Reminiscence and Prompting.

 

Each season is but an infinitesimal point. 

It no sooner comes than it is gone. 

It has no duration … 

Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting.

I cannot count one.

I know not the first letter 

of the alphabet.

May 15, 2022

(avesong)

Already we begin to anticipate spring, and this is an important difference between this time and a month ago. We begin to say that the day is springlike.  February 2, 1854

The novelty is in us, and it is also in nature. The mirage is constant . . . a constantly varying mirage, answering to the condition of our perceptive faculties and our fluctuating imaginations. February 9, 1852

A dry, powdery snow about one inch deep, from which, as I walk toward the sun, this perfectly clear, bright afternoon, at 3.30 o’clock, the colors of the rainbow are reflected from a myriad fine facets.   February 13, 1859

Genius has evanescent boundaries.  February 16, 1857 

It is inspiriting to feel the increased heat of the sun reflected from the snow. There is a slight mist above the fields, through which the crowing of cocks sounds spring-like. February 23, 1856 

I am reminded of spring by the quality of the air. The cock-crowing and even the telegraph harp prophesy it, even though the ground is for the most part covered by snow. February 24, 1852

Stopping in a sunny and sheltered place on a hillock in the woods, — for it is raw in the wind, — I hear the hasty, shuffling, as if frightened, note of a robin from a dense birch wood . . . This sound reminds me of rainy, misty April days in past years.   March 8, 1855

I wish to begin this summer well;  to do something in it worthy of it and of me . . . to have my immortality now, that it be in the quality of my daily life . . .I pray that the life of this spring and summer may ever lie fair in my memory. March 15,  1852

I hear a faint note 

far in the wood which reminds 

me of the robin. 

 March 17, 1858

Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. How happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening; reminiscences of our sanest hours? March 18, 1858

When I get two thirds up the hill, I look round and am for the hundredth time surprised by the landscape of the river valley and the horizon with its distant blue scalloped rim. It is a spring landscape, and as impossible a fortnight ago as the song of birds. March 18, 1858

There is the difference between winter and spring. The bared face of the pond sparkles with joy. March 20, 1853

I am waked by my genius, surprised to find myself expecting the dawn in so serene and joyful and expectant a mood. March 22, 1853

Uncanoonuc, well seen from this hill, whereon you camped for a night in your youth, which you have never revisited, still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it. March 31, 1853

Each day's feast in Nature's year is a surprise to us and adapted to our appetite and spirits. She has arranged such an order of feasts as never tires. March 28, 1859

Sitting on the rail over the brook, I hear something which reminds me of the song of the robin in rainy days in past springs.  April 2, 1854  

The wind is southeasterly. This is methinks the first hazy day, and the sough of the wind in the pines sounds warmer, whispering of summer. April 3, 1854

This susurrus carries me forward some months toward summer -- to those still warm summer noons when . . . the fishes retreat from the shallows into the cooler depths, and the cows stand up to their bellies in the river. The reminiscence comes over me like a summer's dream. April 6, 1854 

If you yield for a moment to the impressions of sense, you hear some bird giving expression to its happiness. April 15, 1859

Almost did without a fire this morning. Coming out, I find it very warm, warmer than yesterday or any day yet. It is a reminiscence of past summers. April 18, 1855

There is a season for everything, and we do not notice a given phenomenon except at that season.  April 24, 1859

And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. Walden, Where I lived and what I lived for

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. Walden, Economy

How full of reminiscence is any fragrance! May 7, 1852  

We remember autumn to best advantage in the spring; the finest aroma of it reaches us then. May 10, 1852

Our past experience is a never-failing capital which can never be alienated, of which each kindred future event reminds us. If you would have the song of the sparrow inspire you a thousand years hence, let your life be in harmony with its strain to-day. May 12, 1857

