the 'trick of science'

I witness a beauty in the form or coloring of the clouds which addresses itself to my imagination, for which you account scientifically to my understanding, but do not so account to my imagination. It is what it suggests and is the symbol of that I care for, and if, by any trick of science, you rob it of its symbolicalness, you do me no service and explain nothing...If there is not something mystical in your explanation, something unexplainable to the understanding, some elements of mystery, it is quite insufficient...Just as inadequate to a pure mechanic would be a poet's account of a steam-engine. If we knew all things thus mechanically merely, should we know anything really?
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We seek too soon to ally the perceptions of the mind to the experience of the hand, to prove our gossamer truths practical, to show their connection with our every-day life (better show their distance from our every-day life), to relate them to the cider-mill and the banking institution. Ah, give me pure mind, pure thought! Let me not be in haste to detect the universal law; let me see more clearly a particular instance of it! Much finer themes I aspire to, which will yield no satisfaction to the vulgar mind, not one sentence for them. Perchance it may convince such that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in their philosophy. Dissolve one nebula, and so destroy the nebular system and hypothesis. Do not seek expressions, seek thoughts to be expressed.

By perseverance you get two views of the same truth.

Thoreau's simple grave in Concord, Mass.

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pg 101 - 102, The journal Henry David Thoreau, introduction by John R. Stilgoe

thoreau -- leaves

Even the dry leaves are gregarious, and they collect in little heaps in the hollows in the snow, or even on the plane surfaces, driven in flocks by the wind. How like shrinking maidens wrapping their scarfs about them they flutter along!
pg.107, journals

moods

Thoreau's cove at Walden Pond

The mind is subject to moods, as the shadows of clouds pass over the earth. Pay not too much heed to them. Let not the traveller stop for them. They consist with the fairest weather. By the mood of my mind, I suddenly felt dissuaded from continuing my walk, but I observed at the same instant that the shadow of a cloud was passing over the spot on which I stood, though it was of small extent, which, if it had no connection with my mood, at any rate suggested how transient and little to be regarded that mood was. I kept on, and in a moment the sun shone on my walk within and without.
age 34, July 1851, pg. 63

"A traveller!"

from the journals of Thoreau

A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from ----- to -----; it is the history of every one of us.
age 33, June 1851, pg. 58

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Why should pensiveness be a kin to sadness? There is a certain fertile sadness which I would not avoid, but rather earnestly seek. It is positively joyful to me. It saves my life from being trivial.
age 34, August 1851, pg. 66

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And why should I speak to my friends? for how rarely is it that I am I; and are they, then, they?
age 34, August 1851, pg. 67

Henry David Thoreau central

This blog is probably going to become Henry David Thoreau central for the time being. I am reading his newly published -- abridged -- journals. Although they are abridged, they are the greatest compilation of his journals to date. And he has so many nuggets of interesting thoughts and observations that I feel I have to write them down somewhere.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is only another name for tameness. It is the untamed, uncivilized, free, and wild thinking in Hamlet, in the Iliad, and in all the scriptures and mythologies that delights us...A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvellous[sic], ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen...The fault of our books and other deeds is that they are too humane, I want something speaking in some measure to the condition of muskrats and skunk-cabbage as well as of men, -- not merely to a pining and complaining coterie of philanthropists.
pg. 43, November 1850, age 33

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What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
pg. 42, November 1850, age 33