What is there in music that it should so stir our deeps? / The deer mouse will be printing on the snow of Well Meadow.

January 15. 

January 15, 2017

P. M. — To Fair Haven Pond and across to railroad. 

As I passed the south shed at the depot, observed what I thought a tree sparrow on the wood in the shed, a mere roof open at the side, under which several men were at that time employed sawing wood with a horse power. Looking closer, I saw, to my surprise, that it must be a song sparrow, it having the usual marks on its breast and no bright-chestnut crown. The snow is nine or ten inches deep, and it appeared to have taken refuge in this shed, where was much bare ground exposed by removing the wood. When I advanced, instead of flying away, it concealed itself in the wood, just as it often dodges behind a wall.

What is there in music that it should so stir our deeps? We are all ordinarily in a state of desperation; such is our life; ofttimes it drives us to suicide. To how many, perhaps to most, life is barely tolerable, and if it were not for the fear of death or of dying, what a multitude would immediately commit suicide! But let us hear a strain of music, we are at once advertised of a life which no man had told us of, which no preacher preaches. 

Suppose I try to describe faithfully the prospect which a strain of music exhibits to me. 

The field of my life becomes a boundless plain, glorious to tread, with no death nor disappointment at the end of it. All meanness and trivialness disappear. I become adequate to any deed. No particulars survive this expansion; persons do not survive it. In the light of this strain there is no thou nor I. We are actually lifted above ourselves.

The tracks of the mice near the head of Well Meadow were particularly interesting. There was a level surface of pure snow there, unbroken by bushes or grass, about four rods across, and here were nine tracks of mice running across it from the bushes on this side to those on the other, the tracks quite near together but repeatedly crossing each other at very acute angles, but each particular course was generally quite direct. The snow was so light that only one distinct track was made by all four of the feet, five or six inches apart, but the tail left a very distinct mark. 

A single track, thus stretching away almost straight, sometimes half a dozen rods, over unspotted snow, is very handsome, like a chain of a new pattern; and then they suggest an airy lightness in the body that impressed them. Though there may have been but one or two here, the tracks suggesting quite a little company that had gone gadding over to their neighbors under the opposite bush. 

Such is the delicacy of the impression on the surface of the lightest snow, where other creatures sink, and night, too, being the season when these tracks are made, they remind me of a fairy revel. It is almost as good as if the actors were here. I can easily imagine all the rest. Hopping is expressed by the tracks themselves. 

Yet I should like much to see by broad daylight a company of these revellers hopping over the snow. There is a still life in America that is little observed or dreamed of. Here were possible auditors and critics which the lecturer at the Lyceum last night did not think of. How snug they are somewhere under the snow now, not to be thought of, if it were not for these pretty tracks! 

And for a week, or fortnight even, of pretty still weather the tracks will remain, to tell of the nocturnal adventures of a tiny mouse who was not beneath the notice of the Lord. 

So it was so many thousands of years before Gutenberg invented printing with his types, and so it will be so many thousands of years after his types are forgotten, perchance.  The deer mouse will be printing on the snow of Well Meadow to be read by a new race of men. 

Cold as the weather is and has been, almost all the brook is open in the meadow there, an artery of black water in the midst of the snow, and there are many sink-holes, where the water is exposed at the bottom of a dimple in the snow. Indeed, in some places these little black spots are distributed very thickly, the snow in swells covering the intervening tussocks.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 15, 1857



Looking closer, I saw, to my surprise, that it must be a song sparrow, taken refuge in this shed. January 22, 1857 ("Minott tells me that Sam Barrett told him once when he went to mill that a song sparrow took up its quarters in his grist-mill and stayed there all winter."); January 28, 1857 (“Am again surprised to see a song sparrow sitting for hours on our wood-pile in the yard, in the midst of snow in the yard.”)