The sessile-leaved bellwort, with three or four delicate pale-green leaves with reflexed edges, on a tender-looking stalk, the single modest-colored flower gracefully drooping, neat, with a fugacious, richly spiced fragrance, facing the ground, the dry leaves, as if unworthy to face the heavens. It is a beautiful sight, a pleasing discovery, the first of the season, -- growing in a little straggling company, in damp woods or swamps. When you turn up the drooping flower, its petals make a perfect geometrical figure, a six-pointed star. May 16, 1852

Standing in the meadow near the early aspen at the island, I hear the first fluttering of leaves, - a peculiar sound, at first unaccountable to me. May 17, 1860

The world can never be more beautiful than now. May 18, 1852

The foliage of the young maples . . . has become, since the rain commenced, several shades darker, changing from its tender and lighter green. May 19, 1853

With what unobserved secure dispatch nature advances! The amelanchiers have bloomed . . . shed their blossoms and show minute green fruit. There is not an instant's pause! May 19, 1854

All nature is a new impression every instant.  May 23, 1841

These expressions of the face of Nature are as constant and sure to recur as those of the eyes of maidens, from year to year, — sure to be repeated as long as time lasts. May 27, 1859

The fact that a rare and beautiful flower which we never saw . . . may be found in our immediate neighborhood, is very suggestive . . . The boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations. May 31, 1853

It is remarkable how, as you are leaving a mountain and looking back at it from time to time, it gradually gathers up its slopes and spurs to itself into a regular whole, and makes a new and total impression. June 4, 1858

Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind. June 6, 1857

No one, to my knowledge, has observed the minute differences in the seasons.  A book of the seasons, each page of which should be written in its own season and out-of-doors, or in its own locality wherever it may be. June 11, 1851

Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as never before in our lives. We become like a still lake of purest crystal. All the world goes by us and is reflected in our deeps. And without effort our depths are revealed to ourselves. June 22, 1851 

My genius makes distinctions which my understanding cannot, and which my senses do not report. June 23, 1851

We find only the world we look for. July 2, 1857 

Now, a quarter after nine, as I walk along the river-bank, long after starlight, and perhaps an hour or more after sunset, I see some of those high-pillared clouds of the day, in the southwest, still reflecting a downy light from the regions of day, they are so high. It is a pleasing reminiscence of the day in the midst of the deepening shadows of the night. July 12, 1852

If I take the same walk by moonlight an hour later or earlier in the evening, it is as good as a different one. July 14, 1851

Beyond the bridge there is a goldenrod partially blossomed. I hear a cricket, too, under the blackberry vines, singing as in the fall. Yesterday it was spring, and to-morrow it will be autumn. Where is the summer then? July 19, 1851

The sun is now warm on my back, and when I turn round I shade my face with my hands. July 21, 1853

Late rose now in prime.

The memory of roses

along the river.

July 23, 1860

I turn round, and there shines the moon. July 27, 1852 

After midsummer we have a belated feeling and are forward to see in each sight and hear in each sound some presage of the fall, just as in middle age man anticipates the end of life. July 30, 1852

Do not all flowers that blossom after mid-July remind us of the fall? July 30, 1852

I hear the distant sound of a flail, and thoughts of autumn occupy my mind, and the memory of past years. July 31, 1856

I hear the steady (not intermittent) shrilling of apparently the alder cricket, clear, loud, and autumnal, a season sound. Hear it, but see it not. It reminds me of past autumns and the lapse of time, suggests a pleasing, thoughtful melancholy, like the sound of the flail. August 18, 1856

Nature rests no longer at her culminating point than at any other. If you are not out at the right instant, the summer may go by and you not see it. August 19, 1851

It commonly chances that I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I am in a thrilled and expectant mood, perhaps wading in some remote swamp where I have just found something novel and feel more than usually remote from the town. Or some rare plant which for some reason has occupied a strangely prominent place in my thoughts for some time will present itself. My expectation ripens to discovery. I am prepared for strange things. September 2, 1856

This cold evening with

a white twilight makes us think

of wood for winter.

