1.15.2014

a most celestial blue
...Thoreau's Journal: 15-Jan-1856

A bright day, not cold. I can comfortably walk without gloves, yet my shadow is a most celestial blue. This only requires a clear bright day and snow-clad earth, not great cold. I cross the river on the crust with some hesitation. The snow appears considerably deeper than the 12th, maybe four or five inches deeper, and the river is indicated by a mere depression in it.

In the street not only the fences but trees are obviously shortened, as by a flood. You are sensible that you are walking at a level a foot or more above the usual one. Seeing the tracks where a leaf had blown along and then tacked and finally doubled and returned on its trail, I thought it must be the tracks of some creature new to me.

1 comment:

Quinton Blue said...

Winter lends itself to observations no other season can offer. Or as Wallace Stevens wrote, "For the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."