in Thoreau’s Journal

Gathered the Linnaea borealis.

1860 in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is truly June when you begin to see brakes (dark green) fully expanded in the wood paths.  In early June, methinks as now, we have clearer days, less haze, more or less breeze, especially after rain, and more sparkling water, than before.  I look from Fair Haven Hill….The leaves generally are almost fully expanded….

1850 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Not till June can the grass be said to be waving in the fields. When the frogs dream and the grass waves, and the buttercups toss their heads, and the heat imposes one to bathe in the ponds and streams, then is summer begun.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

To-day it is yet warmer, 87°at 3 P.M., compelling me to put on a thin coat, and I see that a new season has arrived June shadows are moving over waving grass-fields, the crickets chirp uninterruptedly, and I perceive the agreeable acid scent of high blueberry bushes in bloom.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This is June, the month of grass and leaves…Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late. Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting.

Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse, and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts, which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind.

For my purposes, the June 6, 1857 citation from the Journal is a key passage in understanding Thoreau’s reconfiguration of “the seasons” and likewise, how each season has its own language in nature. It also explicates another Thoreau touchstone:  “the revolution of the seasons”.  The image of the cog-wheel as developed in the passage above does this perfectly. In a larger perspective, this passage also reveals Thoreau’s meta-location (the joined position) with nature:  “Now I am ice, now I am sorrel”.  This is evident as the various seasons affect “the tone and hue” of his thoughts.

If this is an accurate description of this passage, then it’s possible for me to understand it as a rather compact epistemology:  A way of knowing the self in situ at any time and place.

Here’s a passage from Sharon Cameron’s Writing Nature, p. 88 where she cites Thoreau on this topic:

Consciousness does not just mediate or mirror natural phenomena; as we see in the following passage, the fiction of the Journal is that consciousness is displaced by them. Of a near expulsion of the self by atmospheric pressure, Thoreau writes:

out of doors my thought is commonly drowned as it were & shrunken pressed down by stupendous piles of light etherial influences–for the pressure of the atmosphere is still 15 lbs to a square inch–I can do little more than preserve the equilibrium & resist the pressure of the atmosphere–  I can only nod like the rye-heads in the breeze. — I expand more surely in my chamber–as far as [expression] goes, as if that pressure were taken off. –but here outdoors is the place to store up influences (July, 23, 1851).

Another image shows us how nature is at once internalized and recorded:  “Properly speaking there can be no history but natural history, for there is no past in the soul but in nature” (March 8, 1842).  Not just consciousness, then, but memory itself harks back to a store of natural influences–call them seasonal repetitions–for nature is the only history to which our lives keep returning.

Just to reinforce the subtle and specific nature of this passage:  Thoreau wrote:  “Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late.” Here we have the natural phenomenon (aspens trembling) connected to “a little fluttered in my thoughts” which is a kind emotional turbulence that might cross our minds when and if we felt things were going by too quickly and we were missing something important.  At another place in the Journal Thoreau wrote:

July 19, 1851:  Methinks my seasons revolve more slowly than those of nature; I am differently timed. I am contented. This rapid revolution of nature, even of nature in me, why should it hurry me?

This gives us a bit of the “tone and hue” of Thoreau’s insight about being late.

 in Thoreau’s Journal

Some poet must sing in praise of the bulbous Arethusa.

I have observed that one mood is the natural critic of another. When possessed with a strong feeling on any subject foreign to the one I may be writing on, I know very well what of good and what of bad I have written on the latter. It looks to me now as it will ten years hence. My life is then earnest and will tolerate no makeshifts nor nonsense.   What is tinsel or euphuism or irrelevant is revealed to such a touchstone. In the light of a strong feeling, all things take their places, and truth of every kind is seen for such.

Now let me read my verses, and I will tell you if the god has had a hand in them. I wish to survey my composition for a moment from the least favorable point of view. I wish to be translated to the future, and look at my work as it were at a structure on the plain, to observe what portions have crumbled under the influence of the elements.

The year has many seasons more than are recognized in the almanac. (Spring 1850)

It is no small thing to say as little as is necessary.

I am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost a man learns to speak simply at last.  (December 12, 1851)

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The clear brightness of June was well represented yesterday by the buttercups (Ranunculus bulbosus) along the roadside. Their yellow cups are glossy and varnished within, but not without.

Photo: June 3, 2016

in Thoreau’s Journal:

These are the clear breezy days of early June, when the leaves are young and few, and the sorrel not yet in its prime. Perceive the meadow fragrance…. The roads are strewn with red maple seed. The pine shoots have grown generally from three to six inches, and begin to make a distant impression, even at some distance, of white and brown above their dark green. The foliage of deciduous trees is still rather yellow-green than green.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Clintonia borealis in a day or two. Its beauty at present consists chiefly in its commonly three very handsome, rich, clear, dark-green leaves….They are perfect in form and color, broadly oblanceolate, with a deep channel down the middle, uninjured by insects, arching over from a centre at the ground; and from their midst rises the scape, a foot high with one or more umbels of green, bell-shaped flowers, –– yellowish-green, nodding or bent downward, but without fragrance.