September 11, 1854

A man must attend to Nature closely for many years to know when, as well as where, to look for his objects, since he must always anticipate her a little. Young men have not learned the phases of Nature; they do not know what constitutes a year, or that one year is like another. I would know when in the year to expect certain thoughts and moods, as the sports man knows when to look for plover.  September 24, 1859

I perceive in various places, in low ground, this afternoon, the sour scent of cinnamon ferns decaying. It is an agreeable phenomenon, reminding me of the season and of past years. October 2, 1859

The common notes of the chickadee, so rarely heard for a long time, and also one phebe strain from it, amid the Leaning Hemlocks, remind me of pleasant winter days, when they are more commonly seen. October 6, 1856

When I turn round half-way up Fair Haven Hill, by the orchard wall, and look northwest, I am surprised for the thousandth time at the beauty of the landscape. October 7, 1857 

The chickadee, sounding all alone, now that birds are getting scarce, reminds me of the winter, in which it almost alone is heard. October 10, 1851

The faint suppressed warbling of the robins sounds like a reminiscence of the spring. October 10, 1853

The swamp amelanchier is leafing again . . . an anticipation of the spring . . . an evidence of warmth and genialness. Its buds are annually awakened by the October sun as if it were spring. The shad-bush is leafing again by the sunny swamp-side. It is like a youthful or poetic thought in old age . . . In my latter years, let me have some shad-bush thoughts.  October 13, 1859

Paddling slowly back, we enjoy at length very perfect reflections in the still water. The blue of the sky, and indeed all tints, are deepened in the reflection.  October 14, 1858

 

It is surprising how any reminiscence of a different season of the year affects us. 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

My moods are thus periodical, not two days in my year alike.   October 26, 1857

 [These little cheerful hemlocks] remind me of winter, the snows which are to come . . . and the chickadees that are to flit and lisp amid them. November 4, 1851

The winter is approaching. The birds are almost all gone. The note of the dee de de sounds now more distinct, prophetic of winter .  November 4, 1855

We cannot see any thing until we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly see anything else.  November 4, 1858

It is remarkable how little we attend to what is passing before us constantly, unless our genius directs our attention that way.  November 6, 1853

The sight of the masses of yellow hastate leaves and flower-buds of the yellow lily, already four or six inches long, at the bottom of the river, reminds me that nature is prepared for an infinity of springs yet.  November 10, 1854

The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work. November 18, 1851

The year looks back toward summer, and a summer smile is reflected in her face.  December 1, 1852 

There is a certain resonance and elasticity in the air that makes the least sound melodious as in spring. It is an anticipation, a looking through winter to spring. December 2, 1852

The crowing of cocks and other sounds remind you of spring, such is the state of the air.   December 2, 1859 

I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too. December 5, 1856 

It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.  December 11, 1855

What a reminiscence of summer, a fiery hangbird's nest dangling from an elm over the road when perhaps the thermometer is down to -20 (?), and the traveller goes beating his arms beneath it! December 22, 1859

The snow collects and is piled up in little columns like down about every twig and stem, and this is only seen in perfection, complete to the last flake, while it is snowing, as now. 

 December 24, 1856 

What a fine and measureless joy the gods grant us thus, letting us know nothing about the day that is to dawn! This day, yesterday, was as incredible as any other miracle. December 29, 1851 

I hear very distinctly from the railroad causeway the whistle of the locomotive on the Lowell road . . . It, as it were, takes me out of my body and gives me the freedom of all bodies and all nature. December 31, 1853

It is a remarkably warm night for the season, the ground almost entirely bare. 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 white pines, now seen against the moon, with their single foliage, look thin . . . 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

How completely a load of hay in the winter revives the memory of past summers!  January 5, 1858

Through thin ice I see

my face in bubbles against

its undersurface.

January 6, 1853

After December all weather that is not wintry is springlike. January 8, 1860

On the face of the Cliff the crowfoot buds lie unexpanded just beneath the surface . . .  informed of a spring which the world has never seen.  . . It offers to my mind a little temple into which to enter and worship. May I lead my life the following year as innocently! May it be as fair and smell as sweet! I anticipate nature. It will go forth in April, this vestal now cherishing her fire, to be married to the sun. January 9, 1853

After the January thaw our thoughts cease to refer to autumn and we look forward to spring. January 9, 1860

Red alder catkins

dangling in the wintry air

promise a new spring.

