The year is but a succession of days,
and I see that I could assign some office to each day
which, summed up, would be the history of the year.
Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852
Looking closely as
this thin and fragile frostwork
melts under my breath.
January 1, 2017
The river has risen and flooded the meadows again. The white pines, now seen against the moon, with their single foliage, look thin. January 1, 1852
I observe a shelf of ice . . . adhering to the walls and banks at various heights, the river having fallen nearly two feet since it first froze. It is often two or three feet wide and now six inches thick. January 1, 1857
This morning we have something between ice and frost on the trees, etc. The whole earth . . . is encased in ice. . . frozen drizzle, collected around the slightest cores, gives prominence to the least withered herbs and grasses. . . . Standing on the north side of a bush or tree, looking against the sky, you see only a white ghost of a tree. January 1, 1853
The drooping birches along the edges of woods are the most feathery, fairy-like ostrich plumes of the trees, and the color of their trunks increases the delusion. January 1, 1853
Seen from the north, there is no greenness in the pines, and the character of the tree is changed. The willows along the edge of the river look like sedge in meadows. The sky is overcast, and a fine snowy hail and rain is falling, . . . I return at last in a rain, and am coated with a glaze, like the fields. January 1, 1853
I notice that in the angle made by our house and shed, a southwest exposure, the snow-drift does not lie close about the pump, but is a foot off, forming a circular bowl, showing that there was an eddy about it. It shows where the wind has been, the form of the wind. January 1, 1854
This morning it is snowing again fast, and about six inches has already fallen by 10 a. m., of a moist and heavy snow. It is about six inches in all this day. January 1, 1854
All the tolerable skating is a narrow strip, often only two or three feet wide, between the frozen spew and the broken ice of the middle. January 1, 1855
Walden is covered with white snow ice six inches thick, for it froze while it was snowing . . . A very small patch of Walden, frozen since the snow, looks at a little distance exactly like open water by contrast with the snow ice, the trees being reflected in it, and indeed I am not certain but a very small part of this patch was water. January 1, 1856
The snow is like a mould, showing the form of the eddying currents of air which have been impressed on it, while the drifts mark the standstill or equilibrium between the currents of air or particular winds. January 1, 1854
By the side of the Deep Cut are the tracks of probably tree sparrows about the weeds, and of partridges. January 1, 1856
I see the tracks apparently of a white rabbit, afterward many tracks of gray rabbits, and where they had squatted under or rather by the side of an alder stem or the like, and left many balls in the pure snow. Many have run in one course. January 1, 1856
In the other direction you trace the retreating steps of the disappointed fox until he has forgotten this and scented some new game, maybe dreams of partridges or wild mice. Your own feelings are fluttered proportionately. January 1, 1856
We see the pink light on the snow within a rod of us. The shadow of the bridges on the snow is a dark indigo blue. January 1, 1855
Here are two fishermen, and one has preceded them. They have not had a bite, and know not why. It has been a clear winter day. January 1, 1856
Moon little more than half full. Not a cloud in the sky. The stars dazzlingly bright. It is a remarkably warm night for the season, the ground almost entirely bare. January 1, 1852
On the ice at Walden are very beautiful great leaf crystals in great profusion . . . They are, on a close examination, surprisingly perfect leaves, like ferns . . .They are so thin and fragile that they melt under your breath while looking closely at them. January 1, 1856
I listen to the booming of the pond as if it were a reasonable creature. January 1, 1853
The stars of higher magnitude are more bright and dazzling, and therefore appear more near and numerable, while those that appear indistinct and infinitely remote in the summer, imparting the impression of unfathomability to the sky, are scarcely seen at all. January 1, 1852
The front halls of heaven are so brilliantly lighted that they quite eclipse the more remote. January 1, 1852
Perhaps the only thing that spoke to me on this walk was the bare, lichen-covered gray rock at the Cliff, in the moonlight, naked and almost warm as in summer. January 1, 1852
Lichen-covered rock
almost warm as in summer --
naked in moonlight,
I have lately been surveying the Walden woods so extensively and minutely that I . . .am aware when I walk there that I am at a given moment passing from such a one's wood-lot to such another's. I fear this particular dry knowledge may affect my imagination and fancy, that it will not be easy to see so much wildness and native vigor there as formerly. No thicket will seem so unexplored now that I know that a stake and stones may be found in it. January 1, 1858
The stars are dazzlingly bright. The fault may be in my own barrenness, but methinks there is a certain poverty about the winter night's sky . . . The sky has fallen many degrees. January 1, 1852
March 5, 1852 ("The habit of looking at things microscopically, as the lichens on the trees and rocks, really prevents my seeing aught else in a walk")
*****
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Lichens
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Tree Sparrow
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Winter Birds
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Snow-storms might be classified.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Annual ice-in at Walden
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Winter Colors
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Winter of Skating
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January Moonlight
*****
January 1, 2023
April 13, 1856 (“[D]ark-green clear ice . . . At a little distance you would mistake it for water; further off still . . .it is blue as in summer.“)
May 6, 1858 ("One man shall derive from the fisherman’s story more than the fisher has got who tells it")
June 26, 1853 ("Fishing is often the young man's introduction to the forest and wild. As a hunter and fisher he goes thither until at last the naturalist or poet distinguishes that which attracted him first, and he leaves the gun and rod behind.”)August 21, 1851 ("You must walk sometimes perfectly free, not prying nor inquisitive, not bent upon seeing things")
October 26, 1853 ("You only need to make a faithful record of an average summer day's experience and summer mood, and read it in the winter, and it will carry you back to more than that summer day alone could show.")