In fact, the plant is all green, both leaves and corolla. The leaves alone—and many have no scape—would detain the walker.  Its berries are its flower.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Summer begins now about a week past—with the expanded leaves—the shade & warm weather….what a variety of colors we are entertained––yet most colors are rare or in small doses presented us as a condiment or spice ––– Much of green-blue-black & white but of yellow & the different shades of red far less. The eyes feast on the different shades of flowers as on tit-bits—-they are its spices. How much lupine is now in full bloom….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I am going in search of the Azalea Nudiflora….

The fact that a rare & beautiful flower which we never saw–perhaps never heard for which therefore there was no place in our thoughts may at length be found in our immediate neighborhood, is very suggestive.

[Very long passage follows about this search. To my reading Thoreau’s jury was out as to whether he eventually found Azalea Nudiflora. The photo attached is of what I imagine he saw as it blooms prolifically now in exactly the types of locations he describes in this passage.]

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I am surprised to find arethusa abundantly out in Hubbards Close May be 2 or 3 days though not yet at Arethusa meadow prob on account of the recent freshet– It is so leafless that it shoots up unexpectedly

It is all color a little hook of purple flame projecting from the meadow into the air. Some are comparatively pale. This high colored plant shoots up suddenly all flower in meadows where it is wet walking.

On the seasons of Thoreau:

Ecclesiastes 3:1:  There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven—

Thoreau in his Journal:

Spring 1850: The year has many seasons more than are recognized in the almanac.

June 11, 1851:  No one to my knowledge, has observed the minute differences in the seasons. Hardly two nights are alike. The rocks do not feel warm to-night, for the air is warmest; nor does the sand particularly. A book of the seasons, each page of which should be written out-of-doors, or in its own locality wherever it may be.

July 5, 1852:  The progress of the season is indescribable.

April 23, 1859:  There is a season for everything, and we do not notice a given phenomenon except at that season, if, indeed, it can be called the same phenomenon at any other season. There is a time to watch the ripples on Ripple Lake, to look for arrowheads, to study the rocks and lichens, a time to walk on sandy deserts; and the observer of nature must improve these seasons as much as the farmer his. So boys fly kites and play ball or hawkie at particular times all over the State. A wise man will know what game to play to-day, and play it. We must not be governed by rigid rules, as by the almanac, but let the season rule us. The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature’s. Nothing must be postponed.

September 13, 1852:  How earnestly and rapidly each creature, each flower, is fulfilling its part while its day lasts! Nature never lost a day, nor a moment. As the planet in its orbit and around its axis, so do the seasons, so does time, revolve, with a rapidity inconceivable.

October 25, 1857: These regular phenomena of the seasons get at last to be ––they were at first, of course  ––simply and plainly phenomena or phases of my life. The seasons and all their changes are in me. I see not a dead eel or floating snake, or a gull, but it rounds my life and is like a line or accent in its poem. Almost I believe the Concord would not rise and overflow its banks again, were I not here. After a while I learn what my moods and seasons are. I would have nothing subtracted. I can imagine nothing added. My moods are thus periodical, not two days in my year alike. The perfect correspondence of Nature to man, so that he is home in her!

November 17, 1858: Not only different objects are presented to our attention at different seasons of the year, but we are in a frame of body and mind to appreciate different objects at different seasons.

December 5, 1856:  I love best to have each thing in its season only, and enjoy doing without it at all other times. It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. I find it invariably true, the poorer I am, the richer I am.

 in Thoreau’s Journal

That exceedingly neat & interesting little flower blue-eyed grass now claims our attention.

March 27, 1858:

How fitly and exactly any season of the year may be described by indicating the condition of some flower!

May 23, 1853

Every new flower that opens, no doubt, expresses a new mood of the human mind.

 in Thoreau’s Journal

The fresh green foliage of the deciduous trees now so prevails….

 in Thoreau’s Journal

The fringed polygala near the Corner Spring is a delicate flower with very fresh tender green leaves & red-purple blossoms.

Beautiful from the contrast of its clear red purple flowers with its clear green leaves.

Mindful

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –

but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

—Mary Oliver

in Thoreau’s Journal:

A high-blue berry bush by roadside beyond the bridge––very full of blossoms– It has the more florid & blooming effect because the leaves are few & quite distinct or standing out from the flowers–

the countless inverted white mugs (in rows & every where as on counter or shelves) with their peculiar green calyxes– If there are as many berries as blossoms we shall fare well.

 in Thoreau’s Journal

Butter cups now densely spot the church yard.

June 15, 1852 in Thoreau’s Journal:

How rapidly new flowers unfold! as if Nature would get through her work too soon. One has as much as he can do to observe how flowers successively unfold. It is a flowery revolution, to which but few attend. Hardly too much attention can be bestowed on flowers. We follow we march after, the highest color; that is our flag, our standard, our “color.” Flowers were made to be seen, not overlooked. Their bright colours imply eyes, spectators.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The smooth speedwell is in its prime now whitening the sides of the back road…its sweet little pansy-like face—looks up on all sides— This and the myosotis laxa

are the two most beautiful little flowers yet— If I remember rightly.