A Book of the Seasons: November 1 (November, flocking crows, gossamer, birch, a poetic mood, luminous blue reflections)

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

November 1

It is a bright, clear,

warm November day.

I feel blessed.

I love my life.

I warm toward

all nature.

November 1, 1851

November 1, 2016

In November, a man will eat his heart, if in any month. November 1, 1852

As I go up the back road, I am struck with the general stillness as far as birds are concerned. November 1, 1853

It is a little cooler.  November 1, 1854

The road and ruts are all frosted and stiff, and the grass and clover leaves.   November 1, 1853

A warm, mizzling kind of rain for two days past and still. November 1, 1852

After a rain-threatening morning it is a beautiful Indian-summer day, the most remarkable hitherto and equal to any of the kind. November 1, 1855

A perfect Indian-summer day, and wonderfully warm. 72+ at 1 P. M. and probably warmer at two.   November 1, 1860

The air is still and warm. The river is perfectly smooth. November 1, 1855

The butterflies are out again . . . and yellow-winged grasshoppers with blackish edges.  November 1, 1860

The crickets now sound faintly and from very deep in the sod.   November 1, 1851

A striped snake basks in the sun amid dry leaves.  November 1, 1860

Now that the sun is fairly risen, I see and hear a flock of larks in Wheeler's meadow. November 1, 1853. 

I now hear a robin, and see and hear some noisy and restless jays, and a song sparrow chips faintly. November 1, 1853

At this season there are stranger sparrows or finches about.   November 1, 1851

Counted one hundred and twenty five crows in one straggling flock moving westward. November 1, 1851

As I return, I notice crows flying southwesterly in a very long straggling flock, of which I see probably neither end.  November 1, 1853

Gossamer on the withered grass is shimmering in the fields, and flocks of it are sailing in the air. November 1, 1860

It is a remarkable day for fine gossamer cobwebs. November 1, 1851

If at a distance you see the birch near its top forking into two or more white limbs, you may know it for a canoe birch. November 1, 1851

The white birch seeds begin to fall and leave the core bare.   November 1, 1853

The ground wears its red carpet under the pines. November 1, 1851

The grass has got a new greenness in spots. November 1, 1851

The skunk-cabbage is already pushing up again. November 1, 1851

Fall dandelions look bright still. November 1, 1851

The cinquefoil on Conantum. November 1, 1851

The witch-hazels have mostly lost their blossoms, perhaps on account of the snow. November 1, 1851 

I see much witch-hazel in the swamp by the south end of the Abiel Wheeler grape meadow. Some of it is quite fresh and bright. . . .What a lively spray it has, both in form and color! . . .They impart to the whole hillside a speckled, parti-colored look.  November 1, 1857

Another cloudy afternoon after a clear morning.   November 1, 1857

When I enter the woods I notice the drier crispier rustle of withered leaves on the oak trees, – a sharper susurrus. November 1, 1857

The red shrub oak leaves abide on the hills. November 1, 1851

Going over the high field west of the cut, my foot strikes a rattle-pod in the stubble, and it is betrayed. From that faint sound I knew it must be there, and went back and found it. I could have told it as well in the dark. How often I have found pennyroyal by the fragrance it emitted when bruised by my feet! November 1, 1857

The maples and swamp oaks and willows are for the most part bare, but some of the oaks are partly clothed yet with withered leaves.  November 1, 1855

The larches are at the height of their change.  November 1, 1857

The hawthorn is but three-quarters fallen and is a greenish yellow or yellowish green. November 1, 1858

The alders have lost their leaves, and the willows except a few shrivelled ones. November 1, 1851

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. November 1, 1858

The pitch pines show new buds at the end of their plumes.   November 1, 1851

 While getting the azaleas, I notice the shad-bush conspicuously leafing out. Those long, narrow, pointed buds, prepared for next spring, have anticipated their time. November 1, 1853

I see the common prinos berries partly eaten about the hole of a mouse under a stump. November 1, 1857

As I approached their edge, I saw the woods beneath, Fair Haven Pond, and the hills across the river, . . .between the converging boughs of two white pines a rod or two from me on the edge of the rock; and I thought that there was no frame to a landscape equal to this, — to see, between two near pine boughs, whose lichens are distinct, a distant forest and lake, the one frame, the other picture. November 1, 1852

