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| ISBN-13: | 9780486118895 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 12/19/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 900 KB |
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The Heart of Thoreau's Journals
By Odell Shepard
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 1961 Dover Publications, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-11889-5
CHAPTER 1
1837–47
Many of the earlier entries in this chapter are transcriptions, no doubt much revised, from manuscripts now lost. Possibly the work of selection and revision was part of the "private business" carried on by Thoreau in his Walden hut. On that supposition we can more readily explain the fact that in passages dated as early as his twenty-third year, he comes before us with a prose style unmistakably his own and also with that set of ideas, opinions, sympathies, and antipathies which thereafter so strongly marked him as a unique individual. What we chiefly miss in them is the admirable factuality of his best writing. He has not yet fully learned to think in terms of things, to make the fact flower into a truth, to write in complete accord with his belief that all stuff of the senses is profoundly metaphorical.
Yet even in these first pages Thoreau shows again and again his power of packing huge significance into a few simple words. "We look to windward for fair weather" he says, in a sentence we do not soon come to the end of. It is drawn from the very core of the man. In the language of a meteorological observation it implies his whole theory and practice of heroism. When he wrote those seven words and saw that they were good, he had passed his apprenticeship.
During these years Thoreau taught school for a while, made pencils, surveyed wood lots, served as Secretary of the Concord Lyceum, helped to edit The Dial, wrote a considerable amount of verse, travelled somewhat in New England, saw more than he liked of New York City, lived for some time in the Emerson household, lost his dearly loved brother John, spent 26 months at Walden Pond, and composed the greater part of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and of Walden. Except for one never forgotten bereavement, these were happy years. By Thoreau's standards, they were successful. He learned to long for what he had, to discern the underlying and overarching marvel of things familiar, and thus to turn what others might think his deprivations into shining advantages. As one of the "nobly poor" he found that by one month of labor he could earn eleven months of leisure in which to strive for perfection as a writer, a thinker, and a man.
Oct. 22, 1837
"What are you doing now?" he asked. "Do you keep a journal?" So I make my first entry today.
To be alone I find it necessary to escape the present—I avoid myself. How could I be alone in the Roman emperor's chamber of mirrors? I seek a garret. The spiders must not be disturbed, nor the floor swept, nor the lumber arranged.
Oct. 29
A curious incident happened some four or six weeks ago which I think it worth the while to record. John and I had been searching for Indian relics, and been successful enough to find two arrowheads and a pestle, when, of a Sunday evening, with our heads full of the past and its remains, we strolled to the mouth of Swamp Bridge Brook. As we neared the brow of the hill forming the bank of the river, inspired by my theme, I broke forth into an extravagant eulogy on those savage times, using most violent gesticulations by way of illustration. "There on Nawshawtuct," said I, "was their lodge, the rendezvous of the tribe, and yonder, on Clamshell Hill, their feasting ground. This was, no doubt, a favorite haunt; here on this brow was an eligible lookout post. How often have they stood on this very spot, at this very hour, when the sun was sinking behind yonder woods and gilding with his last rays the waters of the Musketaquid, and pondered the day's success and the morrow's prospects, or communed with the spirit of their fathers gone before them to the land of shades!
"Here," I exclaimed, "stood Tahatawan; and there" (to complete the period) "is Tahatawan's arrowhead."
We instantly proceeded to sit down on the spot I had pointed to, and I, to carry out the joke, to lay bare an ordinary stone which my whim had selected, when lo! the first I laid hands on, the grubbing stone that was to be, proved a most perfect arrowhead, as sharp as if just from the hands of the Indian fabricator!!!
Nov. 3
If one would reflect, let him embark on some placid stream, and float with the current. He cannot resist the Muse. As we ascend the stream, plying the paddle with might and main, snatched and impetuous thoughts course through the brain. We dream of conflict, power, and grandeur. But turn the prow downstream, and rock, tree, kine, knoll, assuming new and varying positions, as wind and water shift the scene, favor the liquid lapse of thought, far-reaching and sublime, but ever calm and gently undulating.
Nov. 13
This shall be the test of innocence—if I can hear a taunt, and look out on this friendly moon, pacing the heavens in queen-like majesty, with the accustomed yearning.
Dec. 12
When we speak of a peculiarity in a man or a nation, we think to describe only one part, a mere mathematical point; but it is not so. It pervades all. Some parts may be further removed than others from this centre, but not a particle so remote as not to be either shined on or shaded by it.