January 10, 1858

Perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer . . . The cold is merely superficial; it is summer still at the core, far, far within. It is in the cawing of the crow, the crowing of the cock, the warmth of the sun on our backs. January 12, 1855

Well may the tender buds attract us at this season, no less than partridges, for they are the hope of the year, the spring rolled up. January 12, 1855

The glitter or sparkle on the surface of a snow freshly fallen when the sun comes out and you walk from it, the points of light constantly changing. January 12, 1860

I  must stand still and listen with open ears . . . that the night may make its impression on me  . . . The silence rings; it is musical and thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible. January 21, 1853

The wonderfully mild and pleasant weather continues . . .  The sun, and cockcrowing, bare ground, etc., etc., remind me of March.   January 23, 1858 

The moment always spurs us. The spurs of countless moments goad us incessantly into life. January 26, 1852

Though you walk every day, you do not foresee the kind of walking you will have the next day. January 26, 1860

It is so mild and moist as I saunter along by the wall east of the Hill that I remember, or anticipate, one of those warm rain-storms in the spring . . .  A rain which is as serene as fair weather, suggesting fairer weather than was ever seen  . . . You feel the fertilizing influence of the rain in your mind. January 27, 1858

Tonight I feel it stinging cold . . . it bites my ears and face, but the stars shine all the brighter. January 29, 1854 

The wind is more southerly, and now the warmth of the sun prevails, and is felt on the back. January 31, 1854 

******

Distant mountaintop

as blue to the memory

as now to the eyes.

March 31, 1853

 reminiscence and prompting

The past and future –

 two eternities meeting

 the present moment.

Walden

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Reminiscence and Prompting

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

All nature is a new impression every instant.

May 23. 

Sunday. Barn. - The distant woods are but the tassels of my eye.

Books are to be attended to as new sounds merely.

Most would be put to a sore trial if the reader should assume the attitude of a listener.

They are but a new note in the forest.

To our lonely, sober thought the earth is a wild unexplored. Wildness as of the jay and muskrat reigns over the great part of nature. The oven-bird and plover are heard in the horizon.

Here is a new book of heroes, come to me like the note of the chewink from over the fen, only over a deeper and wider fen.

The pines are unrelenting sifters of thought; nothing petty leaks through them.

Let me put my ear close, and hear the sough of this book, that I may know if any inspiration yet haunts it.

There is always a later edition of every book than the printer wots of, no matter how recently it was published.

All nature is a new impression every instant. 

May 23, 2020

The aspects of the most simple object are as various as the aspects of the most compound.

Observe the same sheet of water from different eminences.

When I have travelled a few miles I do not recognize the profile of the hills of my native village.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 23, 1841

When I have travelled a few miles I do not recognize the profile of the hills of my native village. See June 4, 1858 ("It is remarkable how, as you are leaving a mountain and looking back at it from time to time, it gradually gathers up its slopes and spurs to itself into a regular whole, and makes a new and total impression.")


All nature is a new impression every instant. See June 6, 1857 (“We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact”); August 19, 1851("Nature rests no longer at her culminating point than at any other. If you are not out at the right instant, the summer may go by and you not see it.”); Walden: Where I lived and what I lived for ("God Himself culminates in the present moment,"); April 24, 1859 ("There is a season for everything, and we do not notice a given phenomenon except at that season")

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

I drink at it; but while I drink

I see the sandy bottom and

detect how shallow it is.

Its thin current slides away,

but eternity remains.

I would drink deeper;

fish in the sky, whose bottom

is pebbly with stars.

I cannot count one.

I know not the first 

letter of the alphabet.

I have always been regretting that

I was not as wise as the day I was born.

Walden, Where I lived and what I lived for

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 © 2009-2021

Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change?

