JOURNAL DRIPPINGS

JOURNAL DRIPPINGS Vol. X, No. 1

Excerpts from Thoreau's Journal.
The Adventure Continues!

October 2008

* * * *

“Says I to myself” should be the motto of my journal.”
-Journal, November 11, 1851

"Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me
as my own thoughts." -HDT

* * * *

Welcome to the tenth year of Journal Drippings. Here, monthly (October to June), you can find excerpts from Thoreau's 7,000-plus page journal, which generously provides writing, observations, and insights as brilliant and blinding as the autumn reflections of a flaming red maple in the quiet waters of our local rivers. His journal is probably the one place in the Western hemisphere where is it always sunrise and the day just keeps dawning. Hey, the adventure continues!

Bill Schechter
Brookline, Mass.
September 2008

************

The simplest and most lumpish fungus has a peculiar interest to us, compared with a mere mass of earth, because it is so obviously organic and related to ourselves, however mute. It is the expression of an idea; growth according to a law; matter not dormant, not raw, but inspired; appropriated by a spirit. If I take up a handful of earth, however separately interesting the particles may be, their relation to one another appears to be that of mere juxtaposition generally. I might have thrown them together thus. But the humblest fungus betrays a life akin to my own. It is a successful poem in its kind. (October 10, 1858)

************

The autumnal tints have not been so bright this year, but why is hard to say. (Oct. 11)

************

I have heard of judges, accidentally met at an evening party, discussing the efficacy of the laws and courts, and deciding that, with the aid of the jury system, substantial justice was done! But taking those cases in which honest men refrain from going to law, together with those in which men honest and dishonest, do go to law, I think the law is really a "humbug" and a benefit principally to the lawyers. (Oct. 12)

************

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 (Oct. 14)

************

Hence, too, we are struck by the prevalence of sky or light in the reflection and at twilight dream that the light has gone into the bosom of the waters...In the reflection you have an infinite number of eyes to see for you and report the aspect of things each from its point of view. (Oct. 16)

************

Methinks the reflections are never purer and more distinct than now at the season of the fall of the leaf, just before the cool twilight has come, when the air has a finer grain. Just as our mental reflections are more distinct at this season of the year, when the evenings grow cool and lengthen and our winter evenings with their brighter fires may be said to begin. And painted ducks, too, often come and sail or float amid the painted leaves. (Oct. 17)

************

One reason why I associate perfect reflections from still water, with this and a later season may be that now, by the fall of the leaves, so much more light is let into the river. The river reflects more light, therefore, in this twilight of the year, as it were an afterglow. (Same)

************

Little did the fathers of the town anticipate this brilliant success when they caused to be imported from further in the country some straights poles, with the tops cut off, which they called sugar maple trees, and a neighboring merchant's clerk, as I remember, by way of jest planted beans about them. Yet these which were jestingly called bean-poles are these days the most beautiful objects in our streets. They are worth all and more than they cost,- ñthough one of the selectman did take the cold which occasioned his death in setting them out,- if only because they have filled the open eyes of children with their rich color so unstintingly so many autumns. We will not ask them to yield us sugar in the spring, while they yield so fair a prospect in the autumn. Wealth may be the inheritance of a few in the houses, but it is equally distributed on the Common...This October festival costs no powder, nor ringing of bells, but every tree is a liberty pole on which a thousand bright lights are run up. Hundreds of children's eyes are steadily drinking this color, and by these teachers even the truants are caught and educated the moment they step abroad. (Oct.18)

************

Do you not think it [the October splendor] will make some odds for the children that were brought up under the maples? (Same)

************

Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun house be all the colors a village can display? A village is not complete unless it has these trees to mark the seasons in it. They are as important as a town clock. Such a village will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose; and essential part is wanting. Let us have willows for spring; elms for summer; maples and walnuts and tupelos for autumn; evergreens for winter, and oaks for all seasons. What is a gallery in a house to a gallery in the street! (Same)

************

A village needs the innocent stimulant of bright and cheery prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most desperate and hardest drinkers. (Same)

************

The trees repay the earth with interest for what they have taken from it. (Oct. 19)

************

[He had seen someone making wooden trays by hand]: "I was more pleased with the sight of the trays, because the tools used were so simple, and they were made by hand, not by machinery. They may make equally good pails, and cheaper as well as faster at the pail-factory with home-made ones, but that interests me less, because the man is turned partly into a machine there himself. In this case, the workman's relation to his work is more poetic, he also shows more dexterity and is more of a man. You come away from the great factory saddened, as if the chief end of man was to make pails; but in the case of the countryman who makes a few by hand, rainy days, the relative importance of human life and of the pails is preserved, and you come away thinking of the simple and helpful life of the man-you do not turn pale at the thought,-and would fain go to making pails yourself. We admire more the man who can use an axe or adze skillfully than him who can merely tend a machine. When labor is reduced to turning a crank, it is no longer amusing nor truly profitable;..." (Same)

*******************************************************

“His journals should not be permitted to be read by any, as I think they were not
meant to be read. I alone might read them intelligently. To most others
they would only give false impressions. I have never been able to
understand what he meant by his life. Why did he care so much
about being a writer? Why did he pay so much attention to his
own thoughts? Why was he so dissatisfied with everyone
else, etc? Why was he so much interested in the river
and the woods and the sky, etc?

Something peculiar, I judge.”

- Ellery Channing, friend of Thoreau's

**********

“My journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of
the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what I love
to think of...I feel ripe for something...yet can’t discover what that
thing is. I feel fertile merely. It is seed time with me. I have lain
fallow long enough.” -HDT

**********

“Of all the strange and accountable things, this journalizing is the
strangest” –HDT

***********************************************************
***********************

If you would like to see complete copy of "Journal Drippings" to date,
just email me at:

bill_schechter@lsrhs.net
or go to
the Drippings Archive at:
https://schechsplace.tripod.com/ht.htm
or to:
the Thoreau Institute's web site:
http://www.walden.org/education/index_Schechter_Journal_Drippings.htm

*********

For L-S Alumni

LS HISTORY/CULTURE PAGE
http://www.lsrhs.net/publications/HistoryCulture/
ALUMNI PAGE
http://www.lsrhs.net/alumni/default.html
THE FORUM
http://www.Lincoln-SudburyForum.org

**********

To subscribe to the L-S Alumni Newsletter, write:
bill_schechter@lsrhs.net

*******************************************************************************************************

JOURNAL DRIPPINGS Vol. X, No. 2

Excerpts from Thoreau’s Journal.
The Adventure Continues!

