Fair, but overcast. Thermometer about 32°.
Pretty good skating on the Great Meadows, slightly raised and smoothed by the thaw and also the rain of (I think) the 23d-24th.
Great revolutions of this sort take place before you are aware of it.
Though you walk every day, you do not foresee the kind of walking you will have the next day.
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| January 26, 2019 |
Skating, crusted snow, slosh, etc., are wont to take you by surprise.
P. M. — To Eleazer Davis's Hill, and made a fire on the ice, merely to see the flame and smell the smoke. We soon had a slender flame flashing upward some four feet, — so many parallel undulating tongues. The air above and about it was all in commotion, being heated so that we could not see the landscape distinctly or steadily through it. If only to see the pearl ashes and hear the brands sigh.
H.D. Thoreau, Journal, January 26, 1860
Great revolutions of this sort take place before you are aware of it. See June 22, 1859 ("One who is not almost daily on the river will not perceive the revolution constantly going on.")
Though you walk every day, you do not foresee the kind of walking you will have the next day. See January 10, 1854 ("What you can recall of a walk on the second day will differ from what you remember on the first day"); January 10, 1851 ("Who can foretell the sunset . . .the art of taking walks daily"); December 29, 1851 ("What a fine and measureless joy the gods grant us thus, letting us know nothing about the day that is to dawn! This day, yesterday, was as incredible as any other miracle."); January 7, 1851 ("There is no account of the blue sky in history. I must live above all in the present.");
Live in the present.
There is no account of the
blue sky in history.
January 7, 1851
The art of walking
is to saunter daily with
no specific ends.
What measureless joy
to know nothing about the
day that is to dawn!
December 29, 1851
What you recall of
a walk the second day will
differ from the first.
January 10, 1854
Though you walk each day,
you do not foresee the walk
you have the next day.
January 26, 1860
Made a fire on the ice, merely to see the flame and smell the smoke. See February 7, 1854 ("Made a fire on the snow-covered ice half a mile below Ball's Hill -- a large warm fire, whose flame went up straight, there being no wind, and without smoke,"); February 20, 1854 ("We skate home in the dusk, with an odor of smoke in our clothes.")
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 © 2009-2024
tinyurl.com/hdt18600126
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