What is there in music that it should so stir our deeps? See  January 13, 1857 ("one thrumming a guitar . . . reminds me of moments that I have lived. . . .”); May 19, 1856 ("I am always thus affected when I hear in the fields any singing or instrumental music at the end of the day. “);April19, 1856 ("Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, — passing travellers singing. My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. “); May 23, 1854("There was a time when the beauty and the music were all within, and I sat and listened to my thoughts, and there was a song in them. I sat for hours on rocks and wrestled with the melody which possessed me. I sat and listened by the hour to a positive though faint and distant music . . .. When I walked with a joy which knew not its own origin.”); December 31, 1853 ("I hear very distinctly from the railroad causeway the whistle of the locomotive on the Lowell road. I hear it, and I realize and see clearly what at other times I only dimly remember. . . . It, as it were, takes me out of my body and gives me the freedom of all bodies and all nature. . . . The contact of sound with a human ear whose hearing is pure and unimpaired is coincident with an ecstasy.”); August 3, 1852 (" At the east window. — A temperate noon. I hear a cricket creak in the shade; also the sound of a distant piano. . . . At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree.”); June 22, 1851 ("The world is a musical instrument. The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure. I awake to its music with the calmness of a lake when there is not a breath of wind. . . .And without effort our depths are revealed to ourselves.”);  July 16, 1851("This earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains. To have such sweet impressions made on us, such ecstasies begotten of the breezes ! I can remember how I was astonished. I said to myself, — I said to others, — " There comes into my mind such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion, and [I] have had nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers.1 This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself.”)

The tracks suggesting quite a little company that had gone gadding over to their neighbors under the opposite bush. See January 31, 1856 (“The tracks of the mice suggest extensive hopping in the night and going a-gadding.”); December 27, 1857 ("Mice have been abroad in the night. We are almost ready to believe that they have been shut up in the earth all the rest of the year because we have not seen their tracks.”)

There is so much more life than is suspected in the most solitary and dreariest scene.

January 14. 

P. M. — Up Assabet on ice. 

I go slumping four or five inches in the snow on the river, and often into water above the ice, breaking through a slight crust under the snow, which has formed in the night. 

Each cold day this concealed overflow, mixing with the snow beneath, is converted into ice, and so raises it, makes the surface snow shallower, and improves the walking; but unless it is quite cold, this snow and water is apt to get a slight crust only, through which you sink. 

I notice, on the black willows and also on the alders and white maples overhanging the stream, numerous dirty-white cocoons, about an inch long, attached by their sides to the base of the recent twigs and disguised by dry leaves curled about them, — a sort of fruit which these trees bear now. The leaves are not attached to the twigs, but artfully arranged about and fastened to the cocoons. Almost every little cluster of leaves contains a cocoon, apparently of one species. 

So that often when you would think that the trees were retaining their leaves, it is not the trees but the caterpillars that have retained them. I do not see a cluster of leaves on a maple, unless on a dead twig, but it conceals a cocoon. Yet I cannot find one alive; they are all crumbled within. 

The black willows retain very few of their narrow curled leaves here and there, like the terminal leafet of a fern (the alders and maples scarcely any ever), yet these few are just enough to withdraw attention from those which surround the cocoons. 

What kind of understanding was there between the mind that determined that these leaves should hang on during the winter, and that of the worm that fastened a few of these leaves to its cocoon in order to disguise it? 

I thus walk along the edge of the trees and bushes which overhang the stream, gathering the cocoons, which probably were thought to be doubly secure here. These cocoons, of course, were attached before the leaves had fallen. Almost every one is already empty, or contains only the relics of a nymph. It has been attacked and devoured by some foe. 

These numerous cocoons attached to the twigs over hanging the stream in the still and biting winter day suggest a certain fertility in the river borders, — impart a kind of life to them, — and so are company to me. There is so much more life than is suspected in the most solitary and dreariest scene. They are as much as the lisping of a chickadee. 

Hemlock seeds are scattered over the snow. 

The birch (white) catkins appear to lose their seeds first at the base, though that may be the uppermost. They are blown or shaken off, leaving a bare threadlike core.

Mr. Wild tells me that while he lived on Nantucket he never observed the thermometer lower than 2° above zero.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 14, 1857