November 2008

* * *

“Says I to myself” should be the motto of my journal.”
-Journal, November 11, 1851

"Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me
as my own thoughts." -HDT

* * *

ELECTION SPECIAL: PRESDIENTS, PARTY POLITICS, & NATURE

"The Anglo-American can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells. ... He ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them." (The Maine Woods, 1857).

The reference is to President James Buchanan, not one of HDT's favorite people.

I will leave it to the reader to decide which to which of the recent candidates this quotation can be most aptly applied.

LATE BREAKING NEWS

The NY Times recently carried a report about how Thoreau's nature observations (in the Journal and elsewhere) are helping to unlock the story of Global Warming, Follow this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/science/earth/28wald.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Thoreau&st=cse&oref=slogin

WHERE WE ARE NOW

For both new and veteran readers of Journal Drippings, let me provide a quick G.P.S. reading of where we are now. I began reading the 7,000 pages of Thoreau’s Journal in July 1997. From my very first excerpted "Drippings," I intentionally excluded the most famous lines that later found their way in his best-known writings. Over the years, I shifted (as I now see) from epigrammatic statements to somewhat longer passages that display his unrivaled ability to describe nature in all its unseen beauty (with a few philosophical reflections thrown in). What can I say except that I was simply drawn in by his nut-like prose. I got beguiled. How incredibly well he helps and encourages us to see that which is all around us. The current national political campaign caused me to become obsessed with statistics. And so I’ll tell you that the Drippings project has now journeyed across 5,568 of the journal’s pages. Readers, we only have 1,442 pages to go. I am already feeling sad. Of course, if my man wins the election, I will probably feel just a little better.

Thoreau began his journal in 1837, at age 20. His final entry would come in November 1861, a half year before his death at age 44.

We now rejoin him during his saunters around Concord. It is late October 1858.

************

From the higher ground west of the stump-field fence. The stagnant river gleams like liquid gossamer in the sun, and I can hardly distinguish the sparkle occasioned by an insect from the white breast of a duck. (October 20, 1858)

************

As I look over the smooth gleaming surface of White Pond, I am attracted by the sun sparkles on it, as if fiery serpents were crossing to and fro. Yet if you were there you would find only insignificant insects. (Same)

************

[Oak trees in the fall]: "That same sun which called forth its leaves in the spring has now, aided by the frost, sealed up its foundation for the year and...withered them. The order had gone forth for them to rest. As each tree casts its leaves, it stands careless and free, like a horse freed from its harness, or like one who has done his years work and now stands unnoticed, but with concentrated strength and contentment, ready to brave the blasts of winter without a murmur." (Oct. 22)

************

[He mentions four local fishermen]: "These fishermen who sit thus alone from morning till night must be greater philosophers than the shoemakers." (Same)

************

Think how much the eyes of painters, both artisans and artists, and of the manufacturers of clothe and paper, and of paper-stainers are to be educated by these autumnal colors. (Same)

************

The brilliant autumnal colors are red and yellow and the various tints, hues, and shades of these. Blue is reserved to be the color of the sky, but red and yellow are the colors of the earth flower...The forest and herbage, the very pellicle of the earth as it were, must acquire a bright color, an evidence of its ripeness, as if the globe itself were a fruit on its stem, with ever one cheek toward the sun. (Oct. 24)

************

Our appetites have commonly confined our views of ripeness and its phenomena–colors and mellowness and perfectness–to the fruits we eat, and we are wont to forget an immense harvest which we do not eat, hardly use at all is annually ripened by nature. At our annual cattle-shows and horticultural exhibitions we make, as we think, a great show of our fruits, destined, however, to a rather ignoble fate...but round about and within our towns there is annually another show of fruits, on an infinitely great scale, fruits which address our taste for beauty alone. (Same)

************

[Scarlet oaks]: "Look at one completely changed from green to bright dark-scarlet, every leaf, as if dipped into a scarlet dye, between you and the sun. Was this not worth waiting for? Little did you think ten days ago that a cold green tree could assume such color as this." (Same)

************

[He sees willow buds]: "How many thoughts lie undeveloped and, as it were, dormant, like these buds in the minds of men!" (Oct. 25)

************

[He feels the first cold of the year]: “Yet this first decided coolness–not to say wintriness–is not only bracing but exhilarating...So much the more I have a hearth and heart within me. We step more briskly and brace ourselves against the winter.” (Same)

************

At the pond, the black birches are bare. How long? (Same)

************

{He describes how the vegetation on the river shore appears as horizontal bands of color]: "I call it, therefore, the rainbow rush. When, moreover, you see it in the water the effect is very much increased." (Oct. 27)

************

Think of the interminable forest of grasses which dies down to the ground every autumn! What a more than Xerxean army of wool-grasses and sedges without fame lie down to an ignominious death, as the mowers esteem it, in our river meadows each year, and become ìold fog,î to trouble the mowers, lodging as they fall, that might have been the straw beds of horses and cattle, tucked under them every night. (Same)

************

It is remarkable that the autumnal change of our woods has left no deeper impression on our literature yet...High colored as are some political speeches, I do not detect any reflection even, from the autumnal tints in them. They are as colorless and lifeless as the herbage in November. (Same)

************

The year, with these dazzling colors on its margin, lies spread open like an illustrated volume. The preacher does not yet utter the essence if its teaching. (Same)

************

October has not yet colored our poetry yet. (Same)

************

It is impossible to describe the infinite variety of hues, tints, and shades, for the language affords no names for them, and we must apply the same term monotonously to twenty different things...When the tints are the same they differ so much in purity and delicacy that language to describe them truly would not only have to be greatly enriched, but as it were, dyed to the same colors, itself, and speak to the eye as well as the ear. And it is the subtle differences which especially attract and charm our eyes. Where else will you study color under such advantages? To describe these colors you must use colored words. (Same)

************

In describing the richly spotted leaves, for instance, we find ourselves using ineffectually words which merely indicate faintly our good intentions, giving them in our despair a terminal twist toward our mark,-–such as reddish, yellowish, purplish, etc. We cannot make a hue of words for they are not to be compounded like colors, and hence we are obliged to use such ineffectual expressions as reddish brown, etc. They need to be ground together. (Same)

*******

“His journals should not be permitted to be read by any, as I think they were not meant to be read. I alone might read them intelligently. To most
others they would only give false impressions. I have never been
able to understand what he meant by his life. Why did he care
so much about being a writer? Why did he pay so much
attention to his own thoughts? Why was he so
dissatisfied with everyone else, etc?
Why was he so much interested
in the river and the woods
and the sky, etc?

Something peculiar, I judge.”

