The openness of the leafless woods by moonlight.

November 12.

November 12, 2021

Write often, write upon a thousand themes, rather than long at a time, not trying to turn too many feeble somersets in the air, and so come down upon your head at last. Antæus-like, be not long absent from the ground.

Those sentences are good and well discharged which are like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our life, — a distinct fruit and kernel itself, springing from terra firma. Let there be as many distinct plants as the soil and the light can sustain.

Take as many bounds in a day as possible. Sentences uttered with your back to the wall. Those are the admirable bounds when the performer has lately touched the spring board.

A good bound into the air from the air (sic) is a good and wholesome experience, but what shall we say to a man's leaping off precipices in the attempt to fly? He comes down like lead.

In the meanwhile, you have got your feet planted upon the rock, with the rock also at your back, and, as in the case of King James and Roderick Dhu, can say, —

 “Come one, come all! this rock shall fly 

   From its firm base as soon as I.” 

Such, uttered or not, is the strength of your sentence.

Sentences in which there is no strain. A fluttering and inconstant and quasi inspiration, and ever memorable Icarian fall, in which your helpless wings are expanded merely by your swift descent into the pelagos beneath.

C. is one who will not stoop to rise (to change the subject). He wants something for which he will not pay the going price. He will only learn slowly by failure, not a noble, but disgraceful, failure. This is not a noble method of learning, to be educated by inevitable suffering, like De Quincey, for instance.

Better dive like a muskrat into the mud, and pile up a few weeds to sit on during the floods, a foundation of your own laying, a house of your own building, however cold and cheerless.

Methinks the hawk that soars so loftily and circles so steadily and apparently without effort has earned this power by faithfully creeping on the ground as a reptile in a former state of existence. You must creep before you can run; you must run before you can fly. Better one effective bound upward with elastic limbs from the valley than a jumping from the mountain - tops in the attempt to fly.

The observatories are not built high but deep; the foundation is equal to the superstructure. It is more important to a distinct vision that it be steady than that it be from an elevated point of view.

Walking through Ebby Hubbard's wood this afternoon, with Minott, who was actually taking a walk for amusement and exercise, he said, on seeing some white pines blown down, that you might know that ground had been cultivated, by the trees being torn up so, for otherwise they would have rooted themselves more strongly.

Saw some very handsome canoe birches there, the largest I know, a foot in diameter and forty or fifty feet high. The large ones have a reddish cast, perhaps from some small lichen. Their fringes and curls give them an agreeable appearance.

Observed a peculiarity in some white oaks. Though they had a firm and close bark near the ground, the bark was very coarse and scaly, in loose flakes, above. Much coarser than the swamp white oak.

Minott has a story for every woodland path. He has hunted in them all. Where we walked last, he had once caught a partridge by the wing!


7 P. M. To Conantum.

A still, cold night.

The light of the rising moon in the east. Moonrise is a faint sunrise. And what shall we name the faint aurora that precedes the moonrise?

The ground is frozen and echoes to my tread. There are absolutely no crickets to be heard now. They are heard, then, till the ground freezes.

To-day I heard for the first time this season the crackling, vibrating sound which resounds from thin ice when a stone is cast upon it. So far have we got toward winter:

• It is doubtful if they who have not pulled their turnips will have a chance to get them.
• It is not of much use to drive the cows to pasture.
• I can fancy that I hear the booming of ice in the ponds.
• I hear no sound of any bird now at night, but sometimes some creature stirring, a rabbit, or skunk, or fox, betrayed now by the dry leaves which lie so thick and light.

The openness of the leafless woods is particularly apparent now by moonlight; they are nearly as bright as the open field.

It is worth the while always to go to the waterside when there is but little light in the heavens and see the heavens and the stars reflected. There is double the light that there is elsewhere, and the reflection has the force of a great silent companion.

There is no fog now o’nights.

I thought to-night that I saw glow-worms in the grass, on the side of the hill; was almost certain of it, and tried to lay my hand on them, but found it was the moonlight reflected from (apparently) the fine frost crystals on the withered grass, and they were so fine that they went and came like glow-worms. It had precisely the effect of twinkling glow-worms. They gleamed just long enough for glow-worms.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 12, 1851

The ground is frozen and echoes to my tread. See November 12, 1858 ("It is much the coldest day yet, and the ground is a little frozen and resounds under my tread.")

There are absolutely no crickets to be heard now. See note to November 12, 1853 ("I hear one cricket singing still, faintly deep in the bank, now after one whitening of snow. His theme is life immortal. The last cricket, full of cheer and faith, piping to himself, as the last man might.") See also November 9, 1851 (" I hear a cricket singing the requiem of the year . . . Soon all will be frozen up, and I shall hear no cricket chirp in the land.")

I heard for the first time this season the crackling, vibrating sound which resounds from thin ice when a stone is cast upon it. See November 22, 1860 ("Though you are finger-cold toward night, and you cast a stone on to your first ice, and see the unmelted crystals under every bank, it is glorious November weather, and only November fruits are out.")

Canoe birches there, the largest I know, a foot in diameter and forty or fifty feet high.  See May 18, 1851 ("The log of a canoe birch on Fair Haven, cut down the last winter, more than a foot in diameter at the stump; one foot in diameter at ten feet from the ground. . . . I counted about fifty rings"); November 2, 1851 ("Saw a canoe birch beyond Nawshawtuct, growing out of the middle of a white pine stump, which still showed the mark of the axe, sixteen inches in diameter at its bottom, or two feet from the ground, or where it had first taken root on the stump. "); July 24, 1857 ("[On the shore of Moosehead Lake] I measured a canoe birch, five and a half feet in circumference at two and a half from the ground.")

The light of the rising moon in the east. See November 7, 1851 ("At Walden are three reflections of the bright full (or nearly) moon, one moon and two sheens further off")

The openness of the leafless woods is particularly apparent now by moonlight. See November 12, 1853 ("Moon nearly full. Trees stand bare against the sky again. This the first month in which they do ")