What kind of understanding was there between the mind that determined that these leaves should hang on during the winter, and that of the worm that fastened a few of these leaves to its cocoon in order to disguise it? See December 17, 1853 ("While surveying for Daniel Weston in Lincoln to-day, see a great many — maybe a hundred — silvery-brown cocoons, wrinkled and flatfish, on young alders in a meadow, three or four inches long, fastened to the main stem and branches at same time, with dry alder and fragments of fern leaves attached to and partially concealing them; of some great moth.”); December 24, 1853 ("The largest are four inches long by two and a half, bag-shaped and wrinkled and partly concealed by dry leaves, — alder, ferns, etc., — attached as if sprinkled over them. This evidence of cunning in so humble a creature is affecting, for I am not ready to refer it to an intelligence which the creature does not share, as much as we do the prerogatives of reason. This radiation of the brain. The bare silvery cocoons would otherwise be too obvious. The worm has evidently said to itself: "Man or some other creature may come by and see my casket. I will disguise it, will hang a screen before it." Brake and sweet-fern and alder leaves are not only loosely sprinkled over it and dangling from it, but often, as it were, pasted close upon and almost incorporated into it.”); ; February 19, 1854 ("Though the particular twigs on which you find some cocoons may never or very rarely retain any leaves, . . . there are enough leaves left on other shrubs and trees to warrant their adopting this disguise. Yet it is startling to think that the inference has in this case been drawn by some mind that, as most other plants retain some leaves, the walker will suspect these also to. Each and all such disguises and other resources remind us that not some poor worm's instinct merely, as we call it, but the mind of the universe rather, which we share, has been intended upon each particular object. All the wit in the world was brought to bear on each case to secure its end. It was long ago, in a full senate of all intellects, determined how cocoons had best be suspended”)

A thrumming guitar reminds me of moments that I have lived.

January 13.

I hear one thrumming a guitar below stairs. It reminds me of moments that I have lived. 

What a comment on our life is the least strain of music! It lifts me up above all the dust and mire of the universe. I soar or hover with clean skirts over the field of my life. It is ever life within life, in concentric spheres. 

The field wherein I toil or rust at any time is at the same time the field for such different kinds of life! The farmer's boy or hired man has an instinct which tells him as much indistinctly, and hence his dreams and his restlessness; hence, even, it is that he wants money to realize his dreams with. The identical field where I am leading my humdrum life, let but a strain of music be heard there, is seen to be the field of some unrecorded crusade or tournament the thought of which excites in us an ecstasy of joy. 

The way in which I am affected by this faint thrumming advertises me that there is still some health and immortality in the springs of me. What an elixir is this sound! I, who but lately came and went and lived under a dish cover, live now under the heavens. It releases me; it bursts my bonds. 

Almost all, perhaps all, our life is, speaking comparatively, a stereotyped despair; i. e., we never at any time realize the full grandeur of our destiny. We forever and ever and habitually underrate our fate. 

Talk of infidels! Why, all of the race of man, except in the rarest moments when they are lifted above themselves by an ecstasy, are infidels. With the very best disposition, what does my belief amount to? This poor, timid, unenlightened, thick-skinned creature, what can it believe? I am, of course, hopelessly ignorant and unbelieving until some divinity stirs within me. 

Ninety-nine one-hundredths of our lives we are mere hedgers and ditchers, but from time to time we meet with reminders of our destiny. 

We hear the kindred vibrations, music! and we put out our dormant feelers unto the limits of the universe. We attain to a wisdom that passeth understanding. 

The stable continents undulate. The hard and fixed becomes fluid. "Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!" When I hear music I fear no danger, I am invulnerable, I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest. 

There are infinite degrees of life, from that which is next to sleep and death, to that which is forever awake and immortal. We must not confound man with man. We cannot conceive of a greater difference than between the life of one man and that of another. I am constrained to believe that the mass of men are never so lifted above themselves that their destiny is seen to be transcendently beautiful and grand.

 P. M. — On the river to Bittern Rock. 

The river is now completely concealed by snow. I come this way partly because it is the best walking here, the snow not so deep. 

The only wild life I notice is a crow on a distant oak. 

The snow is drifted and much deeper about the button-bushes, etc. It is surprising what an effect a thin barrier of bushes has on it, causing it to lodge there until often a very large drift is formed more or less abrupt on the south. 

Wool-grass still rises above the snow along the sides. In a very few places, for half a dozen feet the snow is blown off, revealing the dark transparent ice, in which I see numerous great white cleavages, which show its generous thickness, a foot at least. They cross each other at various angles and are frequently curved vertically, reflecting rainbow tints from within. Small triangles only a foot or two over are seen to be completely cracked around at the point of convulsion, yet it is as firm there as anywhere. 

I am proud of the strength of my floor, and love to jump and stamp there and bear my whole weight on it. As transparent as glass, yet you might found a house on it. Then there are little feathery flake-like twisted cleavages, which extend not more than an inch into it. 

I see no tracks but of mice, and apparently of foxes, which have visited every muskrat-house and then turned short away. 

Am surprised to see, returning, how much it has drifted in the Corner road. It has overflowed from the northern fields and lodged behind the north wall, forming drifts as high as the wall, which extend from one third to two thirds across the road for two long reaches, driving the traveller into the neighboring field, having some taken down the fence. 