- Ellery Channing, friend of Thoreau's

**********

“My journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of
the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what I
love to think of...I feel ripe for something...yet can’t discover
what that thing is. I feel fertile merely. It is seed time with
me. I have lain fallow long enough.” -HDT

**********

“Of all the strange and accountable things, this journalizing is the
strangest” –HDT

***********************************************************

If you would like a complete copy of "Journal Drippings" to date,
just email me at:

bill_schechter@lsrhs.net
or go to :
https://schechsplace.tripod.com/ht.htm
or to:
the Thoreau Institute's web site:
http://www.walden.org/education/index_Schechter_Journal_Drippings.htm

*********

For L-S Alumni

LS HISTORY/CULTURE PAGE
http://www.lsrhs.net/publications/HistoryCulture/
ALUMNI PAGE
http://www.lsrhs.net/alumni/default.html
THE FORUM
http://www.LincolnSudburyForum.org

**********

To subscribe to the L-S Alumni Newsletter, write:
bill_schechter@lsrhs.net

*******************************************************************************************************

JOURNAL DRIPPINGS Vol. X, No. 4

Excerpts from Thoreau’s Journal.
The Adventure Continues!

January 2009

* * *

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Thoreau blew some great riffs in November 1858. Hence some of the excerpts are longer than usual. Best of luck in the year ahead!

* * *
“Says I to myself” should be the motto of my journal.”
-Journal, November 11, 1851

"Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me
as my own thoughts." -HDT

******************************

I know of but one or two persons with who I could afford to walk. With most the walk degenerates into a mere vigorous use of your legs, ludicrously purposeless, while you are discussing some mighty argument, each one having his say, spoiling each other’s day, worrying one another with conversation, hustling one another with our conversation. I know of no use in the walking part in this case, except that we may seem to be getting on together toward the same goal; but of course we keep our original distance he whole way. Jumping every wall and ditch in the vague hope of shaking your companion off.
(November 8, 1858)

************

Animals generally see things in the vacant way I have described. They rarely see anything but their food or some real or imaginary foe. I never saw but one cow looking into the sky. (Same)

************

[A meditation on bare November]: “I wandered over the bare fields where the cattle, lately turned out, roamed restless and unsatisfied with the feed; I dived into a rustling young oak wood where not a green leaf was to be seen; I climbed to the geological axis of elevation and clambered over curly-pated rocks whose strata are on their edges amid the rising woods; and again I thought, they are all gone surely and left me alone. Not a man Friday remains. What nutriment can I extract from these bare twigs? Starvation stares me in the face. ‘Nay, Nay!’ said a nuthatch making its way, head downward, about a bare hickory close by. ‘The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. Only the superfluous has been swept away. Now we behold the naked truth. If at any time the weather is to cold and bleak for you, keep the sunny side of the trunk, for there is a wholesome and spring warmth such as the morning never afforded. There are the winter mornings with the sun on the oak wood tops. While buds sleep, thoughts wake.’ (‘Hear! Hear!’ screamed the jay from a neighboring copse where I heard a twittering for some time). ‘Winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it.’ And then the speaker shifted to another tree far off, and reiterated his assertions, and his mate at a distance confirmed them; and I heard a suppressed chuckle from a red squirrel that heard the last remark, but had kept silent and invisible all the while. Is that you? (‘Yes-siree,’ said he. Then, running down a slanted bough, he called out impudently, ‘Look here! Just get a snug-fitting coat and a pair of fur gloves like mine, and you laugh at a north east storm,’ and he wound up with a slang phrase in his own lingo, accompanied by a flourish with his tail, just as a newsboy twirls his fingers with his thumb on his nose and inquires, ‘Does your mother know you are out?’” (Same)

************

I stand in Ebby Hubbard’s yellow birch swamp, admiring some gnarled and shaggy picturesque old birches there, which send out large knee-like limbs near the ground, while the brook, raised by the late rain, winds fuller than usual through the rocky swamp. I thought with regret how soon these trees, like the black birches that grew on the hill nearby, would all be cut off, and there would be almost nothing of the old Concord left, and we should be reduced to reading old deeds in order to be reminded of such things,
–deeds, at least, on which some old and revered bound trees are mentioned. These will be the only proof that they ever existed. Pray, farmers, keep some old wood to match the old deeds. Keep them for history’s sake, as specimens of what the township was. Let us not be reduced to a mere paper evidence, to deeds kept in a chest or secretary when not so much as the bark of the paper birch will be left for evidence about its decayed stump. (Same)

************

Looking from Pratt’s windows at sunset, I saw the purple or rosy light, reflected from some old Chestnut rails on the hilltop before his house. Methinks, it is pinkish even like the old cow-droppings in the pastures. So universally does Nature blush at last. (Same)

************

[He reads in the paper than Manchester N. H. has snow]: “It was as if a scout had brought in words than an enemy were approaching in force only a days march distant. Manchester was the spy this time…”(Nov. 9)

************

We had a true November sunset after a dark, cloudy afternoon. The sun reached a clear stratum just before setting, beneath the dark cloud, though ready to enter another on the horizon’s edge, and a cold yellow sunset suddenly illumined the withered grass of the fields around, near and far, eastward. Such a phenomenon, when it occurs later, I call the afterglow of the year. (Same)

************

It is of no use to plow deeper than the soil is…Yet many a man likes to tackle mighty themes, like immortality, but in his discourse he turns up nothing but yellow sand, under which what little fertile and available surface soil he may have is buried and lost…Many a man runs his plow so deep in heavy or stony soil that it sticks fast in the furrow. It is a great art in the writer to improve from day-to-day just that soil and fertility which he has to harvest that crop which his life yields, whatever it may be, not be straining as to reach apples or oranges when he yields only ground-nuts. He should be digging not soaring. Just as earnest as your life is, so deep is your soil. If strong and deep, you will sow wheat and raise the bread of life in it. (Same)

************

[An obituary for a young hawk shot by a farmer protecting his chickens]: “The executing farmer hastes to secure his trophy. He treats the proud bird’s body with indignity. He carries it home to show his wife and children for the hens were his wife’s special care…The body of the victim is delivered up to the children and the dog and, like the body of Hector, is dragged so many times around Troy….But alas for the youthful hawk, the proud bird of prey, the tenant of the skies! We shall no more see his wave-like outline against a cloud, nor here his scream from behind one…He saw but a pheasant in the field, the food which nature has provided for him, and stooped to seize it. This was his offense. He, the native of the skies, must make way for these bog-trotters from another land, which never soar…These wings which swept the sky must now dust the chimney corner, perchance. …In vain were the brown spotted eggs laid in the loftiest pine of the swamp. Where are your father and mother? Will they hear of your early death? before you had acquired your full plumage, and who nursed and defended ye so faithfully?” (Same)

************

This is the month of nuts and nutty thoughts,–that November whose name sounds so bleak and cheerless. Perhaps its harvest of thoughts is worth more than all the other crops of the year. Men are serious now. (Nov. 11)

************

[On the sharp indentations–or “bays” and “headlands”–of the scarlet oak leaf]: “The scarlet oak leaf! What a graceful and pleasing outline! These deep bays in the leaf are as agreeable to us as the thought of deep and smooth and secure havens to the mariner
…If I were a drawing master, I would set my pupils to copying these leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and gracefully. It is a shore to the aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats. How different from the white oak leaf with its rounded headlands, on which no lighthouse need be placed.” (Same)

* * *

Something peculiar, I judge.”