As I return by the Well Meadow Field and then Wheeler’s large wood, the sun shines from over Fair Haven Hill into the wood, and I see that the sun, when low, will shine into a thick wood, which you had supposed always dark, as much as twenty rods, lighting it all up, making the gray, lichen-clad stems of the trees all warm and bright with light, and a distinct black shadow behind each. As if every grove, however dense, had its turn. November 1, 1857

The woods are now much more open than when I last observed them; the leaves have fallen, and they let in light, and I see the sky through them as through a crow's wing in every direction. November 1, 1851

For the most part only the pines and oaks (white?) retain their leaves. At a distance, accordingly, the forest is green and reddish.   November 1, 1851

The lowest and most succulent oak sprouts in exposed places are red or green longest. Large trees quite protected from sun and wind will be greener still. November 1, 1857

Many black oaks are bare in Sleepy Hollow. November 1, 1858

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  November 1, 1858

As I paddle under the Leaning Hemlocks, the breeze rustles the boughs, and showers of their fresh winged seeds come wafted down to the water and are carried round and onward in the great eddy there. November 1, 1853

I see so far and distinctly, my eyes seem to slide in this clear air. The river is peculiarly sky-blue to-day, not dark as usual. It is all in the air. November 1, 1851

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. November 1, 1858

It is a bright, clear, warm November day. I feel blessed. I love my life. I warm toward all nature. November 1, 1851

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. November 1, 1858  

There is no more tempting novelty than this new November.   November 1, 1858

This is the aspect under which the Musketaquid might be represented at this season: a long, smooth lake, reflecting the bare willows and button-bushes, the stubble, and the wool-grass on its tussock, a muskrat-cabin or two conspicuous on its margin amid the unsightly tops of pontederia, and a bittem disappearing on undulating wing around a bend.  November 1, 1855

This is the November shore. November 1, 1855

This, too, is the recovery of the year, — as if the year, having nearly or quite accomplished its work, and abandoned all design, were in a more favorable and poetic mood, and thought rushed in to fill the vacuum.  November 1, 1855

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. November 1, 1858

I leaned over a rail in the twilight on the Walden road, waiting for the evening mail to be distributed, when . . . 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! November 1, 1858

Returning in the twilight, I see a bat over the river. November 1, 1855

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. November 1, 1858

November 1, 2 016

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  Birches in Season

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the American Crow

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Blue Jay

 A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Witch-Hazel

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  The Scarlet Oak

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Pine Fall 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Shrub Oak

 A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Gossamer Days

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Indian Summer

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November Sunsets

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November Moods

November 1, 2019

June 19, 1852 (“Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth, samara?, tinged with his expectation.”)
July 16, 1851 ("I love and worship myself with a love which absorbs my love for the world.")
August 15, 1851 ("May I love and revere myself above all the gods that men have ever invented.")
October 22, 1858 ("I see, from the Cliffs, that color has run through the shrub oak plain like a fire or a wave, not omitting a single tree.")
October 28, 1857("The white pine needles on the ground are already turned considerably redder.")

.October 29, 1858 ("The birch has now generally dropped its golden spangles")

October 31, 1858("As I sit on the Cliff there, the sun is now getting low, and the woods in Lincoln south and east of me are lit up by its more level rays, and there is brought out a more brilliant redness in the scarlet oaks, scattered so equally over the forest, than you would have believed was in them. Every tree of this species which is visible in these directions, even to the horizon, now stands out distinctly red.")

November 2, 1853 ("The witch-hazel appears to be nearly out of bloom, most of the flowers withering or frost-bitten ")

 November 2, 1858 ("In sprout-lands some young birches are still rather leafy and bright-colored.")

November 2, 1858 ("Going over the newly cleared pasture on the northeast of Fair Haven Hill, I see that the scarlet oaks are more generally bright than on the 22d . . . they interest me more than the maples, they are so widely and equally dispersed throughout the forest; they are so hardy, a nobler tree on the whole, lasting into November; our chief November flower, abiding the approach of winter with us, imparting warmth to November prospects.")

November 3, 1857 ("It is a phenomenon peculiar to this season, when the twigs are bare and the air is clear. I cannot easily tell what is cobweb and what twig,")

 November 4, 1854 ("The shad-bush buds have expanded into small leaflets already.")