Dec. 16
How indispensable to a correct study of Nature is a perception of her true meaning. The fact will one day flower out into a truth. The season will mature and fructify what the understanding had cultivated. Mere accumulators of facts—collectors of materials for the master-workmen—are like those plants growing in dark forests, which "put forth only leaves instead of blossoms."
Dec. 19
Hell itself may be contained within the compass of a spark.
Dec. 31
As the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life. It is never isolated, or simply added as treasure to our stock. When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.
Jan. 16, 1838
The world is never the less beautiful though viewed through a chink or knothole.
Jan. 21
Every leaf and twig was this morning covered with a sparkling ice armor; even the grasses in exposed fields were hung with innumerable diamond pendants, which jingled merrily when brushed by the foot of the traveller. It was literally the wreck of jewels and the crash of gems. It was as though some superincumbent stratum of the earth had been removed in the night, exposing to light a bed of untarnished crystals. The scene changed at every step, or as the head was inclined to the right or the left. There were the opal and sapphire and emerald and jasper and beryl and topaz and ruby.
Such is beauty ever—neither here nor there, now nor then, neither in Rome nor in Athens, but wherever there is a soul to admire. If I seek her elsewhere because I do not find her at home, my search will prove a fruitless one.
Feb. 13
All fear of the world or consequences is swallowed up in a manly anxiety to do Truth justice.
March 6
How can a man sit down and quietly pare his nails, while the earth goes gyrating ahead amid such a din of sphere music, whirling him along about her axis some twenty-four thousand miles between sun and sun, but mainly in a circle some two millions of miles actual progress? And then such a hurly-burly on the surface—wind always blowing—now a zephyr, now a hurricane—tides never idle, ever fluctuating—no rest for Niagara, but perpetual ran-tan on those limestone rocks—and then that summer simmering which our ears are used to, which would otherwise be christened confusion worse confounded, but is now ironically called "silence audible," and above all the incessant tinkering named "hum of industry," the hurrying to and fro and confused jabbering of men. Can man do less than get up and shake himself?
March 14
The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.
But you are getting all the while further and further from true society. Your silence was an approach to it, but your conversation is only a refuge from the encounter of men; as though men were to be satisfied with a meeting of heels, and not heads.
Nor is it better with private assemblies, or meetings together, with a sociable design, of acquaintances so called—that is to say of men and women who are familiar with the lineaments of each other's countenances, who eat, drink, sleep, and transact the business of living within the circuit of a mile.
With a beating heart he fares him forth, by the light of the stars, to this meeting of gods. But the illusion speedily vanishes; what at first seemed to him nectar and ambrosia, is discovered to be plain bohea and short gingerbread.
After all, the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.
Our least deed, like the young of the land crab, wends its way to the sea of cause and effect as soon as born, and makes a drop there to eternity.
If thy neighbor hail thee to inquire how goes the world, feel thyself put to thy trumps to return a true and explicit answer. Plant the feet firmly, and, will he nill he, dole out to him with strict and conscientious impartiality his modicum of a response.
But after all, such a morsel of society as this will not satisfy a man. But like those women of Malamocco and Pelestrina, who when their husbands are fishing at sea, repair to the shore and sing their shrill songs at evening, till they hear the voices of their husbands in reply borne to them over the water, so go we about indefatigably, chanting our stanza of the lay, and awaiting the response of a kindred soul out of the distance.
April 24
Men have been contriving new means and modes of motion. Steamships have been westering during these late days and nights on the Atlantic waves—the fuglers of a new evolution to this generation. Meanwhile plants spring silently by the brooksides, and the grim woods wave indifferent; the earth emits no howl, pot on fire simmers and seethes, and men go about their business.
July 13
What a hero one can be without moving a finger!
Aug. 4
Whatever of past or present wisdom has published itself to the world, is palpable falsehood till it come and utter itself by my side.
Aug. 5
Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise, Discord, Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hilltops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former, are the true sphere music—pure, unmixed music—in which no wail mingles.
DIVINE SERVICE IN THE ACADEMY HALL
In dark places and dungeons these words might perhaps strike root and grow, but utter them in the daylight and their dusky hues are apparent. From this window I can compare the written with the preached word: within is weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth; without, grain fields and grasshoppers, which give those the lie direct.
Aug. 10
The human soul is a silent harp in God's quire, whose strings need only to be swept by the divine breath to chime in with the harmonies of creation. Every pulse-beat is in exact time with the cricket's chant, and the tickings of the death-watch in the wall. Alternate with these if you can.