- Ellery Channing, friend of Thoreau's

**********

“Of all the strange and accountable things, this journalizing is the
strangest” –HDT

**************************************

If you would like a complete copy of "Journal Drippings" to date,
just email me at:

bill_schechter@lsrhs.net
or go to :
https://schechsplace.tripod.com/ht.htm
or to:
the Thoreau Institute's web site:
http://www.walden.org/education/index_Schechter_Journal_Drippings.htm

*********

For L-S Alumni

LS HISTORY/CULTURE PAGE
http://www.lsrhs.net/publications/HistoryCulture/
ALUMNI PAGE
http://www.lsrhs.net/alumni/default.html
FACEBOOK
The LS Alumni Association
THE FORUM
http://www.LincolnSudburyForum.org

**********

To subscribe to the L-S Alumni Newsletter, write:
bill_schechter@lsrhs.net

**************************************************************************************

JOURNAL DRIPPINGS Vol. X, No. 5

Excerpts from Thoreau’s Journal.
The Adventure Continues!

February 2009

* * *

EDITOR’S NOTE: Well, I appear to still be wandering through Thoreau’s November (1858), but it’s not a bad place to be. Besides, what’s the rush.

* * *

“Says I to myself” should be the motto of my journal.”
-Journal, November 11, 1851

"Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me
as my own thoughts." -HDT

******************************

Now a brisk and energetic walk with a will and a purpose. Have done with sauntering in the idle sense. You must rush to the assault of winter. Make haste onto the outskirts. Climb the ramparts of the town, be on the alert and let nothing escape your observation…
(November 12, 1858)

***********

It is much the coldest day yet, and the ground is a little frozen and resounds under my feet. All people move the brisker for the cold, yet are braced and a little elated by it. They love to say, “Cold day, sir.” Thought the days are shorter, you get more work out of a hired man than before, for he must work to keep warm. (Same)

***********

I see some feathers of the blue jay scattered along a wood-path and at length came to the body of the bird. What a neat and delicately ornamental creature, finer than any work of art in a lady’s boudoir, with its soft light purplish-blue crest and dark blue or purplish secondaries (the narrow half) finely baked with dusky. It is the more glorious to live in Concord because the jay is so splendidly painted. (Nov. 13)

***********

[On the first snow]: “After expecting snow all day,–we did not know it would prove rain,–we looked out the window at 9 pm and saw the ground for the most part white with the first sugaring, which at first we could barely tell from mild moonlight,–only there was no moon. Thus it comes stealthily in the night and changes the whole aspect of the earth.” (Same)

***********

[He describes the average citizen walking through frosty woods with no ‘pleasant pursuit’ to divert him]: “Every resounding step on the frozen earth is a vain knocking at the door of what was lately genial earth, his bountiful mother now turned a stepmother. He is left outside to starve.” (Nov. 14)

***********

Now while the frosty air begins to nip your fingers and your nose, the frozen ground rapidly wears away the souls of your shoes, as sandpaper might; the old she-wolf is nibbling at your extremities. The frozen ground eating away the souls of your feet is only typical of the vulture that gnaws your heart this month. (Same)

***********
Snow and cold drives the doves to your door, and so your thoughts make new alliances. (Same)

***********

Preaching? Lecturing? Who are yea that ask for such things? What do ye want to hear, ye puling infants? A trumpet-sound that would train you up to mankind or a nurse’s lullaby? The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes…I will not consent to walk with my mouth muzzled, not till I am rapid, until there is a danger I will bite the unoffending and that my bite will produce hydrophobia. (Nov. 16)

***********

Freedom of speech! It hath not entered into your hearts to conceive what these words mean. It is not leave given me by your sect to say this or that; it is when leave is given for your sect to withdraw. The church, the state, the school, the magazine think they are liberal and free. It is the freedom of the prison-yard. I ask only that one-quarter of my honest thoughts be spoken aloud. (Same)

***********

We are interested in this season by the manifold ways that the light is reflected toward us...A myriad of surfaces are now prepared to reflect the light. This is one of the hundred silvery lights of November. The setting sun, too, is reflected from windows more brightly that at any other season. “November Lights” would be a theme for me. (Nov. 17)

***********

Nature is moderate and loves degrees. Winter is not all white and sere. Some trees are evergreen to cheer us… (Some)

***********

[Dedicated to our current economic crisis!]: “The fruitless enterprise of some persons who rush helter-skelter carrying out their crazy scheme merely ‘putting it through’ as they phrase it,–reminds me of those thistle-downs, which, not being detained nor steadied by any seed at the base, are blown away at the first impulse and go rolling over all obstacles. They may indeed go fastest and farthest, but where they rest at last not even a thistle springs. I meet these useless barren thistle-downs driving over the fields. They remind me of busy merchants and brokers on ‘change’ [on the exchange] doing business on credit, gambling with fancy stocks that have failed over and over again, assisted to get a-going again to no purpose,–a great ado about nothing,–all in my eye–with nothing to deposit, not of the slightest use to the great thistle-down tribe, not even tempting a jackass. When you right or extricate one of these fellows and set him before the wind again, it is worth the while to look and see if he has any seed of success under him. Such a one as you may know afar–he floats more slowly and steadily–and of his enterprise expect results.” (Nov. 21)

***********

The rare wholesome and permanent beauty of withered oak leaves of various hues of brown mottling a hillside, especially seen when the sun is low–Quaker colors, sober ornaments, beauty that quite satisfies the eye. (Nov. 21)

***********

Who are bad neighbors? They who suffer their neighbors' cattle to go out because they don’t want ill-will,–are afraid to anger them. They are the abettors of the evil-doers. (Same)

***********

Who are the religious? They do not much differ from mankind generally except that they are more conservative and timid and useless, but who in their conversation and correspondence talk about kindness of Heavenly Father. Instead of going bravely about their business, trusting God ever, they do like him who says “Good Sir” to the one he fears, or whistles to the dog that is rushing at him. And because they take his name in vain so often, they presume they are better than you. Oh, their religion is a rotten squash. (Same)

***********

It is a lichen day, with a little moist snow falling (Nov. 24)

***********

Here is an author who contrasts love for “the beauties of the person” with that for “excellencies of the mind,” as if these were alternatives. I must say that is for neither of these that I should feel the strongest affection. I love that one with whom I sympathize, be she “beautiful” or otherwise, of excellent mind or not. (Same)

* * *

Something peculiar, I judge.”

