Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on What ‘All Men Want’)

“All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be."— American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Knowing All Nature’s ‘Moods and Manners’)

“I seek acquaintance with nature to know all her moods and manners. Primitive nature is the most interesting to me. I take infinitive pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and, then, to my chagrin I hear that is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know the entire heaven and an entire earth. All the great trees, and beasts, fishes and fowls are gone.” —American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), journal entry for Mar. 23, 1856, in The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861 (2009)

PBS is giving Thoreau the same treatment it gave Ernest Hemingway a few years ago: a three-part documentary by Ken Burns, starting tonight. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this Transcendentalist as naturalist and protest figure.

Hailed by youth in the 1960s, Thoreau may be experiencing an even greater groundswell of interest now. Let’s hope so.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Irish Ice-Cutters in New England Winters)

“A hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and ‘cradle–holes’ were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty–five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss–grown and hoary ruin, built of azure–tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac—his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They calculated that not twenty–five per cent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the cars.” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

One of those jobs that despised immigrants performed years ago...

The image accompanying this post, showing ice-harvesting in Massachusetts in the early 1850s, appeared first in Gleason's Drawing Room Companion (1852), p. 37.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Walking and Writing)

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow, as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end and consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper. A thousand rills which have their rise in the sources of thought burst forth and fertilize my brain. You need to increase the draft below, as the owners of meadow on Concord river say of the Billerica Dam. Only when we are in action is the circulation perfect. The writing which consists with habitual sitting is mechanical, wooden, dull to read.”— American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), journal entry, August 19, 1851, “Thoreau’s Journal (Part IV),” in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1905

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on a Pond in Winter)

“Out on the silent pond straightway
The restless ice doth crack,
And pond sprites merry gambols play
Amid the deafening rack.
 
“Eager I hasten to the vale,
As if I heard brave news,
How nature held high festival,
Which it were hard to lose.
 
“I gambol with my neighbor ice,
And sympathizing quake,
As each new crack darts in a trice
Across the gladsome lake.”— American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), “Fair Haven,” in Collected Essays and Poems, edited by Elizabeth Hall Witherell (2001)
 
I took the image accompanying this post during the winter four years ago in Pascack Brook County Park in Bergen County, NJ.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on ‘Beauty Visible to Us in the Landscape’)

“Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more.”—American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), “Autumnal Tints,” The Atlantic, October 1862

I took the image accompanying this post in late October 2008.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Walden Pond in Winter)

“Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the snow–covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet is well as over our heads.” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, Inspired by an Early September Day)

“Sometimes my thought rustles in midsummer as if ripe for the fall. I anticipate the russet hues and the dry scent of autumn, as the feverish man dreams of balm and sage.”— American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), journal entry for Sept. 2, 1841, in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journal, Volume I, 1837-1846, edited by Bradford Torrey (1906)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Seeing When We Are ‘Unhurried and Wise’)

"When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on a ‘Tolerable Planet’)

"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? — If you cannot tolerate the planet that it is on?"— American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) in a letter to Harrison Blake, May 20, 1860, in Familiar Letters, edited by F. B. Sanborn (1865)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Dreams, ‘The Touchstones of Our Characters’)

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. We are scarcely less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our grief, which is our atonement, measures inversely the degree by which this is separated from an actual unworthiness. For in dreams we but act a part which must have been learned and rehearsed in our waking hours, and no doubt could discover some waking consent thereto. If this meanness has not its foundation in us, why are we grieved at it?” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, Hungering for Truth)

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board." —American essayist and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on a ‘Picture of Winter’)

“To-day the trees are white with snow,—I mean their stems and branches,—and have the true wintry look on the storm side. Not till this has winter come to the forest. It looks like the small frost-work in the path and on the windows now, especially the oak woods at a distance, and you see better the form which the branches take. That is a picture of winter…”—American essayist and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862, journal entry, January 5, 1852, from Winter: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, edited by Harrison Gray Otis Blake (1891)

Two years ago, I took the image accompanying this post in Saddle River County Park, here in Bergen County, NJ.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, ‘By the Brooksides’ in Early Winter)

“By the brooksides, in the still, genial night,

The more adventurous wanderer may hear

The crystals shoot and form, and winter slow

Increase his rule by gentlest summer means.”— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), “Pray to What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong,” in The Four Seasons: Poems, edited by J.D. McClatchy (2008)

I took this photo in late January of this year in Saddle River County Park in Ridgewood, N.J.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on ‘The Revolution of the Seasons’)

“The revolution of the seasons is a great and steady flow, a graceful, peaceful motion, like the swell on lakes and seas. Nowhere does any rigidity grow upon nature, no muscles harden, no bones protrude, but she is supple-pointed now and always….No man was ever yet too nice to walk in her woods and fields.”—Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), October 6, 1840 entry in Autumn: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau (1900)