Tuesday, September 21, 2021

The Light of the Moon.



Sunday.

It is remarkably dry weather.

The neighbors' wells are failing.

The watering-places for cattle in pastures, though they have been freshly scooped out, are dry.

People have to go far for water to drink, and then drink it warm.

The river is so low that rocks which are rarely seen show their black heads in mid-channel.

I saw one which a year or two ago upset a boat and drowned a girl.

You see the nests of the bream on the dry shore.

I perceive that many of the leaves of shrub oaks and other bushes have been killed by the severe frosts of last week, before they have got ripe and acquired the tints of autumn, and they now look as [if] a fire had run through them, dry and crispy and brown.

So far from the frost painting them, it has withered them.

I notice new cabins of the muskrats in solitary swamps.

The chestnut trees have suffered severely from the drought; already their leaves look withered.


Moonlight is peculiarly favorable to reflection.

It is a cold and dewy light in which the vapors of the day are condensed, and though the air is obscured by darkness, it is more clear.

Lunacy must be a cold excitement, not such insanity as a torrid sun on the brain would produce.

In Rees's Cyclopedia it is said, “The light of the moon, condensed by the best mirrors, produces no sensible heat upon the thermometer.”


I see some cows on the new Wheeler's Meadow, which a man is trying to drive to certain green parts of the meadow next to the river to feed, the hill being dried up, but they seem disinclined and not to like the coarse grass there, though it is green. And now one cow is steering for the edge of the hill, where is some greenness. 

I suppose that herds are attracted by a distant greenness, though it may be a mile or more off.  I doubt if a man can drive his cows to that part of their pasture where is the best feed for them, so soon as they will find it for themselves. 

The man tries in vain to drive them to the best part of the meadow. As soon as he is gone, they seek their own parts.


The light of the moon, sufficient though it is for the pensive walker, and not disproportionate to the inner light we have, is very inferior in quantity and intensity to that of the sun.

The Cyclopedia says that Dr. Hooke has calculated that “it would require 104,368 full moons to give a light and heat equal to that of the sun at noon, and Dr. Smith says, “The light of the full moon is but equal to a 90,900th part of the common light of the day, when the sun is hidden by a cloud."

But the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends us, but also by her influence on the earth. No thinker can afford to overlook the influence of the moon any more than the astronomer can. “The moon gravitates towards the earth, and the earth reciprocally towards the moon.” This statement of the astronomer would be bald and meaningless, if it were not in fact a symbolical expression of the value of all lunar influence on man.

Even the astronomer admits that “the notion of the moon's influence on terrestrial things was confirmed by her manifest effect upon the ocean,” but is not the poet who walks by night conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence, in which the ocean within him overflows its shores and bathes the dry land? '

Has he not his spring-tides and his neap-tides, the former sometimes combining with the winds of heaven to produce those memorable high tides of the calendar which leave their marks for ages, when all Broad Street is submerged, and incalculable damage is done to the ordinary shipping of the mind?

Burritt in his “Geography of the Heavens" says, “The quantity of light which we derive from the Moon when full, is at least three hundred thousand times less than that of the Sun." This is M. Bouguer's inference as stated by Laplace. Professor Leslie makes it one hundred and fifty thousand times less, older astronomers less still.

Rees says: “It is remarkable, that the moon during the week in which she is full in harvest, rises sooner after sun-setting than she does in any other full moon week in the year. By doing so she affords an immediate supply of light after sunset, which is very beneficial to the farmers for reaping and gathering in the fruits of the earth; and therefore they distinguish this full moon from all the others in the year, by calling it the harvest moon.” 
Howitt places the Harvest Moon in August.


The retirement in which Green has lived for nearly eighty years in Carlisle is a retirement very different from and much greater than that in which the pioneer dwells at the West; for the latter dwells within sound of the surf of those billows of migration which are breaking on the shores around him, or near him, of the West, but those billows have long since swept over the spot which Green inhabits, and left him in the calm sea.

There is somewhat exceedingly pathetic to think of in such a life as he must have lived, with no more to redeem it, — such a life as an average Carlisle man may be supposed to live drawn out to eighty years.

And he has died, perchance, and there is nothing but the mark of his cider-mill left.

Here was the cider-mill, and there the orchard, and there the hog-pasture; and so men lived, and ate, and drank, and passed away, — like vermin.

Their long life was mere duration.

As respectable is the life of the woodchucks, which perpetuate their race in the orchard still.

That is the life of these select men 
(!) spun out.

They will be forgotten in a few years, even by such as themselves, like vermin.

They will be known only like Kibbe, who is said to have been a large man who weighed two hundred and fifty, who had five or six heavy daughters who rode to Concord meeting house on horseback, taking turns,-they were so heavy that only one could ride at once.

What, then, would redeem such a life? We only know that they ate, and drank, and built barns, and died and were buried, and still, perchance, their tombstones cumber the ground.

But if I could know that there was ever entertained over their cellar-hole some divine thought, which came as a messenger of the gods, that he who resided here acted once in his life from a noble impulse, rising superior to his grovelling and penurious life, if only a single verse of poetry or of poetic prose had ever been written or spoken or conceived here beyond a doubt, I should not think it in vain that man had lived here.

It would to some extent be true then that God had lived here.

That all his life he lived only as a farmer as the most valuable stock only on a farm — and in no moments as a man!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 21, 1851

I notice new cabins of the muskrats in solitary swamps. See October 16, 1859 ("I see the new musquash-houses erected, conspicuous on the now nearly leafless shores. . . .an important and suggestive sight, . . . For thirty years I have annually observed, about this time or earlier, the freshly erected winter lodges of the musquash along the riverside, . . .So surely as the sun appears to be in Libra or Scorpio, I see the conical winter lodges of the musquash rising above the withered pontederia and flags.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Musquash

And now one cow is steering for the edge of the hill, where is some greenness. See September 27, 1851 ("The pastures are so dry that the cows have been turned on to the meadow, but they gradually desert it, all feeding one way."); October 5, 1856 ("I think I would rather watch the motions of these cows in their pasture for a day, which I now see all headed one way and slowly advancing, — watch them and project their course carefully on a chart, and report all their behavior faithfully.") See also September 6, 1859 ("Hear the sounds nowadays — the lowing, tramp, and calls of the drivers — of cows coming down from up-country."); September 20, 1852 ("Droves of cattle have for some time been coming down from up-country")

Moonlight is peculiarly favorable to reflection. See August 5, 1851 ("With the coolness and the mild silvery light . . . Reflection is more possible. I am sobered by the moonlight. I bethink myself.")

Is not the poet who walks by night conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence, in which the ocean within him overflows. See September 3, 1852 ("I will endeavor to separate the tide in my thoughts, or what is due to the influence of the moon, from the current distractions and fluctuations. The winds which the sun has aroused go down at evening, and the lunar influence may then perchance be detected. ")


A Book of the Seasons
, by Henry Thoreau, 
The Light of the Moon.
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

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