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Henry David Thoreau
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This is the season of the fall when the leaves are whirled through the air like flocks of birds...
Male
101 years old
Concord, Massachusetts
United States
Last Login: 11/24/2009
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Henry David Thoreau's Interests
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| General |
Let your walks now be a little more
adventurous; ascend the hills. If, about the last of October, you ascend
any hill in the outskirts of our town, and probably of yours, and look
over the forest, you may see —well, what I have endeavored to describe.
All this you surely will see, and much more, if you are prepared to see
it,—if you look for it.
We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is
the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood. It asks a bright sun
on it to make it show to best advantage, and it must be seen at this
season of the year.
It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling
leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! How gently lay
themselves down and turn to mould! - painted of a thousand hues, and fit
to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last resting-place,
light and frisky. How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their
graves!
Perchance, in the afternoon of such a day, when the water is perfectly
calm and full of reflections, I paddle gently down the main stream, and,
turning up the Assabet, reach a quiet cove where I unexpectedly find
myself surrounded by myriads of leaves, like fellow-voyagers, which seem
to have the same purpose, or want of purpose, with myself.
| Music |
When I hear music I
fear no danger, I am invulnerable, I see no foe. I am related to the
earliest times and to the latest.
Journal, January 13, 1857
I sailed on the North
River last night with my flute, and my music was a tinkling stream which
meandered with the river, and fell from note to note as a brook from rock
to rock. I did not hear the strains after they had issued from the flute,
but before they were breathed into it, for the original strain precedes
the sound by as much as the echo follows after, and the rest is the
perquisite of the rocks and trees and beasts. Unpremeditated music is the
true gauge which measures the current of our thoughts, the very undertow
of our life’s stream." - Journal, August 18, 1841
You cannot hear music and noise at the same time.
Journal, April 27, 1854
Listen to music
religiously, as if it were the last strain you might hear. Journal, June 12, 1851
A thrumming of
piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the
melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By
some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the
universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my
fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree. This is no
longer the dull earth on which I stood. Journal, August 3, 1852
The music of all
creatures has
to do with their loves, even of toads and frogs. Is it not the same with
man?
Journal, May 6, 1852
One will lose no
music by not
attending the oratorios and operas. The really inspiring melodies are
cheap and
universal, and are as audible to the poor man's son as to the rich
man's.
Journal, August ,
1851
On the railroad I
hear the
telegraph. This is the lyre that is as old as the world. I put my ear to
the
post, and the sound seems to be in the core of the post, directly against
my
ear. This is all of music. The utmost refinements of art, methinks, can
go no
further. Journal, March 29, 1853
A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering
prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two villages,
one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the
other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a single tree or
two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found
the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate
drinkers.
| Books |
Much is
published but little
printed.
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Walden,
"Sounds"
Books of
natural history make the
most cheerful winter reading.
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Excursions,
"Natural History of Massachusetts"
An honest
book is the noblest work
of Man.
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Correspondence to
Helen Thoreau, January 21, 1840
But of much more importance than a knowledge of the names and
distinctions of color is the joy and exhilaration which these colored
leaves excite. Already these brilliant trees throughout the street,
without any more variety, are at least equal to an annual festival and
holiday, or a week of such.
How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great scarlet fruit full of
ripe juices, every leaf, from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow,
especially if you look toward the sun! What more remarkable object can
there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If
such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition
to posterity, and get into the mythology at last.
| Heroes |
 
...the earth is the mother of all creatures.
- Journal, Sept. 9, 1854
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Henry David Thoreau's Details
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| Status: | Single | | Body type: | 5' 11" / Slim / Slender | | Zodiac Sign: | Cancer | | Occupation: | Teacher, Surveyor, Pencil Maker, Lecturer, Writer |
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Henry David Thoreau's Blurbs |
About me:
I should
not talk so much about
myself if there were anybody else
whom I knew as
well. Unfortunately, I am confined
to this theme by the
narrowness of my experience.
Moreover, I, on my side,
require of every writer, first
or last, a simple and
sincere account of his own life,
and not merely what he
has heard of other men's lives;
some such account as he
would send to his kindred from a
distant land; for if he
has lived sincerely, it must
have been in a distant
land to me. - Walden, "Economy"
I should
not talk so much about
myself if there were anybody else
whom I knew as
well. Unfortunately, I am confined
to this theme by the
narrowness of my experience.
Moreover, I, on my side,
require of every writer, first
or last, a simple and
sincere account of his own life,
and not merely what he
has heard of other men's lives;
some such account as he
would send to his kindred from a
distant land; for if he
has lived sincerely, it must
have been in a distant
land to me. - Walden, "Economy"
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Who I'd like to meet:
As I love
nature, as I love singing
birds, and gleaming stubble,
and flowing rivers, and morning and evening,
and summer
and winter, I love thee,
my Friend.
- A Week, "Wednesday"
The
autumnal change of our
woods has not made
a deep impressionon our
literature yet.
October has hardly tinged
our poetry.
- Excursions,
Autumnal Tints
See
those
crimson patches far away
on the hillsides, like dense
flocks of crimson sheep,
where the huckleberry reminds
of recent excursions. See
those patches of rich brown in
the low grounds, where
the ferns stand shriveled. See
the greenish-yellow
phalanxes of birches, and the
crisped yellowish
elm-tops here and there. We are not
prepared to believe that
the earth is now so
parti-colored, and would
present to a bird’s eye such
distinct masses of bright
yellow....
October
is the month of painted
leaves, Their rich glow now
flashes round the world.
As fruits and leaves and the
day itself acquire a
bright tint just before they fall,
so the year near is
setting. October is a sunset sky;
November the later
twilight.
- Autumnal
Tints
When I go to the river the day after
the principal fall of leaves, the sixteenth, I find my boat all covered,
bottom and seats, with the leaves of the golden willow under which it is
moored, and I set sail with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. If I
empty it, it will be full again to-morrow. I do not regard them as
litter, to be swept out, but accept them as suitable straw or matting for
the bottom of my carriage.
In
October the man is ripe
even to his stalk and leaves; he
is pervaded by his
genius, when all the forest is a
universal harvest,
whether he possesses the enduring
color of the pines, which
it takes two years to ripedn
and wither, or the
brilliant color of the deciduous
trees, which fade the
first fall. -
Journal, November
14, 1853
It is
surprising with what
impunity and comfort one who has
always lain in a warm bed
in a close apartment, and
studiously avoided drafts
of air, can lie down on the
ground without a shelter,
roll himself in a blanket, and
sleep before a fire, in a
frosty autumn night, just
after a long rain-storm,
and even come soon to enjoy and
value the fresh
air.
...We are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of
grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly
new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more
mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of
October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we
occupy.
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