It must be pleasant to ride along in the narrow path against the untouched and spotless edge of the drift, which curves over sharp like the visor of a cap. Sometimes this edge is bent down till it is almost vertical, yet a foot or two wide and only a few inches thick.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 13, 1857


We hear the kindred vibrations, music! and we put out our dormant feelers unto the limits of the universe. . . .I fear no danger, I am invulnerable, I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest.  See  December 31, 1853("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. . . . The contact of sound with a human ear whose hearing is pure and unimpaired is coincident with an ecstasy. ") August 3, 1852 (" At the east window. — A temperate noon. I hear a cricket creak in the shade; also the sound of a distant piano. The music reminds me of imagined heroic ages; it suggests such ideas of human life and the field which the earth affords as the few noblest passages of poetry. Those few interrupted strains which reach me through the trees suggest the same thoughts and aspirations that all melody, by whatever sense appreciated, has ever done. I am affected. What coloring variously fair and intense our life admits of! How a thought will mould and paint it! Impressed by some vague vision, as it were, elevated into a more glorious sphere of life, we no longer know this, we can deny its existence. We say we are enchanted, perhaps. But what I am impressed by is the fact that this enchantment is no delusion. So far as truth is concerned, it is a fact such as what we call our actual existence, but it is a far higher and more glorious fact. It is evidence of such a sphere, of such possibilities. It is its truth and reality that affect me. A thrumming of piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree.”) See also note to January 15, 1857 ("What is there in music that it should so stir our deeps?”)

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, I love you like I love the sky

January 13.  A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 13

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

I cannot afford to be telling my experience. I wish to be getting experience

January 11

Began snowing yesterday afternoon, and it is still snowing this forenoon. 

Mother remembers the Cold Friday very well. She lived in the house where I was born. The people in the kitchen — Jack Garrison, Esther, and a Hardy girl — drew up close to the fire, but the dishes which the Hardy girl was washing froze as fast as she washed them, close to the fire. They managed to keep warm in the parlor by their great fires. 

The other day a man came "just to get me to run a line in the woods." This is the usual request. "Do you know where one end of it is?" I asked. (It was the Stratton lot.) "No," said he, "I don't know either end; that is what I want to find." "Do you know either of the next sides of the lot ?" Thinking a moment, he answered, "No." "Well, do you know any one side of the whole lot, or any corner ?" After a little hesitation he said that he did not. 

Here, then, was a wood-lot of half a dozen acres, well enough described in a deed dated 1777, courses and distances given, but he could not tell exactly in what part of the universe any particular part of it was, but he expected me to find out. This was what he understood by "running." On the strength of this deed he had forbidden a man to chop wood somewhere. 

Frequently, when my employer does not know where his land lies, and has put into my hands an ancient and tattered piece of paper called his deed, which throws no light at all on the question, he turns away, saying, "I want you to make it all right. Give me all that belongs to me." 

In the deed of the Stratton wood-lot, dated 1777, there is no mention [of] any building on [it] to be conveyed, so that probably there was only a cellar-hole there then, eighty years ago, as now. For so long, at least, it has been a mere dent in the earth there, to which, from time to time, dead horses or hogs were drawn from the village and cast in. These are our Ninevehs and Babylons. I approach such a cellar-hole as Layard the scene of his labors, and I do not fail to find there relics as interesting to me as his winged bulls.

For some years past I have partially offered myself as a lecturer; have been advertised as such several years. Yet I have had but two or three invitations to lecture in a year, and some years none at all. I congratulate myself on having been permitted to stay at home thus, I am so much richer for it. I do not see what I should have got of much value, but money, by going about, but I do see what I should have lost. It seems to me that I have a longer and more liberal lease of life thus. 

I cannot afford to be telling my experience, especially to those who perhaps will take no interest in it. I wish to be getting experience. You might as well recommend to a bear to leave his hollow tree and run about all winter scratching at all the hollow trees in the woods. He would be leaner in the spring than if he had stayed at home and sucked his claws. 

As for the lecture-goers, it is none of their business what I think. I perceive that most make a great account of their relations, more or less personal and direct, to many men, coming before them as lecturers, writers, or public men. But all this is impertinent and unprofitable to me. I never yet recognized, nor was recognized by, a crowd of men. I was never assured of their existence, nor they of mine. 

