• 

• 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

No true and absolute account of things, —of the evening and the morning and all the phenomena between them, —but ever a petty reference to man, to society, aye, often to Christianity:  What these things are when men  are asleep. I come from the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. The so much grander significant of any fact —of sun and moon and stars — when not referred to man and his needs but viewed absolutely!  Sounds that are wafted from over the confines of time.