November 28. 

A gray, overcast, still day, and more small birds —tree sparrows and chickadees — than usual about the house. 

November 28, 2023

There have been a very few fine snowflakes falling for many hours, and now, by 2 P. M., a regular snow-storm has commenced, fine flakes falling steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape. In half an hour the russet earth is painted white even to the horizon. Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change? 

I cannot now walk without leaving a track behind me; that is one peculiarity of winter walking. Anybody may follow my trail. I have walked, perhaps, a particular wild path along some swamp-side all summer, and thought to myself, I am the only villager that ever comes here. 

But I go out shortly after the first snow has fallen, and lo, here is the track of a sportsman and his dog in my secluded path, and probably he preceded me in the summer as well. Yet my hour is not his, and I may never meet him! 

I asked Coombs the other night if he had been a-hunting lately. He said he had not been out but once this fall. He went out the other day with a companion, and they came near getting a fox. They broke his leg. He has evidently been looking forward to some such success all summer. Having done thus much, he can afford to sit awhile by the stove at the post-office. He is plotting now how to break his head. 

Goodwin cannot be a very bad man, he is so cheery. 

And all the years that I have known Walden these striped breams have skulked in it without my knowledge! How many new thoughts, then, may I have?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 28, 1858


A regular snow-storm has commenced, fine flakes falling steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape. See December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified. This is a fine, dry snow"}

Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change? See November 13, 1858 (“Thus it comes stealthily in the night and changes the whole aspect of the earth.”); November 29, 1858 ("The snow has taken all the November out of the sky."); January 26, 1855 ("This morning it snows again,—a fine dry snow with no wind to speak of, giving a wintry aspect to the landscape . . . What changes in the aspect of the earth! ")

I cannot now walk without leaving a track behind me.  See  November 15, 1858 ("You are now reminded occasionally in your walks that you have contemporaries, and perchance predecessors. I see the track of a fox . . . and, in the wood-path, of a man and a dog."); December 12, 1859 ("[In the winter] you see the tracks of those who had preceded you, and so are more reminded of them than in summer."); compare January 19, 1852 ("It is pleasant to make the first tracks in this road through the woods . . . the fine, dry snow blowing and drifting still.");

Goodwin cannot be a very bad man, he is so cheery. See November 28, 1859 ("Goodwin is cutting out a few cords of dead wood in the midst of E. Hubbard's old lot."); See also October 22, 1853 ("One-eyed John Goodwin, the fisherman, was loading into a hand-cart . . ., — though he is regarded by most as a vicious character, — whose whole motive was so easy to fathom, — thus to obtain his winter's wood, — charmed me unspeakably. . . .Goodwin stands on the solid earth"); See November 4, 1858 ("I took out my glass, and beheld Goodwin, the one-eyed Ajax, in his short blue frock, short and square-bodied, as broad as for his height he can afford to be, getting his winter's wood; for this is one of the phenomena of the season.")

These striped breams have skulked in it without my knowledge! See November 26, 1858
("Looking more attentively, I detected also a great many minnows . . .shaped like bream, but had the transverse bars of perch . . . They have about seven transverse dusky bars like a perch! Yet, from their form and single dorsal fin, I think they are breams. Are they not a new species? "); November 27, 1858 ("I got seventeen more of those little bream of yesterday. “); November 30, 1858 ("How wild it makes the pond and the township to find a new fish in it! For more than two centuries men have fished here and have not distinguished this permanent settler of the township. When my eyes first rested on Walden the striped bream was poised in it, though I did not see it. But there it dwells and has dwelt permanently, who can tell how long?")

November 28. A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November 28

So sudden a change –

the russet earth painted white

to the horizon. 

I cannot now walk

without leaving tracks behind.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  

Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change? 

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

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-581128

A new November evening come round again,

November 1.

November 1, 2018

P. M. — To Poplar Hill. 

Many black oaks are bare in Sleepy Hollow. 