There was wit and even poetry in the negro's answer to the man who tried to persuade him that the slaves would not be obliged to work in heaven. "Oh, you g'way, Massa. I know better. If dere's no work for cullud folks up dar, dey'll make some fur 'em, and if dere's nuffin better to do, dey'll make 'em shub de clouds along. You can't fool this chile, Massa" 

I was describing the other day my success in solitary and distant woodland walking outside the town. I do not go there to get my dinner, but to get that sustenance which dinners only preserve me to enjoy, with out which dinners are a vain repetition. But how little men can help me in this! only by having a kindred experience. Of what use to tell them of my happiness? Thus, if ever we have anything important to say, it might be introduced with the remark: "It is nothing to you, in particular. It is none of your business, I know." That is what might be called going into good society. 

I never chanced to meet with any man so cheering and elevating and encouraging, so infinitely suggestive, as the stillness and solitude of the Well Meadow Field. 

Men even think me odd and perverse because I do not prefer their society to this nymph or wood-god rather. But I have tried them. I have sat down with a dozen of them together in a club, and instantly — they did not inspire me. One or another abused our ears with many words and a few thoughts which were not theirs. There was very little genuine goodness apparent. We are such hollow pretenders. I lost my time. 

But out there! Who shall criticise that companion? It is like the hone to the knife. I bathe in that climate and am cleansed of all social impurities. I become a witness with unprejudiced senses to the order of the universe. There is nothing petty or impertinent, none to say, "See what a great man I am!" There chiefly, and not in the society of the wits, am I cognizant of wit. Shall I prefer a part, an infinitely small fraction, to the whole? There I get my underpinnings laid and repaired, cemented, levelled. There is my country club. We dine at the sign of the Shrub Oak, the New Albion House.

I demand of my companion some evidence that he has travelled further than the sources of the Nile, that he has seen something, that he has been out of town, out of the house. Not that he can tell a good story, but that he can keep a good silence. Has he attended to a silence more significant than any story? Did he ever get out of the road which all men and fools travel? You call yourself a great traveller, perhaps, but can you get beyond the influence of a certain class of ideas? 

I expect the time when there will be founded hospitals for the founders of hospitals.  

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 11, 1857


Cold Friday [January 19, 1810]. . . .See February 7, 1855 ("The old folks still refer to the Cold Friday, when they sat before great fires of wood four feet long, with a fence of blankets behind them, and water froze on the mantelpiece.")

I was describing the other day my success in solitary and distant woodland walking outside the town . . .  Of what use to tell them of my happiness?") See  January 4, 1857 ("I wish again to participate in the serenity of nature, to share the happiness of the river and the woods. "); January 6, 1857 ("'I stones are happy, Concord River is happy, and I am happy too.'") January 7, 1857 ("I get away a mile or two from the town into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me . . .and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself.") Note, Thoreau presented "Walking" December 18, 1856 and again in February, 1857.  See Thoreau's Lectures after Walden. 283-89

 I become a witness with unprejudiced senses to the order of the universe.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 11

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 ©  2009-2023

A Fuzzy Caterpillar.

January 8. 

January 8, 2017

I find by hanging Smith's thermometer on the same nail with ours that it stands 5° below ours. It was 18° at 3 p. m. by ours when I went out to walk. 

I picked up on the bare ice of the river, 

opposite the oak in Shattuck's land, 

on a small space blown bare of snow, 

a fuzzy caterpillar,

black at the two ends 

and red-brown in the middle, 

rolled into a ball 

or close ring, like a woodchuck.

I pressed it hard between my fingers and found it frozen. I put it into my hat, and when I took it out in the evening, it soon began to stir and at length crawled about, but a portion of it was not quite flexible. It took some time for it to thaw. This is the fifth cold day, and it must have been frozen so long. It was more than an inch long.

Shagbark Hickory with Porcupine  Den
January 8,  2017

Miss Minott tells me that she does not think her brother George has ever been to Boston more than once (though she tells me he says he has been twice), and certainly not since 1812. [He since tells me once.]

He was born in the Casey house, i. e. the same in which C. lived, the second of three that stood beyond the old black house beyond Moore's. Casey was a Guinea negro. Casey used to weep in his latter days when he thought of his wife and two children in Africa from whom he was kidnapped. Minott went only to the East Quarter schools. The house he now lives in is about sixty years old, was moved from beside Casey's to where it now stands be fore it was roofed. Minott says he has lived where he now does as much as sixty years. 

