If you get on to a rock in the river, rock the boat.

July 18. 

One tells me that he stopped at Stedman Buttrick's on the 10th, and found him sitting under a cherry tree ringing a bell, in order to keep the birds off! 

If you get on to a rock in the river, rock the boat, while you keep steadily pushing, and thus there will be moments when the boat does not rest on the rock at all, and you will rapidly get it off. 

The river is getting low, so that the entrances to musquash-holes in the bank are revealed and often laid bare, with fresh green rushes or flags, etc., in them. 

Nathan Hosmer remembers that when the two new stone piers at Hunt's Bridge were built, about 1820, one Nutting went under water to place the stones, and he was surprised to see how long he would remain under about this business.

Nothing has got built without labor. Past generations have spent their blood and strength for us. They have cleared the land, built roads , etc., for us. In all fields men have laid down their lives for us. Men are industrious as ants. 

I find myself very heavy-headed these days. It occurs to me that probably in different states of what we call health, even in morbid states, we are peculiarly fitted for certain investigations, — we are the better able to deal with certain phenomena.

N. Barrett says that he has formerly cut six cocks of hay on his bar.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 18, 1859

If you get on to a rock in the river, rock the boat, and you will rapidly get it off. Compare August 8, 1859 ("Rice has had a little experience once in pushing a canal-boat up Concord River. Says this was the way they used to get the boat off a rock when by chance it had got on to one. If it had run quite on, so that the rock was partly under the main bottom of the boat, they let the boat swing round to one side and placed a stout stake underneath, a little aslant, with one end on the bottom of the river and the other ready to catch the bows of the boat, and while one held it, perhaps, the other pushed the boat round again with all his force, and so drove it on to the stake and lifted it up above the rock, and so it floated off.")

July 18. See A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 18

A Book of 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 © 2009-2021

It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light.

April 12.

Surveying for Parks in Lincoln. 

April 12, 2019

A white frost this morning, after the clear moonlight. 

I observe that it is when I have been intently, and it may be laboriously, at work, and am somewhat listless or abandoned after it, reposing, that the muse visits me, and I see or hear beauty. It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light.

The music of the spheres is but another name for the Vulcanic force. May not such a record as this be kept on one page of the Book of Life : "A man was melted to-day " 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 12, 1854

The clear moonlight. See April 11, 1854 ("Evening on river. Fine full moon; river smooth.. . . This the first moon to walk by. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, April Moonlight

It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light. See April 8, 1854 ("A day or two surveying is equal to a journey"); April 12, 1858 ("The woods are all alive with pine warblers now. Their note is the music to which I survey."); September 2, 1851 ("It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart."); November 18 1851 ("The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work."); November 20, 1851 ("Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly. Here I have been for six days surveying in the woods, and yet when I get home at evening, somewhat weary at last, and . . . I find myself more susceptible than usual to the finest influences, as music and poetry. "); April 30, 1856 (" Again, it is with the side of the ear that you hear . . . You would fain devote yourself to the melody, but you will hear more of it if you devote yourself to your work.”); May 12, 1857 ("Methinks I hear these sounds, have these reminiscences, only when well employed."); November 18, 1857 ("You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind. ") October 4, 1859 ("You have got to be in a different state from common.") ; Walden ([W]e are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.”) and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, To effect the quality of the day.

It is from out the

shadow of my toil that I

look into the light.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, From out of the Shadow

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

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