solstice 2019
Sunday.
My difficulties with my friends are such as no frankness will settle. There is no precept in the New Testament that will assist me. My nature, it may [be], is secret. Others can confess and explain; I cannot. It is not that I am too proud, but that is not what is wanted. Friendship is the unspeakable joy and blessing that results to two or more individuals who from constitution sympathize; and natures are liable to no mistakes, but will know each other through thick and thin. Between two by nature alike and fit ted to sympathize there is no veil and there can be no obstacle. Who are the estranged? Two friends explaining. I feel sometimes as if I could say to my friends, " My friends, I am aware how I have outraged you, how I have seemingly preferred hate to love, seemingly treated others kindly and you unkindly, sedulously concealed my love, and sooner or later expressed all and more than all my hate." I can imagine how I might utter something like this in some moment never to be realized. But let me say frankly that at the same time I feel, it may be with too little regret, that I am under an awful necessity to be what I am. If the truth were known, which I do not know, I have no concern with those friends whom I misunderstand or who misunderstand me. The fates only are unkind that keep us asunder, but my friend is ever kind.
***
I am of the nature of stone. It takes the summer's sun to warm it.
My acquaintances sometimes imply that I am too cold; but each thing is warm enough of its kind.
Is the stone too cold which absorbs the heat of the summer sun and does not part with it during the night?
Crystals, though they be of ice, are not too cold to melt, but it was in melting that they were formed.
Cold! I am most sensible of warmth in winter days.
It is not the warmth of fire that you would have, but everything is warm and cold according to its nature. It is not that I am too cold, but that our warmth and coldness are not of the same nature; hence when I am absolutely warmest, I may be coldest to you.
Crystal does not complain of crystal any more than the dove of its mate.
You who complain that I am cold find Nature cold. To me she is warm. My heat is latent to you. Fire itself is cold to whatever is not of a nature to be warmed by it. A cool wind is warmer to a feverish man than the air of a furnace.
That I am cold means that I am of another nature.
***
The dogwood and its berries in the swamp by the railroad, just above the red house, pendent on long stems which hang short down as if broken, betwixt yellowish (?) and greenish (?), white, ovoid, pearly (?) or waxen (?) berries. What is the color of them?
Ah, give me to walk in the dogwood swamp, with its few coarse branches! Beautiful as Satan.
The prinos or black alder berries appear to have been consumed; only the skins left, for the most part, sticking to the twigs, so that I thought there were fewer than usual. Is it that our woods have had to entertain arctic visitors in unusual numbers, who have exhausted their stores?
Sunlight on pine-needles is the phenomenon of a winter day.
Who ever saw a partridge soar over the fields? To every creature its own nature. They are very wild; but are they scarce? or can you exterminate them for that?
As I stand by the edge of the swamp (Ministerial), a heavy-winged hawk flies home to it at sundown, just over my head, in silence.
I cross some mink or muskrat's devious path in the snow, with mincing feet and trailing body.
***
To-night, as so many nights within the year, the clouds arrange themselves in the east at sunset in long converging bars, according to the simple tactics of the sky. It is the melon-rind jig. It would serve for a permanent description of the sunset.
Such is the morning and such the evening, converging bars inclose the day at each end as within a melon rind, and the morning and evening are one day.
Long after the sun has set, and downy clouds have turned dark, and the shades of night have taken possession of the east, some rosy clouds will be seen in the upper sky over the portals of the darkening west.
How swiftly the earth appears to revolve at sunset, which at midday appears to rest on its axle!
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 21, 1851
Crystals, though they be of ice, are not too cold to melt, but it was in melting that they were formed. See December 24, 1850 (“It is never so cold but it melts somewhere. It is always melting and freezing at the same time when icicles form.”)
Sunlight on pine-needles is the phenomenon of a winter day. See December 24, 1850 (“I observe that there are many dead pine-needles sprinkled over the snow, which had not fallen before.”); October 25, 1853 ("The ground is strewn with pine-needles as sunlight.”) See also December 20, 1851 ("A clump of white pines, seen far westward over the shrub oak plain, which is now lit up by the setting sun, a soft, feathery grove, with their gray stems indistinctly seen, like human beings come to their cabin door, standing expectant on the edge of the plain, impress me with a mild humanity. The trees indeed have hearts.")
Long after the sun has set, and downy clouds have turned dark, and the shades of night have taken possession of the east, some rosy clouds will be seen in the upper sky over the portals of the darkening west. See December 23, 1851 (“Now the sun has quite disappeared, but the afterglow, as I may call it, apparently the reflection from the cloud beyond which the sun went down on the thick atmosphere of the horizon, is unusually bright and lasting. Long, broken clouds in the horizon, in the dun atmosphere, — as if the fires of day were still smoking there, — hang with red and golden edging like the saddle cloths of the steeds of the sun. ”); December 24, 1851 (“The few clouds were dark, and I had given up all to night, but when I had got home and chanced to look out the window from supper, I perceived that all the west horizon was glowing with a rosy border.”); December 25, 1851 (“I go forth to see the sun set. Who knows how it will set, even half an hour beforehand ?”)
December 21. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, December 21
December 21, 2023
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 © 2009-2022
tinyurl.com/hdt511221
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