January 29
We must be very active if we would be clean and live our own life, and not a languishing and scurvy one.
The trees, which are stationary, are covered with parasites, especially those which have grown slowly.
The air is filled with the fine sporules of countless mosses, algae, lichens, fungi, which settle and plant themselves on all quiet surfaces.
Under the nails and between the joints of the fingers of the idle, flourish crops of mildew, algae, and fungi, and other vegetable sloths, though they may be invisible, – the lichens where life still exists, the fungi where decomposition has begun to take place.
And the sluggard is soon covered with sphagnum. Algae take root in the corners of his eyes, and lichens cover the bulbs of his fingers and his head, etc., etc., the lowest forms of vegetable life. '
This is the definition of dirt. We fall a prey to others of nature's tenants, who take possession of the unoccupied house.
With the utmost inward activity we have to wash and comb ourselves beside, to get rid of the adhering seeds. Cleanliness is by activity not to give any quiet shelf for the seeds of parasitic plants to take root on.
If he cuts pines, the woodchopper's hands are covered with pitch.
The names of plants are for the most part traced to Celtic and Arabian roots.
The forcible writer does not go far for his themes. His ideas are not far-fetched. IIe derives inspiration from his chagrins and his satisfactions. His theme being ever an instant one, his own gravity assists him, gives impetus to what he says. He minds his business. He does not speculate while others drudge for him.
I am often reminded that if I had bestowed on me the wealth of Croesus, my aims must still be the same and my means essentially the same.
It still melts.
I observed this afternoon that the ground where they are digging for some scales near the depot was frozen about nine inches where the snow has lain most and sixteen inches where the road was.
I begin to see the tops of the grasses and stubble in the fields, which deceive me as if it were the ground itself.
That point where the sun goes down is the cynosure which attracts all eyes at sundown and half an hour before. What do all other parts of the horizon concern us ? Our eyes follow the path of that great luminary. We watch for his rising, and we observe his setting. He is a companion and fellow-traveller we all have. We pity him who has his cheerless dwelling elsewhere, even in the northwest or southwest, off the high road of nature.
The snow is nearly gone from the railroad causeway.
Few are the days when the telegraph harp rises into a pure, clear melody. Though the wind may blow strong or soft, in this or that direction, naught will you hear but a low hum or murmur, or even a buzzing sound; but at length, when some undistinguishable zephyr blows, when the conditions not easy to be detected arrive, it suddenly and unexpectedly rises into melody, as if a god had touched it, and fortunate is the walker who chances to be within hearing.
So is it with the lyres of bards, and for the most part it is only a feeble and ineffectual hum that comes from them, which leads you to expect the melody you do not hear. When the gale is modified, wlen the favorable conditions occur, and the indescribable coincidence takes place, then there is music.
Of a thousand buzzing strings, only one yields music. It is like the hum of the shaft, or other machinery, of a steamboat, which at length might become music in a divine hand. I feel greatly enriched by this telegraph.
I have come to see the clay and sand in the Cut. A reddish tinge in the earth, stains. An Indian hue is singularly agreeable, even exciting, to the eye. Here the whole bank is sliding. Even the color of the subsoil excites me, as if I were already getting near to life and vegetation. This clay is faecal in its color also. It runs off at bottom info mere shoals, shallows, vasa, vague sand-bars, like the mammoth leaves, –– makes strands.
Perhaps those mother-o'-pearl clouds I described some time ago might be called rainbow flocks.
The snow on the slope of the Cliffs is dotted with black specks, the seeds of the mullein which the wind has shaken out. When I strike the dry stalks, the seeds fall in a shower and color the snow black like charcoal dust or powder.
The green mosses on the rocks are evidently nourished and kept bright by the snows lying on them a part of the year.
Day before yesterday, I saw the hunters out with a dozen dogs, but only two pussies, one white and one lithe gray one, did I see, for so many men and dogs, who seem to set all the village astir as if the fox's trail led through it.
And Stedman Buttrick, with whom I was walking, was excited as if in the heyday of his youth.
Heard C. lecture to-night. It was a bushel of nuts.
Perhaps the most original lecture I ever heard. Ever
so unexpected, not to be foretold, and so sententious that
you could not look at him and take his thought at. the
same time.
You had to give your undivided attention
to the thoughts, for you were not assisted by set phrases
or modes of speech intervening. There was no sloping
up or down to or from his points. It was all genius, no
talent. It required more close attention, more abstraction from surrounding circumstances, than any lecture
I have heard.
For, well as I know C., he more than
any man disappoints my expectation. When 1 see him
in the desk, hear him, I cannot realize that I ever saw
him before. He will be strange, unexpected, to his best
acquaintance. I cannot associate the lecturer with the
companion of my walks.