Aug. 19
The sound of the Sabbath bell, whose farthest waves are at this instant breaking on these cliffs, does not awaken pleasing associations alone. Its muse is wonderfully condescending and philanthropic. One involuntarily leans on his staff to humor the unusually meditative mood. It is as the sound of many catechisms and religious books twanging a canting peal round the world, and seems to issue from some Egyptian temple, and echo along the shore of the Nile, right opposite to Pharaoh's palace and Moses in the bulrushes, startling a multitude of storks and alligators basking in the sun. Not so these larks and pewees of Musketaquid. One is sick at heart of this pagoda worship. It is like the beating of gongs in a Hindoo subterranean temple.
Sept. 3
The only faith that men recognize is a creed. But the true creed which we unconsciously live by, and which rather adopts us than we it, is quite different from the written or preached one. Men anxiously hold fast to their creed, as to a straw, thinking this does them good service because their sheet anchor does not drag.
Sept. 20
It is a luxury to muse by a wall-side in the sunshine of a September afternoon—to cuddle down under a gray stone, and hearken to the siren song of the cricket. Day and night seem henceforth but accidents, and the time is always a still eventide, and as the close of a happy day. Parched fields and mulleins gilded with the slanting rays are my diet. I know of no word so fit to express this disposition of Nature as Alma Natura.
Dec.
All sound is nearly akin to Silence; it is a bubble on her surface which straightway bursts, an emblem of the strength and prolificness of the undercurrent. It is a faint utterance of Silence, and then only agreeable to our auditory nerves when it contrasts itself with the former. In proportion as it does this, and is a heightener and intensifier of the Silence, it is harmony and purest melody.
Feb. 9, 1839
It takes a man to make a room silent.
Feb. 10
THE PEAL OF THE BELLS
When the world grows old by the chimney-side,
Then forth to the youngling rocks I glide,
Where over the water, and over the land,
The bells are booming on either hand.
Now up they go ding, then down again dong,
And awhile they swing to the same old song,
And the metal goes round at a single bound,
A-lulling the fields with its measured sound,
Till the tired tongue falls with a lengthened boom
As solemn and loud as the crack of doom.
Then changed is their measure to tone upon tone,
And seldom it is that one sound comes alone,
For they ring out their peals in a mingled throng,
And the breezes waft the loud ding-dong along.
When the echo has reached me in this lone vale,
I am straightway a hero in coat of mail,
I tug at my belt and I march on my post,
And feel myself more than a match for a host.
I am on the alert for some wonderful Thing
Which somewhere's a-taking place;
'Tis perchance the salute which our planet doth ring
When it meeteth another in space.
April 4
Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live and begin to be. A boatman stretched on the deck of his craft and dallying with the noon would be as apt an emblem of eternity for me as the serpent with his tail in his mouth. I am never so prone to lose my identity. I am dissolved in the haze.
May 17
We say justly that the weak person is flat; for, like all flat substances, he does not stand in the direction of his strength, that is on his edge, but affords a convenient surface to put upon. He slides all the way through life. Most things are strong in one direction—a straw longitudinally, a board in the direction of its edge, a knee transversely to its grain—but the brave man is a perfect sphere, which cannot fall on its flat side, and is equally strong every way. The coward is wretchedly spheroidal at best, too much educated or drawn out on one side commonly and depressed on the other; or he may be likened to a hollow sphere, whose disposition of matter is best when the greatest bulk is intended.
June 4
The words of some men are thrown forcibly against you and adhere like burs.
July 25
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Sept. 17
Nature never makes haste; her systems revolve at an even pace. The bud swells imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as though the short spring days were an eternity. All her operations seem separately, for the time, the single object for which all things tarry. Why, then, should man hasten as if anything less than eternity were allotted for the least deed? Let him consume never so many aeons, so that he go about the meanest task well, though it be but the paring of his nails. If the setting sun seems to hurry him to improve the day while it lasts, the chant of the crickets fails not to reassure him, even-measured as of old, teaching him to take his own time henceforth forever. The wise man is restful, never restless or impatient. He each moment abides there where he is, as some walkers actually rest the whole body at each step, while others never relax the muscles of the leg till the accumulated fatigue obliges them to stop short.
Oct. 22
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Nov. 5
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Heart of Thoreau's Journals by Odell Shepard. Copyright © 1961 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION TO DOVER EDITIONCHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
1837-47
1850-51
1852
1853-54
1855-57
1858-61
INDEX