He has not been up in town for three years, on account of his rheumatism. Does nothing whatever in the house but read the newspapers and few old books they have, the Almanac especially, and hold the cats, and very little indeed out of the house. Is just able to saw and split the wood.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 8, 1857

A fuzzy caterpillar . . . See November 29, 1857 ("One of those fuzzy caterpillars, black at each end and rust-colored in middle, curled up in a ring, — the same kind that I find on the ice and snow, frozen, in winter."); January 5, 1858 ("I see one of those fuzzy winter caterpillars, black at the two ends and brown-red in middle, crawling on a rock by the Hunt's Bridge causeway. ") January 24, 1858 ("I see two of those black and red-brown fuzzy caterpillars in a mullein leaf on this bare edge-hill, which could not have blown from any tree, I think. They apparently take refuge in such places."); February 11, 1857 ("Near the other swamp white oak on Shattuck's piece I found another caterpillar on the ice.”); March 8, 1855 ("I see of late more than before of the fuzzy caterpillars, both black and reddish—brown.”).

Boston more than once . . . since 1812. See March 23, 1854 ("Minott confesses to me to-day that he has not been to Boston since the last war, or 1815.”)  and note to October 4, 1851 ("Minott is, perhaps, the most poetical farmer — who most realizes to me the poetry of the farmer's life — that I know . . . He loves to walk in a swamp in windy weather and hear the wind groan through the pines.");

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 8

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 ©  2009-2023

This is the fifth day of cold, blowing weather – alone in distant woods.

Almost every track

made yesterday in the snow. 

A dead leaf in it.

January 8, 1852

January 7. 

P. M. — To Walden down railroad and return over Cliffs. 

I should not be ashamed to have a shrub oak for my coat-of-arms. 

It is bitter cold, with a cutting northwest wind. The pond is now a plain snow-field, but there are no tracks of fishers on it. It is too cold for them. The surface of the snow there is finely waved and grained, giving it a sort of slaty fracture, the appearance which hard, dry blown snow assumes. All animate things are reduced to their lowest terms. 

This is the fifth day of cold, blowing weather. All tracks are concealed in an hour or two. Some have to make their paths two or three times over in a day. The fisherman is not here, for his lines would freeze in. 

I go through the woods toward the Cliffs along the side of the Well Meadow Field. There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me and excites such serene and profitable thought. The objects are elevating. 

In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it, — dining with the Governor or a member of Congress! ! 

But alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. 

I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. 

I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it. I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the America, out of my head and be sane a part of every day. If there are missionaries for the heathen, why not send them to me? I wish to know something; I wish to be made better. I wish to forget, a considerable part of every day, all mean, narrow, trivial men (and this requires usually to forego and forget all personal relations so long), and therefore I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplified. 

I get away a mile or two from the town into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself. 

Our skylights are thus far away from the ordinary resorts of men. I am not satisfied with ordinary windows. I must have a true skylight. My true sky light is on the outside of the village. 

I am not thus expanded, recreated, enlightened, when I meet a company of men. It chances that the sociable, the town and county, or the farmers' club does not prove a sky light to me. I do not invariably find myself translated under those circumstances. They bore me. The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks. 

This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort, or boneset, to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him. There at last my nerves are steadied, my senses and my mind do their office. 

I am aware that most of my neighbors would think it a hardship to be compelled to linger here one hour, especially this bleak day, and yet I receive this sweet and ineffable compensation for it. It is the most agreeable thing I do. Truly, my coins are uncurrent with them. 

I love and celebrate nature, even in detail, merely because I love the scenery of these interviews and translations. I love to remember every creature that was at this club. I thus get off a certain social scurf and scali-ness. 

I do not consider the other animals brutes in the common sense. I am attracted toward them undoubtedly because I never heard any nonsense from them. I have not convicted them of folly, or vanity, or pomposity, or stupidity, in dealing with me. Their vices, at any rate, do not interfere with me. 

My fairies in variably take to flight when a man appears upon the scene. In a caucus, a meeting-house, a lyceum, a club-room, there is nothing like it in my experience. 

But away out of the town, on Brown's scrub oak lot, which was sold the other day for six dollars an acre, I have company such as England cannot buy, nor afford. This society is what I live, what I survey, for. I subscribe generously to this — all that I have and am. 

There, in that Well Meadow Field, perhaps, I feel in my element again, as when a fish is put back into the water. I wash off all my chagrins. All things go smoothly as the axle of the universe. 