- Ellery Channing, friend of Thoreau's

**********

“Of all the strange and accountable things, this journalizing is the
strangest” –HDT

**************************************

If you would like a complete copy of "Journal Drippings" to date,
just email me at:

bill_schechter@lsrhs.net
or go to :
https://schechsplace.tripod.com/ht.htm
or to:
the Thoreau Institute's web site:
http://www.walden.org/education/index_Schechter_Journal_Drippings.htm

*********************************************************************************************************************

JOURNAL DRIPPINGS Vol. X, No. 6

Excerpts from Thoreau’s Journal.
The Adventure Continues!

March 2009

Journal Drippings is now available on Facebook, at:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=53875357202
Please consider joinng the group you find there!

* * *
“Says I to myself” should be the motto of my journal.”
-Journal, November 11, 1851

"Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me
as my own thoughts." -HDT

*************************

While most keep to their parlor fires this cold and blustering Thanksgiving afternoon, and think with compassion of those who are abroad, I find this sunny south side of the swamp as warm as their parlors, and warmer to my spirit. Ay, there is a serenity and warmth here which the parlor does not suggest, enhanced by the sound of the wind roaring on the northwest side of the swamp a dozen or so rods off. What a wholesome and inspiring warmth this is. (November 25, 1858)

**********

[On Farmer Tarbell’s achievements]: “The farmer, now on the down-hill of life, at length gets his new barn and barn-cellar built, far away in some unfrequented vale. This for two score years he has struggled for. This is his poem done at last,–to get the means to dig that cavity and rear those timbers aloft! How many million have done have done just like him! –or failed to do it! There is so little originality, and just so little, and just so much, fate, so to call it, in literature. With steady struggle, with alternate failure and success, he at length gets a barn-cellar completed and then a tomb. You would say there is a tariff on thinking and originality.” (Same)

**********

And all these years that I have known Walden, these striped breams [a kind of fish] have skulked in it without my knowledge! How many new thoughts, then, may I have?
(Nov. 28)

**********

[In Walden woods]: “The sun, rather low, is seen through the woods with a cold, dazzling white luster, like that of a burnished tin reflected from the silvery needles of the pine. No powerful light streams through, but you stand in the quiet and somewhat somber aisles of a forest cathedral…” (Nov. 30)

**********

I never fail to see mother-o’-pearl tints abundant in the sky. (Same)

**********

[He sees a huge blank of clouds]: “The terrestrial mountains were made ridiculous beneath that stupendous range.” (Same)

**********

In these clear, cold days fear no cloud. They vanish and dissolve before the cloud-consuming air. The air snaps them up like a dog his meat.

**********

[Again returns to the ‘striped bream’]: “I cannot but still see in my mind those little striped breams poised in Walden’s glaucous waters. They balance all the rest of the world in my estimation at present, for this is the bream I have just found, and for the time I neglect all its brethren and am ready to kill the fatted calf on its behalf. For more than two centuries have men fished here and have not distinguished this permanent settler of the township. It is not like a new bird, a transient visitor…How wild it makes the pond and the township to find a new fish in it. America renews her youth here. I cannot go a hair’s breath beyond the mere statement that it exists,–the miracle of its existence, my contemporary and neighbor, not so different from me!... (Same)

**********

Now (when I get to the causeway} all the west is suffused with an extremely rich, warm purple or rose-color, while the edges of what were dove-colored clouds have a warm saffron glow, finally deepening to rose or damask when the sun has set. (Dec. 3)

**********

I improve every opportunity to go into a grist-mill, an excuse to see its cobweb-tapestry. I put questions to the miller as an excuse for staying, while my eye rests delightedly on the cobwebs above his head and perchance on his hat. (Same)

**********

A “swirl,” applied to leaves suddenly caught up by a sort of whirlwind, is a good word enough, methinks. (December 11)

**********

Some being offended, think sharp and satirical things, which yet they are not prepared consciously to utter. But in some unguarded moment these things escape from them, when they are, as it were, unconscious. They betray their thoughts, as it were, by talking in their sleep, for the truth will out, under whatever veil of civility. (Same)

**********

[Describing the song of a large flock of snow buntings wheeling in the sky]: “When they rise all together their note is like the rattling of nuts in a bag, as if a whole binful were rolled from side to side.” (Dec.12)

**********

[On observing an owl with a broken wing]: “Solemnity is what they express,–fit representatives of the night.” (Dec.14)

**********

[He goes exploring on the river ice]: “I go running and sliding from one such snow path to another.” (Dec. 25)

**********

[To Walden}: I stayed later to hear the pond crack, but it did not much. How full of soft, pure light the western sky now after sunset! I love to see the outlines of the pines against it. Unless you watch it, you do not know when the sun goes down. It’s like a candle extinguished without smoke. A moment ago you saw that glittering orb amid the dry oak leaves in the horizon and now you can detect no trace of it. In a pensive mood, I enjoy the complexion of the western sun at this hour. (Same)

**********

But for all voice in that serene hour I hear an owl hoot. How glad I am to hear him rather than the most eloquent man of the age! (Same)

**********

I am glad to find that out New England life has a genuine humane core to it; that inside, after all, there is so little pretense and bray. (Same)

**********

How little one can know what is fated to another!–what he can do and what he can’t do! I doubt whether one can give or receive any very pertinent advice. In all important crises, one can only consult his genius…Show me a man who can consult his genius, and you have shown me a man who cannot be advised. You may know what a thing costs or is worth to you; you can never know what it costs or means to me. All the community may scream because one man is born who will not do as it does, who will not conform because conformity to him is death–he is so constituted. They know nothing about his case; they are fools when they presume to advise him. The man of genius knows what he is aiming at; nobody else knows. And he alone knows when something comes between him and his object. In the course of generations, however, men will excuse you for not doing what they do, if you will bring enough to pass in your own way. (Dec. 27)

**********

To Walden. The earth is bare. I walk about the pond looking at the shores, since I have not paddled about it much of late years. What a grand place for a promenade!