Now you easily detect where larches grow, viz. in the swamp north of Sleepy Hollow. They are far more distinct than at any other season. They are very regular soft yellow pyramids, as I see them from the Poplar Hill. Unlike the pines there is no greenness left to alternate with their yellow, but they are a uniform yellow, and they differ from other yellow trees in the generally regular pyramidal outline, i. e. these middling-sized trees. These trees now cannot easily be mistaken for any other, be cause they are the only conspicuously yellow trees now left in the woods, except a very few aspens of both kinds, not one in a square mile, and these are of a very different hue as well as form, the birches, etc.,; having fallen. The larch, apparently, will soon be the only yellow tree left in the woods. It is almost quite alone now. But in the summer it is not easy to distinguish them either by their color or form at a distance. 

If you wish to count the scarlet oaks. do it now. Stand on a hilltop in the woods, when the sun is an hour high and the sky is clear, and every one within range of your vision will be revealed. You might live to the age of Methusaleh and never find a tithe of them otherwise.

We are not wont to see our dooryard as a part of the earth’s surface. The gardener does not perceive that some ridge or mound in his garden or lawn is related to yonder hill or the still more distant mountain in the horizon, is, perchance, a humble spur of the last. We are wont to look on the earth still as a sort of chaos, formless and lumpish. 

I notice from this height that the curving moraine forming the west side of Sleepy Hollow is one of several arms or fingers which stretch away from the hill range that runs down the north side of the Boston road, turning northward at the Court-House; that this finger-like moraine is continued northward by itself almost to the river, and points plainly enough to Ponkawtasset Hill on the other side, even if the Poplar Hill range itself did not indicate this connection; and so the sloping cemetery lots on the west of Sleepy Hollow are related to the distant Ponkawtasset. 

he smooth-shaven knoll in the lawn, on which the children swing, is, perchance, only a spur of some mountains of the moon, which no traveller has ever reached, heaved up by the same impulse. 

The hawthorn is but three-quarters fallen and is a greenish yellow or yellowish green. 

I hear in the fields just before sundown a shriller chirping of a few crickets, reminding me that their song is getting thin and will soon be quenched. 

As I stood on the south bank of the river a hundred rods southwest of John Flint’s, the sun being just about to enter a long and broad dark-blue or slate-colored cloud in the horizon, a cold, dark bank, I saw that the reflection of Flint’s white house in the river, prolonged by a slight ripple so as to reach the reflected cloud, was a very distinct and luminous light blue.

As the afternoons grow shorter, and the early evening drives us home to complete our chores, we are reminded of the shortness of life, and become more pensive, at least in this twilight of the year. We are prompted to make haste and finish our work before the night comes. 

I leaned over a rail in the twilight on the Walden road, waiting for the evening mail to be distributed, when such thoughts visited me. I seemed to recognize the November evening as a familiar thing come round again, and yet I could hardly tell whether I had ever known it or only divined it. The November twilights just begun! 

It appeared like a part of a panorama at which I sat spectator, a part with which I was perfectly familiar just coming into view, and I foresaw how it would look and roll along, and prepared to be pleased. Just such a piece of art merely, though infinitely sweet and grand, did it appear to me, and just as little were any active duties required of me. 

We are independent on all that we see. The hangman whom I have seen cannot hang me. The earth which I have seen cannot bury me. Such doubleness and distance does sight prove. Only the rich and such as are troubled with ennui are implicated in the maze of phenomena. You cannot see anything until you are clear of it. 

The long railroad causeway through the meadows west of me, the still twilight in which hardly a cricket was heard, the dark bank of clouds in the horizon long after sunset, the villagers crowding to the post-office, and the hastening home to supper by candle-light, had I not seen all this before! What new sweet was I to extract from it? Truly they mean that we shall learn our lesson well. Nature gets thumbed like an old spelling-book. 

