5.11.2014

distant thunder
...Thoreau's Journal: 11-May-1854

While at the Falls, I feel the air cooled and hear the mutterings of distant thunder in the northwest and see a dark cloud in that direction indistinctly through the wood. That distant thunder-shower very much cools our atmosphere. And I make haste through the woods homeward via Hubbard’s Close. Hear the evergreen-forest note. The true poet will ever live aloof from society, wild to it, as the finest singer is the wood thrush, a forest bird. The shower is apparently going by on the north. There is a low, dark, blue-black arch, crescent-like, in the horizon, sweeping the distant earth there with a dusky, rainy brush, and all men, like the earth, seem to wear an aspect of expectation. There is an uncommon stillness here, disturbed only by a rush of the wind from time to time. In the village I meet men making haste to their homes, for, though the heavy cloud has gone quite by, the shower will probably strike us with its tail. Rock maple keys, etc., now two inches long, probably been out some days. Those by the path on Common not out at all. Now I have got home there is at last a still cooler wind with a rush, and at last a smart shower, slanting to the ground, without thunder.

My errand this afternoon was chiefly to look at the gooseberry at Saw Mill Brook.

2 comments:

michael jameson said...

can you even imagine planning and going out one day to look at a tree or a river or a clump of ferns or flowers?! to relax and think of nothing more then what your senses can take in? i think not or very few! we are now city dwellers! and the beauty the world has to offer we look at in electric boxes,on paper,some make little gardens. forests have lost their fans! now we are fans of cement and wires! and we are proud look what we can do!. im sorry folks! michael jameson oldantiqueguy@hotmail.com

michael jameson said...

sorry folks i did not mean to upset! i think i upset myself sometimes and it comes out in my writings! michael jameson