A day or two surveying is equal to a journey.

April 8. 

At the Lyceum the other night I felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself and so failed to interest me as much as formerly. He described things not in or near to his heart, but toward his extremities and superficies. The poet deals with his privatest experience. There was no central nor centralizing thought in the lecture.

I find that I can criticise my composition best when I stand at a little distance from it, — when I do not see it, for instance. I make a little chapter of contents which enables me to recall it page by page to my mind, and judge it more impartially when my manuscript is out of the way. 

The distraction of surveying enables me rapidly to take new points of view. A day or two surveying is equal to a journey.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 8, 1854

At the Lyceum... See Life without Principle.

I find that I can criticise my composition best when I stand at a little distance from it. See March 1, 1854 (" In correcting my manuscripts, . . . having purified the main body and thus created a distinct standard for comparison, I can review the rejected sentences and easily detect those which deserve to be readmitted."); February 20, 1859 ("In the composition it is the greatest art to find out as quickly as possible which are the best passages you have written, and tear the rest away").

The distraction of surveying enables me rapidly to take new points of view. See December 13, 1851 ("This varied employment, to which my necessities compel me, serves instead of foreign travel and the lapse of time."); April 12, 1854 ("It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light.")

Editing a life.

It is August. I lie on top of the sheets awakened by an unpleasant dream. I hear the ring of crickets in the dark. An owl calls outside the skylight. Another, closer, at the window returns the call. Hoo. Arrr. Hoo Arrrrrr.

I am thankful to have been awakened and to live here in the woods. I think of Jane. Is she awake in her room over the garage? What about all those in the world who never hear the night?

I find I am on top of a book. I turn on the light; it is the restored edition of A Moveable Feast. The Introduction says it is about damaged memory and lost heart. I read, "How good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates."

Zphx, 20130810

On writing

September 2

We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member. Often I feel that my head stands out too dry, when it should be immersed. A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.

September 2, 2025

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, September 2, 1851

It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart. See August 19, 1851 ("How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!"); May 6, 1854 ("Every important worker will report what life there is in him.”); October 18, 1855 (“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”); November 18, 1857 "Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of”); January 23, 1858. (" It is in vain to write on the seasons unless you have the seasons in you.")

He is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. See Walden (" I grew in those seasons like corn in the night,")

It is essential

always that we love to do

what we are doing.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, On writing

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 ©  2009-2025