drafty mountain hut

from the journals of Henry David Thoreau

Our life should be so active and progressive as to be a journey. Our meals should all be of journey-cake and hasty pudding. We should be more alert, see the sun rise, not keep fashionable hours, enter a house, our own house, as a khan, a caravansary. At noon I did not dine; I ate my journey-cake. I quenched my thirst at a spring or a brook. As I sat at the table, the hospitality was so perfect and the repast so sumptuous that. I seemed to be breaking my fast upon a bank in the midst of an arduous journey, that the water seemed to be a living spring, the napkins grass, the conversation free as the winds ; and the servants that waited on its were our simple desires.

from the journals of Henry David Thoreau

Nature loves gradation. Trees do not spring abruptly from the earth. Mosses creep up over the insteps of the trees and endeavor to reclaim them. Hence the propriety of lacing over the instep.

Is not the moccasin a more picturesque and fitter sort of shoe than ours in which to move amid the herbage ?

Jan.25. In keeping a journal of one’s walks and thoughts it seems to be worth the while to record those phenomena which are most interesting to us at the time. Such is the weather. It makes a material difference whether it is foul or fair, affecting surely our mood and thoughts.

– from the journals of Henry David Thoreau

Reading the hymns of the Rig Veda, translated by Wilson, which consist in a great measure of simple epithets addressed to the firmament, or the dawn, or  the winds, which mean more or less as the reader is more or less alert and imaginative, and seeing how widely the various translators have differed, they regarding not the poetry, but the history and philology, dealing with very concise Sanscrit, which must almost always be amplified to be understood, I am sometimes inclined to doubt if the translator has not made something out of nothing, – whether a real idea or sentiment has been thus transmitted to us from so primitive a period. I doubt if learned Germans might not thus edit pebbles from the seashore into hymns of the Rig Veda, and translators translate them accordingly, extracting the meaning which the sea has imparted to them in very primitive times. While the commentators and translators are disputing about the meaning of this word or that, I hear only the resounding of the ancient sera and put into it all the meaning I am possessed of, the deepest murmurs I can recall, for I do not the least care where I get my ideas, or what suggests them.

from the journals of Henry David Thoreau

Jan 23. “The coldest day that I can remember recording, clear and bright, but very high wind, blowing the snow. Ink froze. Had to break the ice in my pail with a hammer.  Thermometer at 6.45A .M ., -18°; at 10.30, -14° (Smith’s, -20° ; Wilds’, -7°, the last being in a more sheltered place); at 12.45, -9°; at 4 P . M., -5 1/2′; at 7.30 P.M., -8°. I may safely say that -5° has been the highest temperature today by our thermometer.

Walking this afternoon, I notice that the face inclines to stiffen, and the hands and feet get cold soon. On first coming out in very cold weather, I find that I breathe fast, though without walking faster or exerting myself any more than usual.