I think it is time to introduce some other voices than mine to this journal. It's early days as yet but I still hope that I might be so lucky as to receive submissions from readers for possible inclusion also. In the meantime, I mentioned in my first entry that I'd just read Henry David Thoreau's 'Walden' for the first time and suggested I'd publish an article on that topic. I have decided instead to let Thoreau speak for himself (through the filter of my choice of extracts from his best known work).
There are many, many passages in 'Walden' that I marked as I read, but the two that follow have been chosen particularly for their relevance to the AEON premise. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. They are taken from the Project Gutenberg eBook which requires I include the following brief paragraph:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Enjoy ...
'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did
not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish
to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to
live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad
swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its
lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole
and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or
if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion.'
From 'Where I Lived, and What I lived For' p.94
'A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is
earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of
his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender
eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are
its overhanging brows.
Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in
a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite
shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the
glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like
a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming
against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere
from another. You would think that you could walk dry under it to the
opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it.
Indeed, they sometimes dive below this line, as it were by mistake, and
are undeceived. As you look over the pond westward you are obliged to
employ both your hands to defend your eyes against the reflected as well
as the true sun, for they are equally bright; and if, between the two,
you survey its surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass,
except where the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its
whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable
sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have said,
a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It may be that in the distance a
fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one
bright flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water;
sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or here and there, perhaps,
is a thistle-down floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at and
so dimple it again. It is like molten glass cooled but not congealed,
and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in
glass. You may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated
from the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs,
resting on it. From a hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any
part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth
surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake.
It is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is
advertised--this piscine murder will out--and from my distant perch I
distinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods
in diameter. You can even detect a water-bug (Gyrinus) ceaselessly
progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for they
furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuous ripple bounded by two
diverging lines, but the skaters glide over it without rippling it
perceptibly. When the surface is considerably agitated there are no
skaters nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm days, they leave
their havens and adventurously glide forth from the shore by short
impulses till they completely cover it. It is a soothing employment,
on one of those fine days in the fall when all the warmth of the sun
is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on such a height as this,
overlooking the pond, and study the dimpling circles which are
incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid the
reflected skies and trees. Over this great expanse there is no
disturbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed away and assuaged,
as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling circles seek the shore
and all is smooth again. Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on the
pond but it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, as
it were the constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing of
its life, the heaving of its breast. The thrills of joy and thrills
of pain are undistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the lake!
Again the works of man shine as in the spring. Ay, every leaf and twig
and stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered with
dew in a spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an insect produces a
flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo!'
From 'The Ponds' p.190
Henry David Thoreau, 'Walden', First Published 1854
