Colder weather, true November weather, comes again to-night, and I must rekindle my fire, which I had done without of late. I must walk briskly in order to keep warm in my thin coat.
P. M. — To Annursnack.
I am inclined to think that pignuts fall earlier than mocker-nuts, i. e. the leaves, and that the first are now about fallen (?). Those on Nawshawtuct are bare, but I see a great many hickories of some kind not nearly bare.
Monroe’s arbor-vitae hedge has fallen. Put it with the white pine.
The jay is the bird of October. I have seen it repeatedly flitting amid the bright leaves, of a different color from them all and equally bright, and taking its flight from grove to grove. It, too, with its bright color, stands for some ripeness in the bird harvest. And its scream! it is as if it blowed on the edge of an October leaf. It is never more in its element and at home than when flitting amid these brilliant colors. No doubt it delights in bright color, and so has begged for itself a brilliant coat. It is not gathering seeds from the sod, too busy to look around, while fleeing the country. It is wide awake to what is going on, on the qui vive. It flies to some bright tree and bruits its splendors abroad.
By fall I mean literally the falling of the leaves, though some mean by it the changing or the acquisition of a brighter color. This I call the autumnal tint, the ripening to the fall.
The only white birch leaves now seen are those lingering green terminal leaves of the 23d, now at last turned yellow, for they are now burnt upward to the last spark and glimmering. Methinks the birch ripens its leaves very perfectly though gradually.
I should say that that tree which ripened its leaves well, like this, was better suited to the climate than one like the locust and most apples, —which was mostly killed by frost first annually. Perhaps this tells at last on the constitution of the tree, and that variety would be safest to cultivate which matured its leaves best.
The pitch pine fallen and falling leaves now and for some time have not been bright or yellow, but brown.
At base of Annursnack I find one or two fringed gentians yet open, but even the stems are generally killed.
I notice that the cows lately admitted to the meadows and orchards have browsed the grass, etc., closely, on that strip between the dry hillside and the wet meadow, where it is undoubtedly sweetest and freshest yet, and where it chances that this late flower the gentian grows. There, too, grows the herbage which is now the most grateful to the cattle.
Also Aster undulatus is still freshly in bloom; yarrow, etc., etc. Much Lycopodium complanatum not open yet.
Returning, I see at the very northwest end of the White Cedar Swamp a little elder, still quite leafy and green, near the path on the edge of the swamp. Its leafets are commonly nine, and the lower two or more are commonly divided. This seemed peculiarly downy beneath, even “sub-pubescent,” as Bigelow describes the Sambucus pubens to be. Compare it with the common.
Also by it is Viburnum nudum, still quite fresh and green, the slender shoots from starting plants very erect and straight.
The lower leaves of the water andromeda are now red, and the lambkill leaves are drooping (is it more than before?) and purplish from the effect of frost in low swamps like this.
Though I listen for them, I do not hear a cricket this afternoon. I think that I heard a few in the afternoon of November 1st. They then sounded peculiarly distinct, being but few here and there on a dry and warm hill, bird-like. Yet these seemed to be singing a little louder and in a little loftier strain, now that the chirp of the cricket generally was quenched.
How long we will follow an illusion! On meeting that one whom I call my friend, I find that I had imagined something that was not there. I am sure to depart sadder than I came. Nothing makes me so dejected as to have met my friends, for they make me doubt if it is possible to have any friends. I feel what a fool I am. I cannot conceive of persons more strange to me than they actually are; not thinking, not believing, not doing as I do; interrupted by me. My only distinction must be that I am the greatest bore they ever had. Not me single thought agreed; regularly balking one another. But when I get far away, my thoughts return to them. That is the way I can visit them. Perhaps it is unaccountable to me why I care for them. Thus I am taught that my friend is not an actual person. When I have withdrawn and am alone, I forget the actual person and remember only my ideal. Then I have a friend again.
I am not so ready to perceive the illusion that is in Nature. I certainly come nearer, to say the least, to an actual and joyful intercourse with her. Every day I have more or less communion with her, as I think. At least, I do not feel as if I must withdraw out of nature. I feel like a welcome guest. Yet, strictly speaking, the same must be true of nature and of man; our ideal is the only real. It is not the finite and temporal that satisfies or concerns us in either case.
I associate the idea of friendship, methinks, with the person the most foreign to me. This illusion is perpetuated, like superstition in a country long after civilization has been attained to. We are attracted toward a particular person, but no one has discovered the laws of this attraction. When I come nearest to that other actually, I am wont to be surprised at my selection. It may be enough that we have met some time, and now can never forget it. Some time or other we paid each other this wonderful compliment, looked largely, humanly, divinely on one another, and now are fated to be acquaintances forever.
In the case of nature I am not so conscious of this unsatisfied yearning.
Some oak woods begin to look bare, and even smoky, after their fashion.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 3, 1858
By fall I mean literally the falling of the leaves. See October 28, 1852 ("Four months of the green leaf make all our summer, if I reckon from June 1st to October 1st, the growing season, and methinks there are about four months when the ground is white with snow. That would leave two months for spring and two for autumn.")
At base of Annursnack I find one or two fringed gentians yet open, but even the stems are generally killed. See. November 4, 1853 (“To Hubbard's Close. I find no traces of the fringed gentian here, so that in low meadows I suspect it does not last very late”);November 30, 1856 (“Minot Pratt tells me that he watched the fringed gentian this year, and it lasted till the first week in November. ”)
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