**********

Heavy Haynes was fishing a quarter of a mile this side of Hubbard’s Bridge. He had caught a pickerel…What tragedies are enacted under this dumb icy platform in the fields! What an anxious and adventuresome life the small fishes must live, liable at any moment to be swallowed by the larger. No fish of moderate size can go sculling along safely in any part of the stream, but suddenly there may come rushing out of this jungle or that some greedy monster and gulp it down. Parent fishes, if they care for their offspring, how can they trust them abroad out of their sight? It takes so many young fishes a week to fill the maw of this large one. And the large ones! Heavy Haynes and Company are lying in wait for them. (Dec. 29)

**********

On to 1859!

* * *

Something peculiar, I judge.”

- Ellery Channing, friend of Thoreau's

**********

“Of all the strange and accountable things, this journalizing is the
strangest” –HDT

**************************************

If you would like a complete copy of "Journal Drippings" to date,
just email me at:

bill_schechter@lsrhs.net
or go to :
https://schechsplace.tripod.com/ht.htm
or to:
the Thoreau Institute's web site:
http://www.walden.org/education/index_Schechter_Journal_Drippings.htm

*******************************************************************************************************************

JOURNAL DRIPPINGS Vol. X, No. 7

Excerpts from Thoreau’s Journal.
The Adventure Continues!

April 2009

Journal Drippings is now available on Facebook, at:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=53875357202
Please consider joining the group you find there!

* * *
“Says I to myself” should be the motto of my journal.”
-Journal, November 11, 1851

"Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me
as my own thoughts." -HDT

******************************

Going up the hill through Stowe’s young oak woodland, I listen to the sharp dry rustle of the withered oak leaves now. It would be comparatively still and more dreary here in other respects, if it were not for these leaves that hold on. It sounds like the roar of the sea and is enlivening and inspiriting like that, suggesting how all the land is seacoast to the aerial ocean. It is the sound of the surf, the rut of an unseen ocean, billows of air breaking on the forest like water on itself. It rises and falls, wells and dies away, with agreeable alternation as the sea surf does. Perhaps the landsman can foretell a storm by it. It is remarkable how universal these grand murmurs are, the backgrounds of sound–the surf, the wind in the forest, waterfalls, etc–which yet to the ear and in their origin are essentially one voice, the earth-voice, the breathing and snoring of the creature. The earth is our ship, and this is the sound of the wind in her rigging as we sail. (January 2, 1859)

*******

When I hear the hypercritical quarrelling about grammar and style. The position of the particles, etc, etc, stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs–Mr. Webster, perhaps not having spoken according to Mr. Kirkham’s rule–I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be as vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection; first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially, your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat. The grammarian is often one who can neither cry nor laugh, yet thinks he can express human emotions. So the posture-makers tell you how you should walk–turning your toes out, perhaps excessively–but so the beautiful walkers are not made. (Same)

*******

[He describes a heap of snow made by wind and storm]: “They look as if a child had stuck up its elbow under a white sheet.” (Jan 4)

*******

C. says winter is the Sabbath of the year. (Jan 9)

*******

[Describing trees limned with snow]: “Many times I thought that if a particular tree, commonly an elm, under which I was walking or riding were the only one like it, it would [be] worth a journey across the continent to see it. I have no doubt that such journeys would be undertaken on hearing a true account of it. But, instead of being confined to a single tree this wonder was as cheap and common as the air itself. Everyman’s wood lot was a miracle and surprise to him, and for those who could not go so far, there would be the trees in the street and the weeds in the yard.” (Jan 18)

*******

[On the clouds in a ‘mackerel sky’]: “It is a luxury for the eye to rest on it. What curtains, what tapestries to our halls!” (Jan 19)

*******

Coming up the street in the twilight, it occurs to me that I know of no more agreeable object to bound our view, looking outward, through the vista of elm-lined streets, than the pyramidal tops of the white pine forest in the horizon. Let them stand so near at last. (Same)

*******

[About a neighbor who is out on the meadows musquash hunting]: “There are poets of all kinds and degrees little known to each other…the Lake School is not the only or principal one. They love various things. Some love beauty and some like rum. Some go to Rome, and some go a-fishing, and are sent to the house of correction once a month. They keep up their fires by means unknown to me. I know not their comings and goings. How can I tell what violets they watch for? I know them wild and ready to risk all when their muse invites. (Jan 22)

*******

How peculiar the hooting of an owl! It is not shrill or sharp like the scream of a hawk, but full, round, and sonorous, waking the echoes of a wood. (Jan 30)

*******

Five minutes before 3 p.m., father died. (Feb 3)

*******

[With respect to the ignoring and slighting of Native Americans]: “It frequently happens that the historian, though he professes more humanity than the trapper, mountain man, or gold digger, who shoots one as a wild beast, really exhibits and practices a similar humanity to him, wielding a pen instead of a rifle.” (Same)

*******

The writer has much to do even to create a theme for himself. Most that is first written on any subject is a mere groping after it, mere rubble-stone or foundation. It is only when many observations of different periods have been brought together that he begins to grasp his subject and make one pertinent and just observation (Same)

*******

When we have experienced many disappointments, such as the loss of friends, the notes of birds cease to affect us as they did. (Feb 5)

*******

Nature works by contraries. That which in summer was most fluid and unresting is now most solid and motionless. (Feb 11)

*******

Winter comes to make walking possible where there was no walking in summer. Not till winter do we take possession of the whole of our territory. (Feb 13)

*******

Sometimes in our prosaic moods, life appears to us but a certain number more of days, like those which we have lived, to be cheered not by more friends or friendship, but probably fewer and less. As, perchance, we anticipate the end of this day before it is done, close the shutters, and with it a cheerless resignation commences the barren evening whose fruitless end we clearly see, we despondingly think that that all of life that is left is only this experience repeated a certain number of times. And so it would be, if it were not for the faculty of the imagination. (Same)

*******

My eyes nibble the piny sierra which makes the horizons edge, as a hungry man nibbles a cracker. (Feb 16)

*******

[Describes the admirable wildness of the hen-hawk, while man sees virtue only in the tamable]: “So any surpassing work of art is strange and wild to the mass of men, as is genius itself. No hawk that soars and steals our poultry is wilder than genius, and none is more persecuted or above persecution. It can never be a Poet Laureate, to say: ‘Pretty Poll’ or ‘Polly want a cracker.’” (Same)

*******

Why, a friend tells all with a look, a tone, a gesture, a presence, a friendliness. He is present when absent. (Feb 20)

*******

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature–if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you,–know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse. (Feb 25).

*******

[After his lecture, Autumnal Tints, was panned in Worcester]: “…I am more than ever convinced that they have not seen much of them–that there are very few people who do see much of nature.” (Same)

*******

Saw a mackerel in the market. The upper half of its sides is mottled blue and white like the mackerel sky, as stated Jan 19, 1858. (Feb 28)

THE END OF THOREAU’S VOLUME XI.

