Saturday.
Our most glorious experiences are a kind of regret. Our regret is so sublime that we may mistake it for triumph. It is the painful, plaintively sad surprise of our Genius remembering our past lives and contemplating what is possible. . . .
It is a regret so divine and inspiring, so genuine, based on so true and distinct a contrast, that it surpasses our proudest boasts and the fairest expectations.
My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning. I frequently awake with an atmosphere about me as if my unremembered dreams had been divine, as if my spirit had journeyed to its native place, and, in the act of reentering its native body, had diffused an elysian fragrance around.
The Genius says: "Ah! That is what you were! That is what you may yet be!”
It is glorious for us to be able to regret even such an existence. A sane and growing man revolutionizes every day.
[It is remarkable that men commonly never refer to, never hint at, any crowning experiences when the common laws of their being were unsettled and the divine and eternal laws prevailed in them. Their lives are not revolutionary; they never recognize any other than the local and temporal authorities.]
H. D Thoreau, Journal, May 24, 1851
My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning. See October 26, 1851 ("The instant that I awoke, methought I was a musical instrument . . . the organ and channel of melody, as a flute is of the music that is breathed through it"); March 17, 1852 (“ I am conscious of having, in my sleep, transcended the limits of the individual . . .There is a moment in the dawn,. . .when we see things more truly than at any other time.”); October 29, 1857 ("Such early morning thoughts as I speak of . . . are a sort of permanent dream in my mind . . . we cannot tell what we have dreamed from what we have actually experienced. ") April 1, 1860 (“ I am surprised that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, - not fore-thought, - so that I occasionally awake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I had never consciously considered before, and as surprising and novel and agreeable to me as anything can be. As if we only thought by sympathy with the universal mind, which thought while we were asleep”)
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 © 2009-2021
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