The almshouse and Frederick were still as last November. I was no nearer, methinks, nor further off from my friends. Yet I sat the bench with perfect contentment, unwilling to exchange the familiar vision that was to be unrolled for any treasure or heaven that could be imagined. Sure to keep just so far apart in our orbits still, in obedience to the laws of attraction and repulsion, affording each other only steady but indispensable starlight. It was as if I was promised the greatest novelty the world has ever seen or shall see, though the utmost possible novelty would be the difference between me and myself a year ago. This alone encouraged me, and was my fuel for the approaching winter. That we may behold the panorama with this slight improvement or change, this is what we sustain life for with so much effort from year to year.

And yet there is no more tempting novelty than this new November. 

No going to Europe or another world is to be named with it. Give me the old familiar walk, post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith, which does not know when it is beaten. We’ll go nutting once more. We'll pluck the nut of the world, and crack it in the winter evenings. Theatres and all other sightseeing are puppet-shows in comparison. I will take another walk to the Cliff, another row on the river, another skate on the meadow, be out in the first snow, and associate with the winter birds. Here I am at home. In the bare and bleached crust of the earth I recognize my friend.

One actual Frederick that you know is worth a million only read of. Pray, am I altogether a bachelor, or am I a widower, that I should go away and leave my bride? This Morrow that is ever knocking with irresistible force at our door, there is no such guest as that. I will stay at home and receive company.

I want nothing new, if I can have but a tithe of the old secured to me. I will spurn all wealth beside. Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here. 

Here are all the friends I ever had or shall have, and as friendly as ever. Why, I never  had any quarrel with a friend but it was just as sweet as unanimity could be. I do not think we budge an inch forward or backward in relation to our friends. How many things‘ can you go away from? They see the comet from the northwest coast just as plainly as we do, and the same stars through its tail. 

Take the shortest way round and stay at home. A man dwells in his native valley like a corolla in its calyx, like an acorn in its cup. Here, of course, is all that you love, all that you expect, all that you are. Here is your bride elect, as close to you as she can be got. Here is all the best and all the worst you can imagine. What more do you want? Bear here-away then! Foolish people imagine that what they imagine is somewhere else. That stuff is not made in any factory but their own.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal , November 1, 1858

Now you easily detect where larches grow. See October 24, 1852 (“The larches in the swamps are now conspicuously yellow and ready for their fall. They can now be distinguished at a distance.”);   October 27 1855 (“Larches are yellowing.”) and  note to November 1, 1857 ("The larches are at the height of their change.”)

We are reminded of the shortness of life, and become more pensive, at least in this twilight of the year. We are prompted to make haste and finish our work before the night comes. See August 18, 1853 ("The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life."); October 27, 1858 (“the cool, white twilights of that season which is itself the twilight of the year.”)

We are independent on all that we see. . .. You cannot see anything until you are clear of it. See August 8, 1852 ("[I]am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. ")

Take the shortest way round and stay at home. See January 11, 1852 (But if I travel in a simple, primitive, original manner, standing in a truer relation to men and nature, . . . get some honest experience of life . . . then it becomes less important whither I go or how far."); May 6, 1854 ("It matters not where or how far you travel, — the farther commonly the worse, — but how much alive you are."); November 20, 1857 ("A man is worth most to himself and to others, whether as an observer, or poet, or neighbor, or friend, where he is most himself, most contented and at home.")

I hear turkeys gobble.

March 19. 

P. M. —To Hill and Grackle Swamp. 

Another pleasant and warm day. 

March 19,  2018

Painted my boat afternoon. 

These spring impressions (as of the apparent waking up of the meadow described day before yesterday) are not repeated the same year, at least not with the same force, for the next day the same phenomenon does not surprise us. Our appetite has lost its edge.

The other day the face of the meadow wore a peculiar appearance, as if it were beginning to wake up under the influence of the south west wind and the warm sun, but it cannot again this year present precisely that appearance to me. I have taken a step forward to a new position and must see something else. You perceive, and are affected by, changes too subtle to be described. 