* * *

Something peculiar, I judge.”

- Ellery Channing, friend of Thoreau's

**********

“Of all the strange and accountable things, this journalizing is the
strangest” –HDT

**************************************

If you would like a complete copy of "Journal Drippings" to date,
just email me at:

bill_schechter@lsrhs.net
or go to :
https://schechsplace.tripod.com/ht.htm
or to:
the Thoreau Institute's web site:
http://www.walden.org/education/index_Schechter_Journal_Drippings.htm

*********

For L-S Alumni

*******************************************************************************************************************

JOURNAL DRIPPINGS Vol. X, No. 8

Excerpts from Thoreau’s Journal.
The Adventure Continues!

May 2009

Journal Drippings is now available on Facebook, at:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=53875357202
Please consider joining the group you find there!

* * *
“Says I to myself” should be the motto of my journal.”
-Journal, November 11, 1851

"Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me
as my own thoughts." -HDT

******************************

We thus commonly antedate the spring more than any other season, for we look forward to it with more longing. We talk about spring as at hand before the end of February, and yet it will be two good months, one-sixth part of the whole year, before we can go a-maying. There may be a whole month of solid and uninterrupted winter yet, plenty of ice and good sleighing. We may not even see the bare ground, and hardly the water, and yet we sit down and warm our spirits annually with this distant prospect of spring. As if a man were to warm his hands by stretching them toward the rising sun or rubbing them. (March 2, 1859)

***********

[On the bluebird]: “His Most Serene Birdship! His soft warble melts in the ear, as the snow is melting in the valleys around. The bluebird comes and with his warble drills the ice and sets free the rivers and ponds and frozen ground.” (Same)

***********

Going by the solidago oak at Clamshell Hill bank, I heard a faint rippling sound, and, looking up, saw about fifteen snow buntings sitting in the top of an oak, all with their breasts to me–sitting so still and quite white, seen against the white cloudy sky, they did not look like birds but the ghosts of birds, and their boldness, allowing me to draw so near, enhanced the impression…It was a very spectral sight. (March 3)

***********

Saw two small water-bugs at the spring; none elsewhere. (Same)

***********

Talk about reading!–a good reader! It depends on how he is heard. There may be elocution and pronunciation (recitation, say) to satiety, but there can be no good reading unless there is good hearing also. It takes two at least for this game, as for love, and they must cooperate….The reader and the hearer are a team not to be harnessed tandem, the poor wheel horse supporting the burden of the shafts while the leader runs pretty much at will, while the lecture lies passive in the painted curricle behind. (Same)

***********

Read well! Did you ever know a full well that did not yield of its refreshing waters to those who put their hands to the windlass and the well-sweep? Did you ever suck cider through a straw? Did you ever know cider to push out of the straw when you were not sucking, – unless it chanced to be in complete ferment? (Same)

***********

[From somewhere on the Turnpike, while trying to hear a spring bird]: “We heard only a jay screaming in the distance and the cawing of a crow. What a perfectly New England sound is this voice of the crow! If you stand perfectly still anywhere in the outskirts of the town and listen, stilling the almost incessant hum of your factory, this is perhaps the sound which you will be most sure to hear rising above all sounds of human industry and leading your thoughts to some far bay in the woods where the crow is venting his disgust. This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge. It sees a race pass away, but it passes not away. It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature. (March 4)

***********

A rainy day
P.M.–to hill in rain
(March 8)

***********

To us snow and cold seem a mere delaying of the spring. How far we are from understanding the value of these things in the economy of Nature. (Same)

***********

One might say that the yellow of earth mingled with the blue of the sky to make the green of vegetation (Same)

***********

There are some who never do or say anything, whose life merely excites expectation. Their excellence reaches no further than a gesture or mode of carrying themselves. They are a sash dangling from the waist; or a sculptured war club over the shoulder. They are like fine-edged tools gradually becoming rusty in a shop window. I like as well if not better to see a piece of iron and steel, out of which many such tools will be made, or a bush-wack in a man’s hand. When I meet gentlemen and ladies, I am reminded of the extent of the inhabitable and uninhabitable globe; I exclaim to myself, Surfaces! Surfaces!...(March 10)

***********

Rivers too, like the walker, unbutton their icy coats, and we see the dark bosoms of their channels in the midst of the ice. (Same)

***********

The bluebird on the apple tree, warbling so innocently to inquire, if any of its mates are within call–the angel of the spring! Fair and innocent, yet the off-spring of the earth. The color of the sky above and of the subsoil beneath suggesting what sweet and innocent melody (terrestrial melody) may have its birthplace between the sky and earth. (Same)

***********

Mrs. A talks on dolefully on account of the solitude in which she lives, but she gets little consolation. Mrs. B says she envies her that retirement. Mrs. A is aware that she does, and says that it is as if a thirsty man envies another the river in which he is drowning. So goes the world. It is either one extreme or the other. Of solitude, one gets too much and another not enough. (March 11)

***********

There is always some accident in the best things, whether thoughts or expressions or deeds. The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only party ours. The thought came to us because we were in a fit mood. Also we were unconscious and did not know that we had said or done a good thing. We must walk consciously only part way to our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success. (March 11)

***********

I see a small flock of blackbirds flying over, some rising, some falling, yet all advancing together, one flock but many birds, some silent, yet others tchucking– incessant alternation, harmonious movement, as in a dance, this agreeing to differ makes the charm of the spectacle to me. One bird looks fractional, naked, like a single thread or ravelling from the web to which it belongs. Alternation! Alternation! Heaven and hell! Here again is the flight of the bird, its ricochet motion is that undulation observed in so many materials, as in the mackerel sky. (March 13)

***********

If men were to be destroyed and the books they have written [were] to be transmitted to a new race of creatures, in a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remarkable a phenomenon as the rainbow? (Same)

* * *

Something peculiar, I judge.”

- Ellery Channing, friend of Thoreau's

**********

“Of all the strange and accountable things, this journalizing is the
strangest” –HDT

**************************************

If you would like a complete copy of "Journal Drippings" to date,
just email me at:

bill_schechter@lsrhs.net
or go to :
https://schechsplace.tripod.com/ht.htm
or to:
the Thoreau Institute's web site:
http://www.walden.org/education/index_Schechter_Journal_Drippings.htm

*********

For L-S Alumni

************************************************************************************************************

JOURNAL DRIPPINGS Vol. X, No. 9

Excerpts from Thoreau’s Journal.
The Adventure Continues!

