“Men nowhere, east or west, live yet a natural life, round which the vine clings, and which the elm willingly shadows. Man would desecrate it by his touch, and so the beauty of the world remains veiled to him. He needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of earth.”
#Thoreau from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
I am convinced that my genius dates from an older era than the agricultural. I would at least strike my spade into the earth with such careless freedom but accuracy as the woodpecker his bill into a tree. There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness. I know of no redeeming qualities in myself but a sincere love for some things, and when I am reproved I fall back on to this ground. What have I to do with ploughs? I cut another furrow than you see.
#Thoreau from A Week
New on the Digital Thoreau blog: Bob Young discusses Thoreau's fourth and final climb of Mount Monadnock, and explores the map of Monadnock that Thoreau drew in his Journal entry of August 9, 1860. Complete with high-resolution images of the Journal and a StoryMapJS tour of the map. https://digitalthoreau.org/blog/ #thoreau #manuscripts #americanlit #dh
The events of the past month teach me to distrust Fame. I see that she does not finely discriminate, but coarsely hurrahs. She considers not the simple heroism of an action, but only as it is connected with its apparent consequences. She praises till she is hoarse the easy exploit of the Boston tea party, but will be comparatively silent about the braver and more disinterestedly heroic attack on the Boston Court-House, simply because it was unsuccessful!
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) American philosopher and writer
Speech (1854-07-04), “Slavery in Massachusetts,” Anti-Slavery Celebration, Framingham, Massachusetts
Sourcing, notes: wist.info/thoreau-henry-david/…
I have been waiting for this book to come out for a while, very excited for it! Just pre-ordered it so prepare yourself for me to talk nonstop about it in November.
I would remind my countrymen, that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No matter how valuable law may be to protect your property, even to keep soul and body together, if it do not keep you and humanity together.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) American philosopher and writer
Speech (1854-07-04), “Slavery in Massachusetts,” Anti-Slavery Celebration, Framingham, Massachusetts
Sourcing, notes: wist.info/thoreau-henry-david/…
“The bluebird carries the sky on his back.”
#Thoreau 3 April 1852
The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed of them.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) American philosopher and writer
Journal (1852-07-14)
Sourcing, notes: wist.info/thoreau-henry-david/…
2/ Though as yet the trill of the chip-bird is not heard— added—like the sparkling bead which bursts on bottled cider or ale. When we wake indeed, with a double awakening—not only from our ordinary nocturnal slumbers, but from our diurnal—we burst through the thallus of our ordinary life with a proper exciple, we awake with emphasis.”
#Thoreau 22 March 1853
“Go and measure to what length the silvery willows catkins have crept out beyond their scales, if you would know what time o' the year it is by Nature's clock.”
#Thoreau 2 March 1859
“But Thoreau also knows that the calendar, like Emerson's "tradition," has hardened into a formal and highly abstracted system, and that its present lines of demarcation are arbitrary. As categories of perception, neither the months nor the seasons, traditionally demarcated, are responsive to nature's actual currents of change because they have become distanced from perception, which no longer informs them.“
from Thoreau’s Morning Work by Daniel Peck
2/ Boil down the sweet sap which the spring causes to flow within you. Stop not at syrup—go on to sugar, though you present the world with but a single crystal—a crystal not made from trees in your yard, but from the new life that stirs in your pores. Cheerfully skim your kettle, and watch it set and crystallize, making a holiday of it if you will. Heaven will be propitious to you as to him.”
#Thoreau letter to Harrison Blake 13 March 1856
4/ The sight of a marsh hawk in Concord meadows is worth more to me than the entry of the allies into Paris. In this sense I am not ambitious. I do not wish my native soil to become exhausted and run out through neglect. Only that travelling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better. That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
#Thoreau 11 March 1856
“I was reminded, this morning before I rose, of those undescribed ambrosial mornings of summer which I can remember, when a thousand birds were heard gently twittering and ushering in the light, like the argument to a new canto of an epic and heroic poem. The serenity, the infinite promise, of such a morning! The song or twitter of birds drips from the leaves like dew. Then there was something divine and immortal in our life.”
#Thoreau 10 March 1852
I wish my countrymen to consider, that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual, without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) American philosopher and writer
Speech (1854-07-04), “Slavery in Massachusetts,” Anti-Slavery Celebration, Framingham, Massachusetts
Sourcing, notes: wist.info/thoreau-henry-david/…
Laissez la nature vous apprendre la patience, la douceur du vent et la force du silence.
Henri David Thoreau
#nature #silence #amandiers #douceur #printemps #patience #thoreau
“It is because I am allied to the elements that the sound of the rain is thus soothing to me. The sound soaks into my spirit, as the water into the earth, reminding me of the season when snow and ice will be no more, and when the earth will be thawed and drink up the rain as fast as it fall.”
#Thoreau 15 February 1855
