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
The unclouded mind,
serene, pure, ineffable –
like the western sky.
January 17, 2020
January 17, 2021
Another mild day . . . Sky overcast, but a crescent of clearer in the northwest. January 17, 1860
In the spring-hole ditches of the Close I see many little water-bugs (Gyrinus) gyrating, and some under water. It must be a common phenomenon there in mild weather in the winter. January 17, 1860
Saw a red squirrel on the wall, it being thawing weather. January 17, 1854
I look again at that place of squirrels (of the 13th). As I approach, I have a glimpse of one or two red squirrels gliding off silently along the branches of the pines. January 17, 1860
They seem to select for their own abode a hillside where there are half a dozen rather large and thick white pines near enough together for their aerial travelling, and then they burrow numerous holes and depend on finding (apparently) the pine cones which they cast down in the summer, before they have opened. January 17, 1860
I walk about Ripple Lake and Goose Pond. I see the old tracks of some foxes and rabbits about the edge of these ponds (over the ice) within a few feet of the shore. January 17, 1860
I think that I have noticed that animals thus commonly go round by the shore of a pond, whether for fear of the ice, or for the shelter of the shore, i. e. not to be seen, or because their food and game is found there. January 17, 1860
I see on the snow in Hubbard's Close one of those rather large flattish black bugs some five eighths of an inch long, with feelers and a sort of shield at the forward part with an orange mark on each side of it. January 17, 1860
I see a large downy owl's feather adhering to a sweet-fern twig, looking like the down of a plant blowing in the wind . . . They would be very ornamental to a bonnet, so soft and fine with their reflections that the eye hardly rests on the down. January 17, 1858
In proportion as I have celestial thoughts, is the necessity for me to be out and behold the western sky sunset these winter days. That is the symbol of the unclouded mind that knows neither winter nor summer. January 17, 1852
As the skies appear to a man, so is his mind. Some see only clouds there; some, prodigies and por tent; some rarely look up at all; their heads, like the brutes, are directed toward earth. Some behold their serenity, purity, beauty ineffable. January 17, 1852
Those western vistas through clouds to the sky show the clearest heavens, clearer and more elysian than if the whole sky is comparatively free from clouds. January 17, 1852
The endless variety in the forms and texture of the clouds! — some fine, some coarse grained. January 17, 1852
When I reached the open railroad causeway returning, there was a splendid sunset. The northwest sky at first was what you may call a lattice sky, the fair weather establishing itself first on that side in the form of a long and narrow crescent, in which the clouds, which were uninterrupted overhead, were broken into long bars parallel to the horizon. January 17, 1860
I saw to night overhead, stretching two thirds across the sky, what looked like the backbone, with portions of the ribs, of a fossil monster. January 17, 1852
Human beings with whom I have no sympathy are far stranger to me than inanimate matter, — rocks or earth. Looking on the last, I feel comparatively as if I were with my kindred. January 17, 1854
What is your thought like? That is the hue, that the purity, and transparency, and distance from earthly taint of my inmost mind, for whatever we see without is a symbol of something within, and that which is farthest off is the symbol of what is deepest within. January 17, 1852
January 17, 2021
*****
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Water-bug (Gyrinus)
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Red Squirrel
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Fox
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Winter Sunsets
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Serene as the Sky
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Western Sky
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Moods and Seasons of the Mind
*****
January 17, 2021
December 14, 1852 ("Ah, who can tell the serenity and clarity of a New England winter sunset?")
December 21, 1851 ("To-night, as so many nights within the year, the clouds arrange themselves in the east at sunset in long converging bars. . .Such is the morning and such the evening, converging bars inclose the day at each end as within a melon rind, and the morning and evening are one day.")
December 27, 1851 (" The man is blessed who every day is permitted to behold anything so pure and serene as the western sky at sunset . . .The sky is always ready to answer to our moods; we can see summer there or winter.")
December 29, 1859 ("The clouds were very remarkable this cold afternoon, about twenty minutes before sunset, consisting of very long and narrow white clouds converging in the horizon (melon-rind-wise) both in the west and east")
December 31, 1851 ("Consider in what respects the winter sunsets differ from the summer ones")
December 31, 1851 ("I have not enough valued and attended to the pure clarity and brilliancy of the winter skies.")
January 11, 1852 ("The glory of these afternoons, though the sky may be mostly overcast, is in the ineffably clear blue, or else pale greenish-yellow, patches of sky in the west just before sunset. The whole cope of heaven seen at once is never so elysian. Windows to heaven, the heavenward windows of the earth. ")
January 11, 1856 ("The sunsets, I think, are now particularly interesting . . . There is nothing to distract our attention from it ")
January 13, 1860 ("I see under some sizable white pines in E. Hubbard's wood, where red squirrels have run about much since this snow.") January 14, 1852 ("We are related to all nature, animate and inanimate")
January 14, 1852 ("I notice to-night, about sundown, that the clouds in the eastern horizon are the deepest indigo-blue of any I ever saw. Commencing with a pale blue or slate in the west, the color deepens toward the east.")
January 18, 1852 ("The low western sky an Indian red, after the sun was gone.")
January 19, 1856 ("There were eight or ten courses of clouds, so broad that with equal intervals of blue sky they occupied the whole width of the heavens, broad white cirro-stratus in perfectly regular curves from west to east across the whole sky")
January 26, 1852.("Would you see your mind, look at the sky. Would you know your own moods, be weather-wise.")
February 19, 1852 ("By an ocular illusion the bars appearing to approach each other in the east and west horizons,")
February 20, 1857 ("I am that rock by the pond-side.")
February 19, 1852 ("By an ocular illusion the bars appearing to approach each other in the east and west horizons,")
February 20, 1857 ("I am that rock by the pond-side.")
January 17, 2014
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.
January 16 <<<<<<<< January 17 >>>>>>>> January 18
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 17
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/HDT17Jan
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