July 23.
Wednesday.
I remember the last moon, shining through a creamy atmosphere, with a tear in the eye of Nature and her tresses dishevelled and drooping, sliding up the sky, the glistening air, the leaves shining with dew, pulsating upward; an atmosphere unworn, unprophaned by day.
What self-healing in Nature !-swept by the dews.
For some weeks past the roadsides and the dry and trivial fields have been covered with the field trefoil (Trifolium arvense), now in bloom.
8 A. M. – A comfortable breeze blowing.
Methinks I can write better in the afternoon, for the novelty of it, if I should go abroad this morning.
My genius makes distinctions which my understanding cannot, and which my senses do not report.
If I should reverse the usual, — go forth and saunter in the fields all the forenoon, then sit down in my chamber in the afternoon, which it is so unusual for me to do,-it would be like a new season to me, and the novelty of it (would) inspire me.
The wind has fairly blown me outdoors; the elements were so lively and active, and I so sympathized with them, that I could not sit while the wind went by.
And I am reminded that we should especially improve the summer to live out-of-doors.
When we may so easily, it behooves us to break up this custom of sitting in the house, for it is but a custom, and I am not sure that it has the sanction of common sense.
A man no sooner gets up than he sits down again.
Fowls leave their perch in the morning, and beasts their lairs, unless they are such as go abroad only by night.
The cockerel does not take up a new perch in the barn, and he is the embodiment of health and common sense.
Is the literary man to live always or chiefly sitting in a chamber through which nature enters by a window only? What is the use of the summer? You must walk so gently as to hear the finest sounds, the faculties being in repose.
Your mind must not perspire.
True, out of doors my thought is commonly drowned, as it were, and shrunken, pressed down by stupendous piles of light ethereal influences, for the pressure of the atmosphere is still fifteen pounds to a square inch.
I can do little more than preserve the equilibrium and resist the pressure of the atmosphere.
I can only nod like the rye-heads in the breeze.
I expand more surely in my chamber, as far as expression goes, as if that pressure were taken off; but here out doors is the place to store up influences.
The swallow's twitter is the sound of the lapsing waves of the air, or when they break and burst, as his wings represent the ripple.
He has more air in his bones than other birds; his feet are defective.
The fish of the air.
His note is the voice of the air.
As fishes may hear the sound of waves lapsing on the surface and see the outlines of the ripples, so we hear the note and see the flight of swallows.
The influences which make for one walk more than another, and one day more than another, are much more ethereal than terrestrial.
It is the quality of the air much more than the quality of the ground that concerns the walker, — cheers or depresses him.
What he may find in the air, not what he may find on the ground.
On such a road (the Corner) I walk securely, seeing far and wide on both sides, as if I were flanked by light infantry on the hills, to rout the provincials, as the British marched into Concord, while my grenadier thoughts keep the main road.
That is, my light-armed and wandering thoughts scour the neighboring fields, and so I know if the coast is clear.
With what a breadth of van I advance ! I am not bounded by the walls.
I think more than the road full. (Going southwesterly.)
While I am abroad, the ovipositors plant their seeds in me; I am fly-blown with thought, and go home to hatch and brood over them.
I was too discursive and rambling in my thought for the chamber, and must go where the wind blows on me walking . . . . .
A little brook crossing the road (the Corner road), a few inches’depth of transparent water rippling over yellow sand and pebbles, the pure blood of nature.
How miraculously crystal-like, how exquisite, fine, and subtle, and liquid this element, which an imperceptible inclination in the channel causes to flow thus surely and swiftly! How obedient to its instinct, to the faintest suggestion of the hills! If inclined but a hair’s breadth, it is in a torrent haste to obey.
And all the revolutions of the planet — nature is so exquisitely adjusted – and the attraction of the stars do not disturb this equipoise, but the rills still flow the same way, and the water levels are not disturbed.
We are not so much like debauchees as in the after noon.
The mind is subject to moods, as the shadows of clouds pass over the earth.
Pay not too much heed to them.
Let not the traveller stop for them.
They consist with the fairest weather.
By the mood of my mind, I suddenly felt dissuaded from continuing my walk, but I observed at the same instant that the shadow of a cloud was passing over [ the ] spot on which I stood, though it was of small extent, which, if it had no connection with my mood, at any rate suggested how transient and little to be regarded that mood was.
I kept on, and in a moment the sun shone on my walk within and without.
The button-bush in blossom.
The tobacco-pipe in damp woods.
Certain localities only a few rods square in the fields and on the hills, sometimes the other side of a wall, attract me as if they had been the scene of pleasure in another state of existence:
But this habit of close observation, — in Humboldt, Darwin, and others. Is it to be kept up long, this science?
Do not tread on the heels of your experience. Be impressed without making a minute of it. Poetry puts an interval between the impression and the expression, — waits till the seed germinates naturally.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 23, 1851
This habit of close observation. . . See
September 13, 1852 (“I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest, but suffer from a constant strain. When I have found myself ever looking down and confining my gaze to the flowers, I have thought it might be well to get into the habit of observing the clouds as a corrective; but no! that study would be just as bad. It is as bad to study stars and clouds as flowers and stones.”):
March 23, 1853 (“I feel that I am dissipated by so many observations. . . . I have almost a slight, dry headache as the result of all this observing.”); See also Chapter 3,
Thoreau and Humboldtean Science in Seeing New Worlds; and Chapter 19,
Henry David Thoreau and Humboldt in The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
I am reminded that we should especially improve the summer to live out-of-doors.
Here out doors is the place to store up influences. See
December 29, 1856 (“We must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day. . . .. Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always.”)
September 13, 1859 ("You must be outdoors long, early and late, and travel far and earnestly, in order to perceive the phenomena of the day. ")
The mind is subject to moods, as the shadows of clouds pass over the earth. See
January 26, 1852 ("Would you see your mind, look at the sky. Would you know your own moods, be weather-wise.");
February 18, 1860 ("Sometimes, when I go forth at 2 P. M., there is scarcely a cloud in the sky, but soon one will appear in the west and steadily advance and expand itself, and so change the whole character of the afternoon and of my thoughts. ")
A little brook crossing the road . . . a few inches’depth of transparent water rippling over yellow sand and pebbles. See March 26, 1860 (" One of the most interesting sights this afternoon is the color of the yellow sand in the sun at the bottom of Nut Meadow and Second Division Brooks. The yellow sands of a lonely brook seen through the rippling water, with the shadows of the ripples like films passing over it. ")
. . See
Do not tread on the heels of your experience.
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021
