The perfect correspondence of a life and the year.

September 8

September 8, 2019

While the grass is fresh, the earth is in its vigor. The greenness of the grass is the best symptom or evidence of the earth's youth or health.

Perhaps it will be found that when the grass ceases to be fresh and green, or after June, the birds have ceased to sing, and that the fireflies, too, no longer in myriads sparkle in the meadows.

Perhaps a history of the year would be a history of the grass, or of a leaf, regarding the grass blades as leaves, for it is equally true that the leaves soon lose their freshness and soundness, and become the prey of insects and of drought.

Plants commonly soon cease to grow for the year, unless they may have a fall growth, which is a kind of second spring.

In the feelings of the man, too, the year is already past, and he looks forward to the coming winter.  His occasional rejuvenescence and faith in the current time is like the aftermath, a scanty crop.

The enterprise which he has not already undertaken cannot be undertaken this year.  The period of youth is past.

The year may be in its summer, in its manhood, but it is no longer in the flower of its age.  It is a season of withering, of dust and heat, a season of small fruits and trivial experiences.  Summer thus answers to manhood.

But there is an aftermath in early autumn, and some spring flowers bloom again, followed by an Indian summer of finer atmosphere and of a pensive beauty.

May my life be not destitute of its Indian summer, a season of fine and clear, mild weather in which I may prolong my hunting before the winter comes, when I may once more lie on the ground with faith, as in spring, and even with more serene confidence.

And then I will [wrap the] drapery of summer about me and lie down to pleasant dreams. As one year passes into another through the medium of winter, so does this our life pass into another through the medium of death.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 8, 1851

The year may be in its summer, in its manhood, but it is no longer in the flower of its age. See August 23, 1853 ("I am again struck by the perfect correspondence of a day — say an August day — and the year. I think that a perfect parallel may be drawn between the seasons of the day and of the year.”); Walden, "Spring" ("The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer."); July 3, 1840 (We will have a dawn, and noon, and serene sunset in ourselves.); March 18, 1853 ("This the foreglow of the year, when the walker goes home at eve to dream of summer”); June 15, 1852 ("The year is in its manhood now."); July 27, 1853 ("This the afternoon of the year. How apt we are to be reminded of lateness, even before the year is half spent!"); August 18, 1853 ("What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now? — now is the season of fruits; but where is our fruit? The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life."); August 18, 1853 ("The night of the year is approaching"); November 14, 1853. ("October answers to that period in the life of man when . . . all his experience ripens into wisdom, but every root, branch, leaf of him glows with maturity. What he has been and done in his spring and summer appears. He bears his fruit."); November 17, 1853 ("So some human beings in the November of their days exhibit some fresh radical greenness, which, though the frosts may soon nip it, indicates and confirms their essential vitality. When their summer leaves have faded and fallen, they put forth fresh radical leaves which sustain the life in their root still, against a new spring"); January 30, 1854 ("The winter was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of his brain, to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. Then is the great harvest of the year, the harvest of thought. Now we burn with a purer flame like the stars… ") See also January 8 1854 ("We love not so well the landscape represented as in broad noon, but in a morning or evening twilight, those seasons when the imagination is most active, the more hopeful or pensive seasons of the day.")