I can remember that when I was very young I used to have a dream night after night, over and over again, which might have been named Rough and Smooth. All existence, all satisfaction and dissatisfaction, all event was symbolized in this way. Now I seemed to be lying and tossing, perchance, on a horrible, a fatal rough surface, which must soon, indeed, put an end to my existence, though even in the dream I knew it to be the symbol merely of my misery; and then again, suddenly, I was lying on a delicious smooth surface, as of a summer sea, as of gossamer or down or softest plush, and life was such a luxury to live. 

My waking experience always has been and is such an alternate Rough and Smooth. In other words it is Insanity and Sanity. 

Might I aspire to praise the moderate nymph Nature! I must be like her, moderate. 

This snow which fell last Saturday so moist and heavy is now surprisingly dry and light and powdery. In the wood-path between the Well Meadow Field and the Cliff, it is all scored with the tracks of leaves that have scurried over it. Some might not suspect the cause of these fine and delicate traces, for the cause is no longer obvious. 

Here and there is but a leaf or two to be seen in the snow-covered path. The myriads which scampered here are now at rest perhaps far on one side. I have listened to the whispering of the dry leaves so long that whatever meaning it has for my ears, I think that I must have heard it. 

On the top of the Cliff I am again exposed to the cutting wind. It has blown the hilltops almost bare, and the snow is packed in hard drifts, in long ridges or coarse folds, behind the walls there. Fine, dry snow, thus blown, will become hard enough to bear. Especially the flat rocks are bared, the snow having nothing to hold by. 

Going down path to the spring, I see where some fox (apparently) has passed down it, and though the rest of the broad path is else perfectly unspotted white, each track of the fox has proved a trap which has caught from three or four to eight or ten leaves each, snugly packed; and thus it is reprinted.

H. D. Thoreau,  Journal, January 7, 1857 

It is bitter cold, with a cutting northwest wind. See January 7, 1853 ("All nature is but braced by the cold. It gives tension to both body and mind.")

Though the rest of the broad path is else perfectly unspotted white, each track of the fox has proved a trap which has caught from three or four to eight or ten leaves each. See January 8, 1852 ("Almost every track which I made yesterday in the snow - perhaps ten inches deep - has got a dead leaf in it, though none is to be seen on the snow around.")

In the wood-path [the snow] is all scored with the tracks of leaves that have scurried over it. Some might not suspect the cause of these fine and delicate traces, for the cause is no longer obvious. See January 8, 1856("The surface of the snow on the pond is finely scored in many places by the oak leaves which have been blown across it. They have furrowed deeper than a mouses track and might puzzle a citizen.”); January 15,  1856 ("Seeing the tracks where a leaf had blown along and then tacked and finally doubled and returned on its trail, I think it must be the tracks of some creature new to me.”)

I get away a mile or two from the town into the stillness and solitude of nature . . . and it is as if I had come to an open window. See December 8, 1850("I am struck by this sudden solitude and remoteness that these places have acquired. The dear privacy and retirement and solitude which winter makes possible!") December 5, 1856 ("I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold,");  December 25, 1856 ("Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary."); January 10, 1856 ("I love to wade and flounder through the swamp now, these bitter cold days when the snow lies deep on the ground, and I need travel but little way from the town to get to a Nova Zembla solitude, — to wade through the swamps, all snowed up, untracked by man, into which the fine dry snow is still drifting ”); January 11, 1857 (""I never chanced to meet with any man so cheering and elevating and encouraging, so infinitely suggestive, as the stillness and solitude of the Well Meadow Field.); February 28, 1852 ("To get the value of the storm we must be out a long time and travel far in it, so that it may fairly penetrate our skin,"); March 8, 1859 (" If the weather is thick and stormy enough, if there is a good chance to be cold and wet and uncomfortable, in other words to feel weather-beaten, you may consume the afternoon to advantage . . .There is no better fence to put between you and the village than a storm into which the villagers do not venture out"); April 19, 1854 ("When it rains and blows, keeping men indoors, then the lover of Nature must forth.').  See also December 20, 1851(" Go out before sunrise or stay out till sunset.") January 20, 1852 ("To see the sun rise or go down every day would preserve us sane forever.”); November 4, 1852 ("I keep out-of-doors for the sake of the mineral, vegetable, and animal in me."); June 5, 1854 ("I have come to this hill to see the sun go down, to recover sanity and put myself again in relation with Nature.”); December 29, 1856 (“We must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day."); September 13, 1859 ("You must be outdoors long, early and late."); November 13, 1857 ("See the sun rise or set if possible each day.")

in addition

to my solitude

frost on the window

Issa

January 7. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 7

It is bitter cold

with a cutting northwest wind –

I come to myself.

