The Blog of Henry David Thoreau: pretty much alike...Thoreau's Journal: 14-Dec-1851

12.14.2013

pretty much alike
...Thoreau's Journal: 14-Dec-1851

The boys have been skating for a week, but I have had no time to skate for surveying. I have hardly realized that there was ice, though I have walked over it about this business. As for the weather, all seasons are pretty much alike to one who is actively at work in the woods. I should say that there were two or three remarkably warm days and as many cold ones in the course of a year, but the rest are all alike in respect to temperature. This is my answer to acquaintances who ask me if I have not found it very cold being out all day.

2 comments:

Claire said...: I agree - once you get walking and moving, even a very cold day doesn't usually feel all that different from a less cold day.

Thanks so much for posting these excerpts.; Dec 14, 2008, 2:10:00 PM
michael jameson said...: i live where its warm cold warm hot warm cold warm hot etc... its where i live, i cant change it, i dress for it, everyone talks about it because its the one thing everyone has in common.; Dec 14, 2010, 1:52:00 PM

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one of the native forces

“Thoreau was a surprising fellow—he is not easily grasped—is elusive: yet he is one of the native forces—stands for a fact, a movement, an upheaval: Thoreau belongs to America, to the transcendental, to the protesters: then he is an outdoor man: all outdoor men everything else being equal appeal to me. Thoreau was not so precious, tender, a personality as Emerson: but he was a force—he looms up bigger and bigger: his dying does not seem to have hurt him a bit: every year has added to his fame.”

~Walt Whitman as recorded by Horace Traubel

the simple print

The text is from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis Allen, 14 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906).

Each blog post is an excerpt from that day's entry in the Journal, and although not necessarily the complete entry, it is an integral and intact section thereof.

"It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.... One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great." -Emerson