Project: Reading Thoreau’s Journal (2)

by | Feb 1, 2013 | Reading

 

Aug. 28—(an excerpt)

 

Evening.—A new moon visible in the east.

I omit the unusual—the hurricanes and earthquakes—and describe the common. This has the greatest charm and is the true theme of poetry. You may have the extraordinary for your province, if you will let me have the ordinary. Give me the obscure life, the cottage of the poor and humble, the workdays of the world, the barren fields, the smallest share of all things but poetic perception. Give me but the eyes to see the things which you possess.

 

Aug. 29—

 

The air is filled with mist, yet a transparent mist, a principle in it you might call flavor, which ripens fruits. This haziness seems to confine and concentrate the sunlight, as if you lived in a halo. It is August.

 

Sept. 23—

 

Notwithstanding the fog, the fences this morning are covered with so thick a frost that you can write your name anywhere with your nail.

 

Sept. 25—

 

The season of flowers may be considered as past now that the frosts have come. Fires have become comfortable. The evenings are pretty long.

2 P.M.—To bathe in Hubbard’s meadow, thence to Cliffs. I find the water suddenly cold, and that the bathing days are over.

I see numerous butterflies still, yellow and small red, though not in fleets. Examined the hornets’ nest near Hubbard’s Grove, suspended from contiguous huckleberry bushes. The tops of the bushes appearing to grow out of it, little leafy sprigs, had a pleasing effect.

 

Nov. 9—

 

I, too, would fain set down something besides facts. Facts should only be as the frame to my pictures… Facts to tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought… Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought.

 

Nov. 25—

 

That kind of sunset which I witnessed on Saturday and Sunday is perhaps peculiar to the late autumn. The sun is unseen behind a hill. Only this bright white light like a fire falls on the trembling needles of the pine.

 

Dec. 31—

 

There is a low mist in the woods. It is a day to study lichens. The view so confined it compels your attention to near objects, and the white background reveals the disks of the lichens distinctly. They appear more loose, flowing, expanded, flattened out, the colors brighter for the damp. The round greenish-yellow lichens on the white pines loom through the mist (or are seen dimly) like shields whose devices you would fain read. The trees appear all at once covered with their crop of lichens and mosses of all kinds—flat and tearful are some, distended by moisture. This is their solstice, and our eyes run swiftly through the mist to these things only. Nature has a day for each of her creatures, her creations. To-day it is an exhibition of lichens at Forest Hall, the livid green of some, the fruit of others. They eclipse the trees they cover. Ah, beautiful is decay! True, as Thales said, the world was made out of water. That is the principle of all things.

 

*

 

Thoreau, Henry David. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861. Ed. Damion Searls. New York Review Book Classics, 2009. Print.