P. M. — To Boulder Field.
Goodwin, laying wall at Miss Ripley’s, observed to me going by, “Well, it seems that __ thought that he had lived long enough.” He committed suicide within a week, at his sister’s house in Sudbury. A boy slept in the chamber with him, and, hearing a noise, got and found __ on the floor with both his jugular veins cut, but his windpipe whole. He said to the boy, “Take the razor and cut deeper,” but the boy ran, and __ died, and Garfield said it was about time, for __, in revenge for being sent to the house of correction, had set fire to a pile of wood of his, that long pile by the road side beyond William Wheeler’s, that I stood under in a rain once. __ probably burned Witherell’s house too, and perhaps Boynton’s stable.
The red osier at Mrs. Simmons’s is quite bare; how long? Her hawthorn is still quite leafy and pretty, yellow-brown, dotted. A thorn at Hall’s fence is dark scarlet and pretty. There are many leaves on the buckthorn still.
Common thorn bushes, long since bare, when many grow together in clumps, make another such a smoke, though smaller, as the maples, — the same color. I can often distinguish the bush by this.
Alders are a very dark gray, sort of iron gray, and, if near enough, you see dark lines (the stems) and specks (the fruit) like cinders, like a very dense, dark, and unconsumed uliginous smoke, in which many cinders rise.
Those trees and bushes which grow in dense masses and have many fine twigs, being bare, make an agreeable misty impression where there are a myriad retreating points to receive the eye, not a hard, abrupt wall; just as, in the sky, the visual ray is cushioned on clouds, unless it is launched into the illimitable ether. The eye is less worn and wearied, not to say wounded, by looking at these mazes where the seer is not often conscious of seeing anything.
It is well that the eye is so rarely caught and detained by any object in one whole hemisphere of its range, i. e. the sky. It enjoys everlasting holiday on this side. Only the formless clouds and the objectless ether are presented to it. For they are nervous who see many faces in the clouds. Corresponding to the clouds in the sky are those mazes now on the earth.
Nature disposes of her naked stems so softly as not to put our eyes out. She makes them a smoke, or stationary cloud, on this side or that, of whose objective existence we rarely take cognizance. She does not expect us to notice them. She calls our attention to the maple swamp more especially in October.
There is also the coarse maze produced by an oak wood (when nearly all the leaves are fallen), in which, however, the large boughs reflecting the light have considerable distinctness, and that of the forest in general.
I thought, from a small specimen, that the brushy yellow birch tops were of the same hue with the alders. [Vide Nov. 11th.]
Nature has many scenes to exhibit, and constantly draws a curtain over this part or that. She is constantly repainting the landscape and all surfaces, dressing up some scene for our entertainment. Lately we had a leafy wilderness, now bare twigs begin to prevail, and soon she will surprise us with a mantle of snow.[I read that snow fell two or three inches deep in Bangor yesterday morning.] Some green she thinks so good for our eyes, like blue, that she never banishes it entirely, but has created evergreens.
It is remarkable how little any but a lichenist will observe on the bark of trees. The mass of men have but the vaguest and most indefinite notion of mosses, as a sort of shreds and fringes, and the world in which the lichenist dwells is much further from theirs than one side of this earth from the other. They see bark as if they saw it not. These objects which, though constantly visible, are rarely looked at are a sort of eye-brush.
Each phase of nature, while not invisible, is yet not too distinct and obtrusive. It is there to be found when we look for it, but not demanding our attention.
It is like a silent but sympathizing companion in whose company we retain most of the advantages of solitude, with whom we can walk and talk, or be silent, naturally, without the necessity of talking in a strain foreign to the place. I know of but one or two persons with whom I can afford to walk.
With most the walk degenerates into a mere vigorous use of your legs, ludicrously purposeless, while you are discussing some mighty argument, each one having his say, spoiling each other’s day, worrying one another with conversation, hustling one another with our conversation. I know of no use in the walking part in this case, except that we may seem to be getting on together toward some goal; but of course we keep our original distance all the way. Jumping every wall and ditch with vigor in the vain hope of shaking your companion off. Trying to kill two birds with one stone, though they sit at opposite points of [the] compass, to see nature and do the honors to one who does not.
Animals generally see things in the vacant way I have described. They rarely see anything but their food, or some real or imaginary foe. I never saw but one cow looking into the sky.
Lichens as they affect the scenery, as picturesque objects described by Gilpin or others, are one thing; as they concern the lichenist, quite another. These are the various grays and browns which give November its character.
There are also some red mazes, like the twigs of the white maple and our Cornus sericea, etc. (the red osier, too, further north), and some distinct yellow ones, as willow twigs, which are most interesting in spring. The silvery abeles are steadily , falling nowadays. The chalky white under side of these leaves is remarkable. None of our leaves is so white.
I think I admire again about this time the still bright red or crimson fruit of the sumach, now when not only its own but most other leaves have fallen and there are few bright tints, it is now so distinct on its twigs. Your attention is not distracted by its brilliant leaves now.
I go across N. Barrett’s land and over the road beyond his house. The aspect of the Great Meadows is now nearly uniform, the new and exposed grass being nearly as brown and sere as that which was not cut. Thus Nature has been blending and harmonizing the colors here where man had interfered.