November 6, 1853 ("The witch-hazel spray is peculiar and interesting, with little knubs at short intervals, zig zag, crinkle-crankle. How happens it? Did the leaves grow so close? The bud is long against the stem, with a neck to it. ")
November 4, 1852 ("Saw witch-hazels out of bloom, some still fresh.")
November 7, 1855 ("Looking west over Wheeler’s meadow, I see that there has been much gossamer on the grass, and it is now revealed by the dewy mist which has collected on it.”)
November 9, 1851 ("Facts should only be as the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology which I am writing;. . .facts to tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought:. . . I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought -- with these I deal.")
November 15, 1858 ("Gossamer, methinks, belongs to the latter part of October and first part of November")
November 21, 1850 ("Seeing the sun falling . . .in an angle where this forest meets a hill covered with shrub oaks, affects me singularly, reinspiring me with all the dreams of my youth . . . It is one of the avenues to my future.")
February 18, 1852 ("I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant, ... I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all.")

November 1, 2021

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.

  April 7, 1853 

October 31 <<<<<<<<<  November 1 >>>>>>>>  November 2

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November 1

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 © 2009-2022

https://tinyurl.com/HDT01Nov

First of all a man must see, before he can say.

November 1.

November 1, 2021

It is a rare qualification to be able to state a fact simply and adequately, to digest some experience cleanly, to say “yes” and “no” with authority, to make a square edge, to conceive and suffer the truth to pass through us living and intact, even as a waterfowl an eel, as it flies over the meadows, thus stocking new waters.

First of all a man must see, before he can say.

Statements are made but partially. Things are said with reference to certain conventions or existing institutions, not absolutely.

A fact truly and absolutely stated is taken out of the region of common sense and acquires a mythologic or universal significance. Say it and have done with it. Express it without expressing yourself.  See not with the eye of science, which is barren, nor of youthful poetry, which is impotent. But taste the world and digest it.

It would seem as if things got said but rarely and by chance.

As you see, so at length will you say.

When facts are seen superficially, they are seen as they lie in relation to certain institutions, perchance.

But I would have them expressed as more deeply seen, with deeper references; so that the hearer or reader cannot recognize them or apprehend their significance from the platform of common life, but it will be necessary that he be in a sense translated in order to understand them; when the truth respecting his things shall naturally exhale from a man like the odor of the muskrat from the coat of the trapper.

At first blush a man is not capable of reporting truth; he must be drenched and saturated with it first.

What was enthusiasm in the young man must become temperament in the mature man. Without excitement, heat, or passion, he will survey the world which excited the youth and threw him off his balance.

As all things are significant, so all words should be significant.

It is a fault which attaches to the speaker, to speak flippantly or superficially of anything.

Of what use are words which do not move the hearer, are not oracular and fateful? 

A style in which the matter is all in all, and the manner nothing at all.

In your thoughts no more than in your walks do you meet men.

In moods I find such privacy as in dismal swamps and on mountain-tops.

Man recognizes laws little enforced, and he condescends to obey them. In the moment that he feels his superiority to them as compulsatory, he, as it were, courteously reënacts them but to obey them.

This on my way to Conantum, 2.30 P. M. 

November 1, 2018

It is a bright, clear, warm November day. I feel blessed. I love my life. I warm toward all nature.

The woods are now much more open than when I last observed them; the leaves have fallen, and they let in light, and I see the sky through them as through a crow's wing in every direction.

For the most part only the pines and oaks (white?) retain their leaves. At a distance, accordingly, the forest is green and reddish.

The crickets now sound faintly and from very deep in the sod.

Minott says that G. M. Barrett told him that Amos Baker told him that during Concord Fight he went over behind the hill to the old Whittaker place (Sam Buttrick's) and stayed. Yet he was described as the only survivor of Concord Fight. Received a pension for running away? 

Fall dandelions look bright still.

The grass has got a new greenness in spots.

At this season there are stranger sparrows or finches about.

The skunk-cabbage is already pushing up again.

The alders have lost their leaves, and the willows except a few shrivelled ones.

