To affect the quality of the day

 

Author X did this

She also has a website archive, which begins with this quote:

“They go publishing the ‘chronological cycles’ and ‘movable festivals of the Church’ and the like, but how insignificant are these compared with the annual phenomena of your life, which fall within your experience! The signs of the zodiac are not nearly of that significance to me that the sight of a dead sucker in the spring is. That is the occasion for an immovable festival in my church. Another kind of lent.”

– Henry David Thoreau, Journal, October 16, 1859

From Kalendar

No completed work speaks to the fullness of Thoreau's vision in all of its interrelated facets as do these charts—in part because they are not a discrete literary, political, or scientific work, but rather a sketch of a life lived in time, a map of experience itself. They give us—both in their overall structure and in the particular detail of the entries—an extraordinary picture of the mature Thoreau, the Thoreau who had absorbed the lessons of Darwin, Ruskin, and John Brown as thoroughly as he once had the early lessons of Emerson.

Though it is likely that the Kalendar was initially intended as a blueprint for a major work, it seems clear that the purpose it finally served was a more personal one: a consolidation of perspectives that made possible a more integrated life in nature and time. In an 1851 Journal entry, Thoreau describes a remembered state of identification with the more-than-human world: "For-merly methought nature developed as I developed and grew up with me.

My lite was ecstasy. In youth before lost any of my senses- 1 can remember that I was all alive-and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction" (7/16/1951, Journal 3:305-6). For the whole of his adult life, this ideal of growing out nature of being keyed to the seasons as they untold or Thoreau's definition of happiness, sanity, and health. In his final spring of full health and mobility, Thoreau devised a technology for more fully perceiving and experiencing seasonal time. In Walden, he had written, "To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour." The great work for which the Kalendar would finally serve as index and outline was not a book, but a life of multiplied perspectives, lived in fuller time.

81

I formerly thought it would be worth the while to get a specimen leaf from each changing tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant, when it had acquired its brightest, characteristic color, in its transition from the green to the brown state, outline it and copy its color exactly with paint in a book, which should be titled October, or Autumnal Tints. Beginning with the earliest reddening-woodbine, and the lake of radical leaves, and coming down through the maples, hickories and sumacs, and many beautifully freckled leaves less generally known, to the latest oaks and aspens. What a memento such a book would be! You would need only to turn over its leaves to take a ramble through the Autumn woods whenever you pleased. Or if I could preserve the leaves themselves unfaded it would be better still. I have made little progress toward such a book, but I have endeavored instead to describe all these bright tints in the order in which they present themselves.

85

The sudden appearance, in mid-autumn, of delicate lines of spider silk between objects, visible only in direct sunlight, appealed to Thoreau the poet, as well as Thoreau the naturalist. "Let us not underrate the value of a fact," he had written in "A Natural History of Massachusetts," "it will one day flower in a truth." Though Thoreau increasingly adapted this early, transcendental view of nature as a storehouse of symbols for "higher" moral and spiritual truths into a more horizontal sense of interconnectedness, he never stopped seeking and perceiving connections-both between natural phenomena and between mental and physical experience.

Recalling the gossamer days he carefully recorded in his Journal, the Henry Thoreau of 1861 would have found an image for many of the aspects of the natural world that most delighted and amazed him: its tendency toward reproductive superabundance, or what Emerson called "ecstasy"; its multidirectional interconnections; its penchant for hiding in plain sight. "They are everywhere & on everything," he writes, with an uncharacteristic vagueness that suggests the dizzying ubiquity of the phenomenon, an almost-magical plenty: "They are so abundant that they seem to have been suddenly produced in the atmosphere by some chemistry- spun out of air." This capacity of the natural world to stun and overwhelm the senses, to enchant, is part of nature's restorative power for Thoreau.

The phenomenon of gossamer—not only the spider's web into which it is spun, but the delicate, silky, visible-invisible matter itself—was the kind of liminal phenomenon that captivated Thoreau.

89

Thoreau's data gathering for the farmers overlapped with his creation of a seven-and-a-half-foot-long scroll map, copied from a map drawn in 1834 by

B. F. Perham and filled in with Thoreau's personal notations. These include not only descriptions of the river's current in various places but also more subjective data: the good swimming holes, as well as the location of his "boat place." Finally, the map identifies "what plants grow where: individual oak and ash trees, polygonum, bulrush, and many others." In this way, the river survey is analogous to the charts of general phenomena. Both projects seek to unite the methods of science with personal, subjective experience—to attain the double perspective of the poet-naturalist.

106

A man receives only what he is ready to receive-whether physically-or intellectually or morally-as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only.

We hear & apprehend only what we already half know- If there is something which does not concern me-which is out of my line-which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to-however novel & remarkable it may be-if it is spoken, we hear it not-if it is written we read it not-or if we read it-it does not detain us.

Every man thus tracks himself, through life-in all his hearing & reading & observation & travelling. His observations make a chain- The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked-with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. (1/5/1860, Journal Transcript 30:230)

112

from Walden (after thinking about the benefits of rain on crops)

In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in evey sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insighnificant, and i have never thought of them since.  Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympahty and befriended me.

113

In November of 1861, as he felt his decline sharpen, it is no wonder that Thoreau inscribed this salvific phenomenon—the special balm afforded by

"sheltered places" in late fall and winter—in the November chart, even though he could find only two corresponding Journal entries for data points (November 18, 1857, and November 11, 1858). In recording the entry for 1853, Thoreau carefully transcribes "rejoice in" along with the date—as though to preserve in particular this aspect of the phenomenon. As he would have known—etymologist that he was—rejoice has a second, archaic meaning: "to own (goods, property, possess, enjoy the possession of, have the fruition of." To "rejoice in sheltered and sunny places" was thus not only to experience joy, but to possess the fullness of the season, to take into oneself and make one's own this special blessing of November. In preserving the memory of this rejoicing in the charts, Thoreau was asserting the continuity of its operation. Homebound, he could still feel the sun on his back.

114

In 1857 he had written,

I think that the man of science makes this mistake-& the mass of mankind along with him, that you should coolly give your chief attention to the phenomenon which excites you-as something independent on you-and not as it is related to you.... With regard to such objects I find that it is not they themselves-(with which the men of science deal that concern me. The point of interest is somewhere between me & them (i.e. the objects) (11/5/1857, Journal Transcript

24:609-10)

115. Nov 1 1851.   counted 125 crows in one straggling

flock moving westward. The red shruboak leaves abide on the hills." The passage ends with a question that, as Peck observes, echoes throughout the Journal in slightly varying forms. "How long?" The question expresses the combination of delight and yearning that Thoreau experienced with every seasonal "first" that he observed. On the one hand, each new appearance was a source of delight. On the other, it prompted the thought of all his limited perspective might have missed. In charting the dates of many firsts across the decade of his Journal keeping, Thoreau sought accurate and identifiable true beginnings to each phenomenon, much as he once sought the hard rock bottom of Walden Pond: each plant's flowering, each winter bud appearing. The temporal boundary marking at work in the charts bears an obvious affinity to Thoreau's work as surveyor. Peck writes, "As calendar-maker and surveyor, Thoreau is walking through the world to restore the ancient boundaries of time and space. The larger goal toward which this ambulation works is the restoration of the unity of self and world."

117

We do not wonder that so many commit suicide, life is so barren and worthless; we only live on by an effort of will. 12/27/1857.