid ground. It is in vain to try to preserve them by attaching other words to them as the true church, etc. It is like towing a sinking ship with a canoe. 

I have lately been surveying the Walden woods so extensively and minutely that I now see it mapped in my mind's eye – as, indeed, on paper – as so many men’s wood-lots, and am aware when I walk there that I am at a given moment passing from such a one's wood-lot to such another's. I fear this particular dry knowledge may affect my imagination and fancy, that it will not be easy to see so much wildness and native vigor there as formerly. No thicket will seem so unexplored now that I know that a stake and stones may be found in it. 

In these respects those Maine woods differed essentially from ours. There you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all, some villager's familiar wood-lot from which his ancestors have sledded their fuel for generations, or some widow’s thirds, minutely described in some old deed, which is recorded, of which the owner has got a plan, too, and old bound marks may be found every forty rods if you will search. 

What a history this Concord wilderness which I affect so much may have had! How many old deeds describe it, — some particular wild spot, — how it passed from Cole to Robinson, and Robinson to Jones, and Jones finally to Smith, in course of years! Some have cut it over three times during their lives, and some burned it and sowed it with rye, and built walls and made a pasture of it, perchance. All have renewed the bounds and reblazed the trees many times. 

Here you are not reminded of these things. 'T is true the map informs you that you stand on land granted by the State to such an academy, or on Bingham's Purchase, but these names do not impose on you, for you see nothing to remind you of the academy or of Bingham.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 1, 1858

Words which are genuine and indigenous and have their root in our natures See December 16, 1859 (“How much better to describe your object in fresh English words rather than in conventional Latinisms!”)

I have lately been surveying the Walden woods so extensively and minutely that I now see it mapped in my mind's eye and am aware when I walk there that I am at a given moment passing from such a one's wood-lot to such another’s. See November 25, 1850 ("I feel a little alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit . . . the thought of some work, some surveying, will run in my head, and I am not where my body is, I am out of my senses. In my walks I would return to my senses like a bird or a beast."); August 21, 1851 ("You must walk sometimes perfectly free, not prying nor inquisitive, not bent upon seeing things"); November 18 1851 ("\ A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going."); March 5, 1852 ("The habit of looking at things microscopically, as the lichens on the trees and rocks, really prevents my seeing aught else in a walk"); February 12, 1860("Surrounded by our thoughts or imaginary objects, living in our ideas, not one in a million ever sees the objects which are actually around him.")