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

tinyurl.com/hdt570107

Colder and perhaps windier.

January 6. 

Still colder and perhaps windier. 

The river is now for the most part covered with snow again, which has blown from the meadows and been held by the water which has oozed out. I slump through snow into that water for twenty rods together, which is not frozen though the thermometer says — 8°. 

I think that the bright-yellow wood of the barberry, which I have occasion to break in my surveying, is the most interesting and remarkable for its color of any. 

When I get home after that slumping walk on the river, I find that the slush has balled and frozen on my boots two or three inches thick, and can only be thawed off by the fire, it is so solid. 

I frequently have occasion in surveying to note the position or bearing of the edge of a wood, which I describe as edge of wood. In such a way apparently the name Edgewood originated. 

Beatton, the old Scotch storekeeper, used to say of one Deacon (Joe ?) Brown, a grandfather of the milkman, who used to dine at his house on Sundays and praise his wife's dinners but yet prevented her being admitted to the church, that his was like a "coo's (cow's) tongue, rough one side and smooth the other." 

A man asked me the other night whether such and such persons were not as happy as anybody, being conscious, as I perceived, of much unhappiness himself and not aspiring to much more than an animal content. 

"Why!"

 said I, speaking to his condition,

"the stones are happy, Concord River is happy, and I am happy too.

When I took up a fragment of a walnut-shell this morning, I saw by its very grain and composition, its form and color, etc., that it was made for happiness.

The most brutish and inanimate objects that are made suggest an everlasting and thorough satisfaction; they are the homes of content.

Wood, earth, mould, etc., exist for joy.

 
Do you think that Concord River would have continued to flow these millions of years by Clamshell Hill and round Hunt's Island, if it had not been happy, — if it had been miserable in its channel, tired of existence, and cursing its maker and the hour that it sprang ?" 

Though there is an extremely cold, cutting northwest wind, against which I see many travellers turning their backs, and so advancing, I hear and see an unusual number of merry little tree sparrows about the few weeds that are to be seen. 

They look very chipper, flitting restlessly about and jerking their long tails.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 6, 1857

I am happy too. See September 18, 1860 ("If you are not happy to-day you will hardly be so to-morrow.”); January 7, 1855 ("It would not be worth the while to die and leave all this life behind one.”); March 15, 1852 ("The villagers are out in the sun, and every man is happy whose work takes him outdoors.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The world can never be more beautiful than now.

Concord River . . . continued to flow these millions of years . . . See March 14, 1860 ("No sooner has the ice of Walden melted than the wind begins to play in dark ripples over the surface of the virgin water. Ice dissolved is the next moment as perfect water as if melted a million years."); March 12, 1856 ("It is long-continued, steady cold which produces thick ice. If the present cold should continue uninterrupted a thousand years would not the pond become solid?"); March 24, 1855 ("In the course of ages the rivers wriggle in their beds, till it feels comfortable under them. Time is cheap and rather insignificant."); February 11, 1854 ("For how many aeons did the willow shed its yellow pollen annually before man was created!"); May 5, 1860 ("Think how many pewees must have built under the eaves of this cliff since pewees were created and this cliff itself built!!”)

Friday I get home after 630 and change and by seven we are out under red light only with the half moon on the crusty snow for a long walk up to the view down to the Moosetrail back up via Beech Lane and then bushwhacking to the Kendall Fisher pond where there are some very distinct old Fisher tracks frozen in the ice then up to the double chair but By now I've taken off my mittens even though it's 21° and we decide to bushwhack down the property line. Easier said than done because of those cliffs in the dark and forgetting just where the Way around is we end up stuck halfway down and halfway up a cliff over on the neighbors land and have to climb back up in order to get down and it seems as though we are at the stream that flows down through our St. George land but we head back south and end up (although I have no clue) near the lake view farm corner above the ramp and having to slide down here and there and over the boulders and eventually down to the ramp and out and starting down that old first trail that we saw when we first bought this land but I veer off to the sheep trail by the stream and over rainbow bridge to pick up Jane's glove where she at the start of the hike already too hot had left that behind. home by 10PM. 20170106

stuck halfway down and

halfway up we climb back up

to get  back down.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 6.

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

tinyurl.com/HDT570106