October 26, 1853 ("You only need to make a faithful record of an average summer day's experience and summer mood, and read it in the winter, and it will carry you back to more than that summer day alone could show.")
November 18 1851 ("A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going.")
November 25, 1850 ("I feel a little alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit . . . the thought of some work, some surveying, will run in my head, and I am not where my body is, I am out of my senses. In my walks I would return to my senses like a bird or a beast.")
December 6, 1858 ("Yesterday it froze as it fell on my umbrella, converting the cotton cloth into a thick stiff glazed sort of oilcloth, so that it was impossible to shut it. ")
December 18, 1852 ("I slid over it with a little misgiving, mistaking the ice before me for water. “)December 22, 1859 ("The fisherman stands erect and still on the ice, awaiting our approach, as usual forward to say that he has had no luck. He has been here since early morning, and for some reason or other the fishes won't bite. You won't catch him here again in a hurry. They all tell the same story. The amount of it is he has had "fisherman's luck," and if you walk that way you may find him at his old post to-morrow . . . .[T]he pond floor is not a bad place to spend a winter day")
December 23, 1851 ("I find that the evening star is shining brightly, and, beneath all, the west horizon is glowing red, — that dun atmosphere instead of clouds reflecting the sun, — and I detect, just above the horizon, the narrowest imaginable white sickle of the new moon")
December 23, 1851 ("I find that the evening star is shining brightly, and, beneath all, the west horizon is glowing red, — that dun atmosphere instead of clouds reflecting the sun, — and I detect, just above the horizon, the narrowest imaginable white sickle of the new moon")
December 28, 1856 ("There they sit, ever and anon scanning their reels to see if any have fallen, and, if not catching many fish, still getting what they went for, though they may not be aware of it, i. e. a wilder experience than the town affords")
December 30, 1855 ("A dry, light, powdery snow. . .The pump has a regular conical Persian( cap, and every post about the house a. similar one. It is quite light, but has not drifted. ")
December 20, 1854 ("In some places, where the sun falls on it, the snow has a pinkish tinge")
December 21, 1854 ("The last rays of the sun falling on the Baker Farm reflect a clear pink color. ")
Venus -- very bright
now in the early twilight.
right after sunset
December 27, 1851
The evening star seen
shining brightly before the
twilight has begun.
December 31, 1854 ("The shadows on the snow are indigo-blue")
December 31, 1851 (“I have not enough valued and attended to the pure clarity and brilliancy of the winter skies. . . . The day sky in winter corresponds for clarity to the night sky, in which the stars shine and twinkle so brightly in this latitude.”)
December 31, 1852 (“It is a sort of frozen rain this afternoon, which does not wet one, but makes the still bare ground slippery with a coating of ice, and stiffens your umbrella so that it cannot be shut.")
January 10, 1859 ("This is one of the phenomena of the winter sunset, this distinct pink light reflected from the brows of snow-clad hills on one side of you as you are facing the sun.")
January 15, 1856 ("My shadow is a most celestial blue. This only requires a clear bright day and snow-clad earth, not great cold. ")
January 19, 1859 ("Methinks this pink on snow (as well as blue shadows) requires a clear, cold evening.")
January 22, 1852 ("Perhaps this is the main value of a habit of writing, of keeping a journal, - that so we remember our best hours and stimulate ourselves.")
January 23, 1852 ("And the new moon and the evening star, close together, preside over the twilight scene”)
January 24, 1852 (“And now the crescent of the moon is seen, and her attendant star is farther off than last night.”)
January 29, 1854 ("Tonight I feel it stinging cold . . .; it bites my ears and face, but the stars shine all the brighter.”)January 31, 1859 ("The pink light reflected from the low, flat snowy surfaces amid the ice on the meadows, just before sunset, is a constant phenomenon these clear winter days. ")
February 3, 1852 ("The moon is nearly full tonight")
February 3, 1852 ("The heavens appear less thickly starred than in summer, - rather a few bright stars, brought nearer by this splendid twinkling in the cold sky.")
February 9, 1855 ("A very fine and dry snow, about a foot deep on a level. It stands on the top of our pump about ten inches deep, almost a perfect hemisphere, or half of an ellipse.”)
February 10, 1855 (“My shadow is blue. It is especially blue when there is a bright sunlight on pure white snow.”)
February 12, 1854 (“The pond does not thunder every night, and I do not know its law exactly. I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering”); Walden (“Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should.”)
February 12, 1860("Surrounded by our thoughts or imaginary objects, living in our ideas, not one in a million ever sees the objects which are actually around him.")
February 9, 1855 ("A very fine and dry snow, about a foot deep on a level. It stands on the top of our pump about ten inches deep, almost a perfect hemisphere, or half of an ellipse.”)
February 10, 1855 (“My shadow is blue. It is especially blue when there is a bright sunlight on pure white snow.”)
February 12, 1854 (“The pond does not thunder every night, and I do not know its law exactly. I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering”); Walden (“Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should.”)
February 12, 1860("Surrounded by our thoughts or imaginary objects, living in our ideas, not one in a million ever sees the objects which are actually around him.")
January 1, 2017
If you make the least correct
observation of nature this year,
you will have occasion to repeat it
with illustrations the next,
and the season and life itself is prolonged.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 1
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 © 2009-2023
tinyurl.com/hdt01jan
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