I wandered over bare fields where the cattle, lately turned out, roamed restless and unsatisfied with the feed; I dived into a rustling young oak wood where not a green leaf was to be seen; I climbed to the geological axis of elevation and clambered over curly-pated rocks whose strata are on their edges, amid the rising woods; and again I thought, They are all gone surely, and left me alone. Not even a man Friday remains. What nutriment can I extract from these bare twigs? Starvation stares me in the face.
“Nay, nay!” said a nuthatch, making its way, head downward, about a bare hickory close by.
(“Hear! hear!” screamed the jay from a neighboring copse, where I had heard a tittering for some time.)
“The nearer the bone the sweeter the meat. Only the superfluous has been swept away. Now we behold the naked truth. If at any time the weather is too bleak and cold for you, keep the sunny side of the trunk, for there is a wholesome and inspiring warmth such as the summer never afforded. There are the winter mornings, with the sun on the oak wood tops. While buds sleep, thoughts wake.”
“Winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel if you know where to look for it.”
And then the speaker shifted to another tree, further off, and reiterated his assertions, and his mate at a distance confirmed them; and I heard a suppressed chuckle from a red squirrel that heard the last remark, but had kept silent and invisible all the while. Is that you? “Yes-sir-ee,” said he.
Then, running down a slanting bough, he called out rather impudently, “Look here! just get a snug-fitting fur coat and a pair of fur gloves like mine, and you may laugh at a northeast storm,” and then he wound up with a slang phrase, in his own lingo, accompanied by a flourish of his tail, just as a newsboy twirls his fingers with his thumb on his nose and inquires, “Does your mother know you are out?”
The wild pear tree on Ponkawtasset has some yellow leaves still.
The now more noticeable green radical leaves of the buttercup in the russet pastures remind me of the early spring to come, of which they will offer the first evidence.
Now, too, I can see (for the same reason) where grows our only patch of broom, a quarter of a. mile off, it such a distinct, somewhat yellowish, green.
Already the creeping juniper is a ripe glaucous green, with a distinct ruddy tinge to the upper surface, —— the whole bush a ripe tint like a fruit.
I stand in Ebby Hubbard’s yellow birch swamp, ad miring some gnarled and shaggy picturesque old birches there, which send out large knee-like limbs near the ground, while the brook, raised by the late rain, winds fuller than usual through the rocky swamp. I thought with regret how soon these trees, like the black birches that grew on the hill near by, would be all cut off, and there would be almost nothing of the old Concord left, and we should be reduced to read old deeds in order to be reminded of such things, —deeds, at least, in which some old and revered bound trees are mentioned. These will be the only proof at last that they ever existed.
Pray, farmers, keep some old woods to match the old deeds. Keep them for history’s sake, as specimens of what the township was. Let us not be reduced to a mere paper evidence, to deeds kept in a chest or secretary, when not so much as the bark of the paper birch will be left for evidence, about its decayed stump.
The sides of the old Carlisle road where it is low and moist are (and have for a long time been), for many rods together and a rod in width, brown or cinnamon-colored with the withered dicksonia fern, not like the brown of trees (their withered leaves), but a peculiar cinnamon-brown. The bare huckleberry bushes and the sweet ferns are draped with them as a kind of mourning.
Solidago puberula still out, for you see a few bright yellow solidago flowers long after they are generally turned to a dirty-white fuzzy top.
Pratt says he saw a few florets on a Polygala sanguinea within a week. He shows me samphire, plucked three weeks ago in Brighton, when it was a very brilliant crimson still.
Looking from Pratt’s window at sunset, I saw that purple or rosy light reflected from some old chestnut rails on the hilltop before his house. Methinks it is pinkish, even like the old cow-droppings in the pastures. So universally does Nature blush at last. The very herbage which has gone through the stomachs and intestines of the cow acquires at last a faint pinkish tinge.
The button-bush balls are now blackish (really dark brown) and withered, looking much blacker against the light than a month ago.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 8, 1858
Each phase of nature is there to be found when we look for it, but not demanding our attention. See March 23, 1853 ("Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye"); November 6, 1853 (“It is remarkable how little we attend to what is passing before us constantly, unless our genius directs our attention that way.”); July 2 1857 (“Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i. e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.); November 4, 1858 ("All this you will see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it, — if you look for it. "); November 3, 1861 ("All this is perfectly distinct to an observant eye, and yet could easily pass unnoticed by most.",)
Lichens as they affect the scenery, as picturesque objects described by Gilpin or others, are one thing; as they concern the lichenist, quite another. See January 26, 1852 ("The beauty of lichens, with their scalloped leaves, the small attractive fields, the crinkled edge! I could study a single piece of bark for hour.”); March 5, 1852 ("Such is the mood of my mind, and I call it studying lichens. 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 5, 1853 ("It is a lichen day. . . . All the world seems a great lichen and to grow like one to-day”).; January 26, 1858 ("The white lichens, partly encircling aspens and maples, look as if a painter had touched their trunks with his brush as he passed.")
"While buds sleep, thoughts wake,” said the nuthatch, “Winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel if you know where to look for it.” See January 30, 1854 ("The winter was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of man's brain, to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. This harvest of thought the great harvest of the year. The human brain is the kernel which the winter itself matures. Now we burn with a purer flame like the stars.")
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