It is a remarkable day for fine gossamer cobwebs. Here in the causeway, as I walk toward the sun, I perceive that the air is full of them streaming from off the willows and spanning the road, all stretching across the road, and yet I cannot see them in any other direction, and feel not one. It looks as if the birds would be incommoded. They have the effect of a shimmer in the air. This shimmer, moving along them as they are waved by the wind, gives the effect of a drifting storm of light. It is more like a fine snow-storm which drifts athwart your path than anything else. What is the peculiar condition of the atmosphere, to call forth this activity? If there were no sunshine, I should never find out that they existed, I should not know that I was bursting a myriad barriers. Though you break them with your person, you feel not one.
Why should this day be so distinguished? 

The rain of night before last has raised the river at least two feet, and the meadows wear a late-fall look. The naked and weedy stems of the button-bush are suddenly submerged; you no longer look for pickerel from the bridges. The shallow and shrunken shore is also submerged.

I see so far and distinctly, my eyes seem to slide in this clear air.

The river is peculiarly sky-blue to-day, not dark as usual.

It is all in the air.

The cinquefoil on Conantum.

Counted one hundred and twenty five crows in one straggling flock moving westward.

The red shrub oak leaves abide on the hills.

The witch-hazels have mostly lost their blossoms, perhaps on account of the snow.

The ground wears its red carpet under the pines.

The pitch pines show new buds at the end of their plumes. How long this?

Saw a canoe birch by road beyond the Abel Minott house; distinguished it thirty rods off by the chalky whiteness of its limbs.
It is of a more unspotted, transparent, and perhaps pinkish white than the common, has considerable branches as well as white ones, and its branches do not droop and curl downward like that. There will be some loose curls of bark about it.

The common birch is finely branched and has frequently a snarly head; the former is a more open and free-growing tree.

If at a distance you see the birch near its top forking into two or more white limbs, you may know it for a canoe birch. You can tell where it has grown after the wood has turned to mould by a small fragment of its bark still left,-if it divides readily.

The common birch is more covered with moss, has the aspect of having grown more slowly, and has many more branches.

I have heard of a man in Maine who copied the whole Bible on to birch bark.

It was so much easier than to write that sentence which the birch tree stands for.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 1, 1851

I feel blessed. I love my life. I warm toward all nature. See July 16, 1851 ("I love and worship myself with a love which absorbs my love for the world.");  August 15, 1851 ("May I love and revere myself above all the gods that men have ever invented.")

At first blush a man is not capable of reporting truth; he must be drenched and saturated with it first. See November 1, 1857 ("A higher truth, though only dimly hinted at, thrills us more than a lower expressed. ");  See also December 16, 1837("The fact will one day flower out into a truth.");June 19, 1852 (“Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth.”); February 18, 1852 ("I have a commonplace-book for facts and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in my mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success . . . I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant . . . I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all."); February 23. 1860 ("A fact stated barely is dry. It must be the vehicle of some humanity in order to interest us. It is like giving a man a stone when he asks you for bread.")

It is a rare qualification to be able to state a fact simply and adequately. See May 21, 1851 ("I think that the existence of man in nature is the divinest and most startling of all facts."); November 9, 1851 ("Facts should only be as the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology which I am writing;. . .facts to tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought:. . . I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought -- with these I deal."); February 18, 1852 ("I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant, ... I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all."); June 19, 1852 (“Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth, samara?, tinged with his expectation.”); May 10, 1853 (“I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant”); May 6, 1854 (“There is no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i. e. to be significant, must be subjective. ”); November 5, 1857 ("I think that the man of science makes this mistake, and the mass of mankind along with him: that you should coolly give your chief attention to the phenomenon which excites you as something independent on you, and not as it is related to you.”)

It is a remarkable day for fine gossamer cobwebs. See November 1, 1860 ("Gossamer on the withered grass is shimmering in the fields, and flocks of it are sailing in the air."). See also November 7, 1855 ("Looking west over Wheeler’s meadow, I see that there has been much gossamer on the grass, and it is now revealed by the dewy mist which has collected on it.”); November 15, 1858 ("Gossamer, methinks, belongs to the latter part of October and first part of November"); see also note to November 3, 1857 ("Looking westward now, at 4 P.M., I see against the sunlight, where the twigs of a maple and black birch intermingle, a little gossamer or fine cobwebs, but much more the twigs, especially of the birch, waving slightly, reflect the light like cobwebs. It is a phenomenon peculiar to this season, when the twigs are bare and the air is clear. I cannot easily tell what is cobweb and what twig,") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Gossamer Days