I see little swarms of those fine fuzzy gnats in the air. I am behind the Hemlocks. It is their wings which are most conspicuous, when they are in the sun. Their bodies are comparatively small and black, and they have two mourning plumes in their fronts. Are not these the winter gnat? They keep up a circulation in the air like water-bugs on the water. They people a portion of the otherwise vacant air, being apparently fond of the sunshine, in which they'are most conspicuous. Sometimes a globular swarm two feet or more in diameter, suggesting how genial and habitable the air is become. 

I hear turkeys gobble. This too, I suppose, is a spring sound. 

I hear a steady sigh of the wind, rising and swelling into a roar, in the pines, which seems to tell of a long, warm rain to come. I see a white pine which has borne fruit in its ninth year. The cones, four in number, which are seven eighths of an inch long, have stems about two and a half inches long!— not yet curving down; so the stem probably does not grow any more. 

Met Channing and walked on with him to what we will call Grackle Swamp, admiring the mosses; those bright-yellow hypnums (?), like sunlight on decaying logs, and jungermannia, like sea-mosses ready spread. 

Hear the phebe note of a chickadee. 

In the swamp, see grackles, four or five, with the light ring about eye, — their bead eyes. They utter only those ineffectual split notes, no conqueree. 

Might I not call that Hemlock Brook? and the source of it Horse-skull Meadow? 

Hear the pleasant chill-lill of the F. hyemalis, the first time have heard this note. This, too, suggests pleasant associations. 

By the river, see distinctly red-wings and hear their conqueree. They are not associated with grackles. They are an age before their cousins, have attained to clearness and liquidity. They are officers, epauletted; the others are rank and file. I distinguish one even by its flight, hovering slowly from tree-top to tree-top, as if ready to utter its liquid notes. Their whistle is very clear and sharp, while the grackle's is ragged and split. 

It is a fine evening, as I stand on the bridge. The waters are quite smooth; very little ice to be seen. The red-wing and song sparrow are singing, and a flock of tree sparrows is pleasantly warbling. A new era has come. The red-wing's gurgle-ee is heard when smooth waters begin; they come together. 

One or two boys are out trying their skiffs, even like the fuzzy gnats in the sun, and as often as one turns his boat round on the smooth surface, the setting sun is reflected from its side. 

I feel reproach when I have spoken with levity, when I have made a jest, of my own existence. The makers have thus secured seriousness and respect for their work in our very organization. The most serious events have their ludicrous aspect, such as death; but we cannot excuse ourselves when we have taken this view of them only. It is pardonable when we spurn the proprieties, even the sanctities, making them stepping-stones to something higher.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 19, 1858

Another pleasant and warm day. Painted my boat afternoon. See March 19, 1855 ("A fine clear and warm day for the season. Launch my boat.")

I hear turkeys gobble. See March 20, 1856 ("For two or three days I have heard the gobbling of turkeys, the first spring sound")

Hear the pleasant chill-lill of the F. hyemalis, the first time have heard this note. See March 18, 1857 ("I hear the chill-lill or tchit-a-tchit of the slate-colored sparrow, and see it."); March 20, 1852 ("And now, within a day or two, I have noticed the chubby slate-colored snowbird (Fringilla hyemalis?),. . . It has two white feathers in its tail."); March 20, 1855 ("At my landing I hear the F. hyemalis,”)


They are officers, epauletted. The red-wing's gurgle-ee is heard when smooth waters begin. See March 16, 1860 (" How handsome as they go by in a checker, each with a bright-scarlet shoulder! "); March 17, 1858 ("Now I hear . . .the tchuck tchuck of a blackbird, and after, a distinct conqueree. So it is a red-wing?"); March 18, 1857 ("And now from far southward coming on through the air, the chattering of blackbirds, —probably red-wings, for I hear an imperfect conqueree."); March 19, 1855 ("I hear at last the tchuck tchuck of a blackbird and, looking up, see him flying high over the river southwesterly in great haste to reach somewhere."); March 22,1855 ("[T]he blackbirds already sing o-gurgle ee-e-e from time to time on the top of a willow or elm or maple, but oftener a sharp, shrill whistle or a tchuck.”)