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 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, 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, 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 How to ‘Live in Each Season’)

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on ‘Eternity in Each Moment’)

"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment."--Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on the ‘Only Investment That Never Fails’)

“Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

(Thanks to my friend Brian for the inspiration.)

This Day in Literary History (Thoreau Moves to Walden Cabin)

July 4, 1845—With an exquisite, surely self-conscious, sense of timing, Henry David Thoreau moved on Independence Day into the small cabin he had just finished building on land owned by friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and began the 26-month sojourn that culminated in his 1854 masterpiece, Walden.

Many of the ideas in Walden—the ecstatic embrace of nature, the oscillation between society and solitude, self-reliance—can also be found in Emerson. 

And just as, eight years before, Emerson had, in effect, issued an intellectual’s Declaration of Independence in his lecture “The American Scholar,” his younger disciple now sought to extend that notion.

"I am very familiar with all his thoughts,” Emerson noted about his younger friend, “they are my own quite originally drest." Precisely.

Emerson exerted a more powerful influence in the 19th century than Thoreau through his notion of individualism, but his consistently high-pitched tone—the style of the former preacher he was—can lull a modern reader. 

On the other hand, Thoreau’s is a new, distinctive American voice—rhapsodic, surely, but also by turns cranky, jaunty, ironic and packing a whole complex of thought into a few terse words. “I have traveled a good deal in Concord,” he writes, bringing us up sharply (especially after having just mentioned “Chinese and Sandwich Islanders”).

But turn to almost any page in the book and you’re likely to be surprised. For instance, toward the end: “Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.” He continually brings you up short, not just with his insights, but with the concise manner in which he expresses them.

As I mentioned in a post last year, Thoreau came by his sense of isolation naturally, as many in Concord had come to sneer at him after he and friend Edward Hoar accidentally set fire to a large portion of its woods.

But Thoreau used his 26 months in the Walden cabin to great advantage. Walden, like all truly great revolutionary documents, continues to resonate years after the fact.

I’m not thinking here strictly of his care for the environment, his urging that readers forgo the material goods of this world, or his advocacy of nonconformity. 

In addition, I wish his chapter on “Reading” could be reproduced and handed out at any town meeting where short-sighted politicians decide the first thing they want to cut is a library or the school system. "If it is necessary," he wrote, "omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us."