Counted one hundred and twenty five crows in one straggling flock moving westward. See November 1, 1853 ("I notice crows flying southwesterly in a very long straggling flock, of which I see probably neither end.") See also October 20, 1859 ("I see a large and very straggling flock of crows fly southwest from over the hill behind Bull's and contending with the strong and cold northwest wind. This is the annual phenomenon. They are on their migrations."); October 29, 1855 ("I see and count about a hundred crows advancing in a great rambling flock from the southeast and crossing the river on high, and cawing.");  October 28, 1860 ("See a very large flock of crows").Compare March 5, 1854 ("And crows, as I think, migrating northeasterly. They come in loose, straggling flocks, about twenty to each, commonly silent, a quarter to a half a mile apart, till four flocks have passed, perhaps more. Methinks I see them going southwest in the fall.") Also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau: The American Crow

November 1. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November 1

It is a bright clear

warm November day.

I feel blessed.

I love my life.

I warm toward all nature.

Gossamer cobwebs

shimmer in the air as a

drifting storm of light

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, First of all a man must see, before he can say.

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-511101

In November, a man will eat his heart, if in any month

November 1. 

November 1, 2019

A warm, mizzling kind of rain for two days past and still. 

Stellaria media in Cheney's garden, as last spring, butter-and-eggs, that small white aster (A. dumosus?), the small white fleabane, hedge-mustard. 

Day before yesterday to the Cliffs in the rain, misty rain. 

As I approached their edge, I saw the woods beneath, Fair Haven Pond, and the hills across the river, — which, owing to the mist, was as far as I could see, and seemed much further in consequence. I saw these between the converging boughs of two white pines a rod or two from me on the edge of the rock; and I thought that there was no frame to a landscape equal to this, — to see, between two near pine boughs, whose lichens are distinct, a distant forest and lake, the one frame, the other picture. 

November 1, 2019

In November, a man will eat his heart, if in any month. 

The birches have almost all lost their leaves. 

On the river this afternoon, the leaves, now crisp and curled, when the wind blows them on to the water become rude boats which float and sail about awhile conspicuously before they go to the bottom, — oaks, walnuts, etc. 

It is remarkable how native man proves himself to the earth, after all, and the completeness of his life in all its appurtenances. His alliances, how wide! He has domesticated not only beasts but fowl, not only hens and geese and ducks and turkeys, but his doves, winging their way to their dovecots over street and village and field, enhance the picturesqueness of his sky, to say nothing of his trained falcons, his beautiful scouts in the upper air. He is lord of the fowl and the brute. His allies are not only on the land, but in the air and water. The dove, the martin, the bluebird, the swallow, and, in some countries, the hawk have attached themselves to his fortunes. The doves that wing their way so near the clouds, they too are man's retainers.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 1, 1852

Stellaria media in Cheney's garden, as last spring, butter-and-eggs, that small white aster (A. dumosus?), the small white fleabane, hedge-mustard. See August 6,1852 ("Stellaria media at R. W. E.'s. Is it the same, then, which I saw in Cheney's garden so early ?"); November 5, 1855 (“I see the shepherd’s-purse, hedge-mustard, and red clover, — November flowers. ”)

To see, between two near pine boughs, whose lichens are distinct, a distant forest and lake, the one frame, the other picture.See November 3, 1857 ("To see a remote landscape between two near rocks! ")

In November, a man will eat his heart, if in any month. See November 13, 1851 ("Such a day as will almost oblige a man to eat his own heart. A day in which you must hold on to life by your teeth."); November 14, 1858 ("I walk on frozen ground two thirds covered with a sugaring of dry snow, and this strong and cutting northwest wind makes the oak leaves rustle dryly enough to set your heart on edge."); November 25, 1857 ("November Eatheart, — is that the name of it?"); November 27, 1853 ("Now a man will eat his heart, if ever, now while the earth is bare, barren and cheerless, and we have the coldness of winter without the variety of ice and snow; but methinks the variety and compensation are in the stars now."); Compare November 20, 1858 ("The glory of November is in its silvery, sparkling lights .")

The birches have almost all lost their leaves. November 1, 1853 ("The white birch seeds begin to fall and leave the core bare."

On the river this afternoon, the leaves, now crisp and curled, ... become rude boats which float and sail about. See note to October 17, 1856  ("Countless leafy skiffs are floating on pools and lakes and rivers and in the swamps and meadows.")