It was from so original and
peculiar a point of view, yet just to himself in the main,
that I doubt if three in the audience apprehended a tithe
that he said. It was so hard to hear that doubtless few
made the exertion.
A thick succession of mountain
passes and no intermediate slopes and plains. Other
lectures, even the best, in which so much space is given
to the elaborate development of a few ideas, seemed
somewhat meagre in comparison.
Yet it would be how
much more glorious if talent were added to genius, if
there [were] a just arrangement and development of the
thoughts, and each step were not a leap, but he ran a
space to take a yet higher leap!
Most of the spectators sat in front of the performer but here was one who, by accident, sat all the while on
one side, and his report was peculiar and startling.
H. D. Thoreau Journal, January 29, 1852
The forcible writer does not go far for his themes. See
January 30, 1852 ("It is in vain to write on chosen themes. We must wait till they have kindled a flame in our minds. ");
February 3, 1852 ("The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person.") See also
November 12, 1851 ("Write often, write upon a thousand themes"); February 3, 1859 ("The writer has much to do even to create a theme for himself . . . It is only when many observations of different periods have been brought together that he begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent and just observation.");Compare March 18, 1861 ("A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of others, but a genius - a Shakespeare, for instance — would make the history of his parish more interesting than another's history of the world.")
The green mosses on the rocks are evidently nourished and kept bright by the snows lying on them a part of the year. See February 18, 1852 ("The mosses on the rocks look green where the snow has melted. This must be one of the spring signs.");
March 4, 1852 ("The snow is melting on the rocks; the water trickles down in shining streams; the mosses look bright;"); March 28, 1859 ("These earth colors, methinks, are never so fair as in the spring.. Now the green mosses and lichens contrast with the brown grass, but ere long the surface will be uniformly green.");
April 25, 1857 ("The dense, green, rounded beds of mosses in springs and old water-troughs are very handsome now, — intensely cold green cushions.") See also
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau.,
signs of spring: mosses bright green I begin to see the tops of the grasses and stubble in the fields . . . When I strike the dry [mullein ] stalks, the seeds fall in a shower and color the snow black. See December 31, 1859 ("The mulleins are full of minute brown seeds, which a jar sprinkles over the snow, and [they] look black there; also the primrose, of larger brown seeds, which rattle out in the same manner"); March 24, 1859 ("They [goldfinches] are eating the seeds of the mullein and the large primrose, clinging to the plants sidewise in various positions and pecking at the seed-vessels."); see also January 30, 1853 ("The most common and conspicuous green leaf on the ground when the snow is off at this season, as at present, is that of the buttercup. Sorrel is also very common, and johnswort, and the purplish gnaphaliums. There is also the early crowfoot in some places, strawberry, mullein, and thistle leaves, and hawkweeds, etc., etc.")
Perhaps those mother-o'-pearl clouds I described some time ago might be called rainbow flocks. See
January 13, 1852 ("Here I am on the Cliffs at half past three or four o'clock. . . .I see. . .in the west, flitting mother-o'-pearl clouds, which change their loose-textured form and melt rapidly away, even while I write.");
January 22, 1852 ("One mother-o'-pearl tint is common to the winter sky half an hour before sundown."); See also December 18, 1852 ("Loring's Pond beautifully froze . . . it was so exquisitely polished that the sky and scudding dun-colored clouds, with mother-o'-pearl tints, were reflected in it as in the calmest water."); December 26, 1855 ("The sun is gone before five. Just before I looked for rainbow flocks in the west, but saw none,"); December 27, 1853 ("I look far, but see no rainbow flocks in the sky.");
December 30, 1855 ("Looking up over the top of the hill now, southwest, at 3.30 P.M., I see a few mother-o’-pearl tints, and methinks the same or rainbow tints in the drifting snow there, against the bright light of the unseen sun. Only in such clear cold air as this have the small clouds in the west that fine evanishing edge. It requires a state of the air that quickly dissipates all moisture. It must be rare in summer. In this rare atmosphere all cloud is quickly dissipated and mother-o’-pearl tinted as it passes away."); January 9, 1854 ("Looking for rainbow-tinted clouds, small whiffs of vapor which form and disperse, this clear, cold afternoon"); January 22, 1854 ("Once or twice of late I have seen the mother-o'-pearl tints and rainbow flocks in the western sky. The usual time is when the air is clear and pretty cool, about an hour before sundown. . . .Methinks the summer sky never exhibits this so finely."); February 13, 1860 ("It is surprising what a variety of distinct colors the winter can show us . . .There is the red of the sunset sky, and of the snow at evening, and in rainbow flocks during the day, and in sun-dogs.");
February 24, 1860 ("some [clouds]most brilliant mother-o'-pearl. I never saw the green in it more distinct. This on the thin white edges of clouds as if it were a small piece of a rainbow.").