June 2009

Spring has arrived. It's time to put the books down, go outside, & take
a look around! Journal Drippings will return on October 1 with more
sunrise from the mind of H.D. Thoreau!

******
Journal Drippings is now available on Facebook, at:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=53875357202
Please consider joining the group you find there!
* * *

“Says I to myself” should be the motto of my journal.”
-Journal, November 11, 1851

"Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me
as my own thoughts." -HDT

******************************

We are interested in the phenomenon of Nature mainly as children are or as we are in games of chance. They are more or less exciting. Our appetite for novelty is insatiable. We do not attend to ordinary things though they are the most important, but to extraordinary ones. While it is only moderately hot or cold, wet or dry, nobody attends to it, but when Nature goes to an extreme in any of these directions we are all on the alert with excitement. Not that we care about the philosophy or effect of this phenomenon, e.g., when I went to Boston in the early train the coldest morning of last winter two topics mainly occupied the attention of the passengers, Morphy’s chess victories and Nature’s victorious cold that morning. The inhabitants of various towns were comparing notes, and that one whose door opened upon a greater degree of cold than any of his neighbors’ doors chuckled not a little…Thus a greater degree of cold may be said to warm us more than a less one. (March 19, 1959)

**********

In those wet days like the 18th and 19th when the brown culminated, the sun being concealed, I was drawn toward and worshipped the brownish light in the sod,–the withered grass, etc., on barren hills. I felt as if I could eat the very crust of the earth. I never felt so terrene, never sympathized so with the surface of the earth. From whatever source the light and heat came, thither we look with love. (Same)

**********

Can you ever be sure that you have heard the very first wood frog in the township croak? (Match 24)

**********

[On his hobby of searching for arrowheads]: “It is stone fruit. Each one yields me a thought. I come nearer to the maker of it than if I found his bones. His bones would not prove any wit that wielded them, such as this work of his bones does. It is humanity inscribed on the face of the earth, patent to my eyes as soon as the snow goes off, not hidden away in some crypt or grave or under a pyramid.” (March 28)

**********

Time will soon destroy the works of the famous painters and sculptors, but the Indian arrowhead will balk his efforts, and Eternity will have to come to his aid. They are not fossil bones but, as it were, fossil thoughts, forever reminding me the mind that shaped them. I would fain know that I am treading in the tracks of human game–that I am on the trail of mind…They are at peace with rust. This arrow-headed character promises to outlast all others. The larger pestles and axes may, perchance, grow scarce and be broken, but the arrowhead never ceases to wing its way through the ages to eternity. It was originally winged for but a short flight, but it still, to my mind’s-eye, wings its way through the ages bearing a message from the hand that shot it. Myriads of arrow points lie sleeping in the skin of the revolving earth, while meteors revolve in space…The footprint, the mind-print of the oldest men. (Same)

**********

When you pick up an arrowhead and put it in your pocket, it may say: ‘Eh, you think you have got me, do you? But I shall wear a hole in your pocket at last, or if you put me in your cabinet, your heir or great-grandson will forget me or throw me out the window directly, or when the house falls I shall drop into the cellar, and there I shall lie quite at home again. Ready to be found again, eh?” (Same)

**********

[Inspired by seeing a vernal pool after a flood]: In many arrangements, there is a wearisome monotony. We know too well what [we] shall have for Saturday’s dinner, but each day’s feast in Nature’s year is a surprise to us and adapted to our appetite and spirit. She has arranged such an order of feats that never tires. Her motive is not economy, but satisfaction.” (Same)

**********

The earth lies out now like a leopard, drying her lichen and moss-spotted skin in the sun, her sleek and variegated hide. I know that the few raw spots will heal over. Brown is the color for me, the color of our coats and everyday lives, the color of the poor man’s loaf. (Same)

**********

What a pitiful business is the fur trade, which has been pursued now for so many ages…that you may rob some little fellow creature of its coat to adorn or thicken your own, that you may get a fashionable covering in which to hide your head or a suitable robe in which to dispense justice to your fellow men! Regarded from the philosophical point-of-view, it is precisely on a level with rag and bone picking in the streets of the cities. The Indian led a more respectable life before he was tempted to debase himself so much by the white man. (April 8)

**********

Whether a man’s work be hard or easy, a bird is appointed to sing to a man while he is at work. (April 15)

**********

This warbler impressed me as it were calling the trees to life. (Same)

**********

There is a season for everything, and we do not notice a given phenomenon except at that season, if, indeed it can be called the same phenomenon at any other season. There is a time to watch the ripples on Ripple Lake, to look for arrowheads, to study the rocks and lichens, a time to walk on sandy deserts, and the observor of nature must improve these seasons as much as the farmer his. So boys fly kites and play ball or hawkie at particular times all over the state. A wise man will know what game to play today and play it. We must not be governed by rigid rules, as by the almanac, but let the seasons rule us. The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature’s. Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. Where the good husbandman is, there is good soil. Take any other course and life will be a succession of regrets. Let us see vessels sailing prosperously before the wind, and not simply stranded barks. There is no world for the penitent and regretful. (April 26)

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On the Mill-Dam, a man is unmanned. I love best to meet them in the outskirts. They remind me of wharf rats in the other place. Let me see a man a-farming, a-fishing, a- working,–anything but a-shopping. (Same)

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A mosquito endeavors to sting me. (April 25)

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The catechism says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, which of course is applicable to God as seen in his works. Yet the only account of its beautiful insects–butterflies, etc–which God has made and set before us, which the state ever thinks of spending any money on, is the account of those injurious to vegetation. (May 1)

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[He sees a whirlwind carry oak leaves high in the sky]: “Methought that instead of decaying on earth or being consumed by fire, these were being translated and would soon be taken in at the windows of heaven. I never observed this phenomenon so remarkable. The flight of the leaves. (Same)

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A peetweet and it mate at Manatauk Rock…This bird does not return to our stream until the weather is decidedly pleasant and warm. It’s note peoples the river like the prattle of children once more in the yard of a house that has stood empty. (May 2)

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At evening I hear the first sultry buzz of a fly in my chamber, telling of sultry nights to come. (May 6)

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Cat briar in flower, how long? (June 5)

* * *

Something peculiar, I judge.”

- Ellery Channing, friend of Thoreau's

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“Of all the strange and accountable things, this journalizing is the
strangest” –HDT

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If you would like a complete copy of "Journal Drippings" to date,
just email me at:

bill_schechter@lsrhs.net
or go to :
https://schechsplace.tripod.com/ht.htm
or to:
the Thoreau Institute's web site:
http://www.walden.org/education/index_Schechter_Journal_Drippings.htm

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For L-S Alumni