thoreau | Entries tagged with 365 simplifications

January 15, 1857 - "But let us hear a strain of music, we are at once advertised of a life which no man had told us of, which no preacher preaches. Suppose I try to describe faithfully the prospect which a strain of music exhibits to me. The field of my life becomes a boundless plain, glorious to tread, with no death nor disappointment at the end of it. All meanness and trivialness disappear. I become adequate to any deed. No particulars survive this expansion; persons do not survive it. In the light of this strain there is no thou nor I. We are actually lifted above ourselves." - The Diary of Henry David Thoreau

Title: Listen to the music
Flickr User vagawi

14 January 1854 - "I just had a coat come home from the tailor’s. Ah me! Who am I that should wear this coat? It was fitted upon one of the devil’s angels about my size. Of what use that measuring of me if he did not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang it on. This is not the figure that I cut. This is the figure the tailor cuts. That presumptuous and impertinent fashion whispered in his ear, so that he heard no word of mine. As if I had said, “Not my will, O Fashion, but thine be done." - The Diary of Henry David Thoreau

Title: NYE - Detail
Flickr User Gryphon Vanderhole
(

gryphons_hole's esoteric and bombastic individuality came to mind the instant I read this quote)

January 13, 1856 - "In our workshops we pride ourselves on discovering a use for what had previously been regarded as waste, but how partial and accidental our economy compared with Nature’s. In Nature nothing is wasted." - The Diary of Henry David Thoreau

Title: HDR Recycling
Flickr Member king desmond

January 12, 1855: Perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. How we leap by the side of the open brooks! What beauty in the running brooks! What life! What society! The cold is merely superficial; it is summer still at the core, far, far within. It is in the cawing of the crow, the crowing of the cock, the warmth of the sun on our backs. - The Diary of Henry David Thoreau

Title: Brook 2
Flickr User David Ayres

January 11, 1852: "Let me not live as if time was short. Catch the pace of the seasons; have leisure to attend to every phenomenon of nature, and to entertain every thought that comes to you." - The Diary of Henry David Thoreau

Title: Vermilion Lakes Sunset to Stars (Time-Lapse Movie)
Flickr User Astronomy Calgary

January 10, 1856: "The kitchen windows were magnificent last night, with their frost sheaves, surpassing any cut or ground glass." - The diary of Henry David Thoreau

Title: Ice on Glass
Flickr User Clint Gardner

January 9, 1855: "What a strong and healthy but reckless, hit or miss style had some of these early writers of New England....As if they spoke with a relish, smacking their lips like a coach-whip, caring more to speak heartily than scientifically true... They were not to be caught napping by the wonders of nature in a new country. They use a strong, coarse, homely speech which cannot always be found in a dictionary, nor sometimes be heard in polite society, but which brings you very near to the thing itself being described. The strong new soil speaks through them."

Title: Moustache
Flickr User: ben heine

January 8, 1854: "The morning hope is soon lost in what becomes the routine of the day, and we do not recover ourselves again until we land on the pensive shores of evening, shores which skirt the great western continent of the night" - The Diary of Henry David Thoreau

7 January 1852 - "We never tire of the drama of sunset. I go forth each afternoon and look into the west a quarter of an hour before sunset, with fresh curiosity, to see what new picture will be painted there, what new panorama exhibited, what new dissolving views. Can Washington Street or Broadway show anything as good? Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn and the curtain falls." - from the Diary of Henry David Thoreau

Title:Oceanside Sunset 01.06.11
Flickr User Joe Wolf in San Diego

6 January 1858: "my attention was caught by a snowflake on my coat-sleeve. It was one of those perfect, crystalline, star-shaped ones, six-rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes, only the spokes were perfect little pine trees in shape, arranged around a central spangle. This little object, which, with many of its fellows, rested unmelting on my coat, so perfect and beautiful, reminded me that Nature had not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart?"

Title: Mama Snowflake
Flickr User Sonnet Schultz

January 5, 1860 - "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 and 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 and 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 and reading and observation and traveling." - The Diary of Henry David Thoreau

title: forest path
flickr user saikat

January 4, 1857, "After spending four or five days surveying and drawing a plan incessantly, I especially feel the necessity of putting myself in communication with nature again, to recover my tone, to withdraw out of the wearying and unprofitable world of affairs. The things I have been doing have but a fleeting and accidental importance, however much men are immersed in them, and yield very little valuable fruit. I would fain have been wading through the woods and fields and conversing with the sane snow. Having waded in the very shallowest stream of time, I would now bathe my temples in eternity. I wish again to participate in the serenity of nature, to share the happiness of the river and the woods."

Title: Soleduck Falls, Olympic National Park
Flickr User I owe my soul...

January 3, 1853 - "I have a room all to myself; it is nature. It is a place beyond the jurisdiction of human governments. Pile up your books, the records of sadness - your saws and your laws - Nature is glad outside and her merry worms within will erelong topple them down." - Diary of Henry David Thoreau

Title: Alpine Meadow
Flickr User troikkonen

2 January 1859: Diary of Henry David Thoreau

"When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat. The grammarian is one who can neither cry nor laugh, yet thinks he can express human emotions. So the posture-masters tell you how you shall walk - turning your toes out, perhaps excessively - but so the beautiful walkers are not made."

Title: Ice Gazers (lying on Walden Pond Winter 2007)
Flickr User greendrz

The 2011 365 Project

On a New Year's Day, Thoreau wrote (at age 34) in his journal, "I wish to be translated to the future - and look at my work as if it were a structure on the plain. to observe what portions have crumbled under the influence of the elements."

Remarkably, little has. If anything, Thoreau's message that we should strive for a simple life seems more timely as the years go by - if ever harder to attain.

so - for my 365 project for 2011 - I'll be using quotes from Thoreau, Emerson and other Transcendentalist thinkers as well as quotes on the themes of simplifying our lives, finding peace and being responsible for our paths and for honoring the paths of those around us as free of judgement as possible. Each path is unique - and should be honored accordingly.

So - time for a reset of the 365 project. :) On a New Year's Day, Thoreau wrote (at age 34) in his journal,

"I wish to be translated to the future - and look at my work as if it were a structure on the plain. to observe what portions have crumbled under the influence of the elements."

Remarkably, little has. If anything, Thoreau's message that we should strive for a simple life seems more timely as the years go by - if ever harder to attain.

so - for my 365 project for 2011 - I'll be using quotes from Thoreau, Emerson and other Transcendentalist thinkers as well as quotes on the themes of simplifying our lives, finding peace and being responsible for our paths and for honoring the paths of those around us as free of judgement as possible. Each path is unique - and should be honored accordingly. So here is 1.365:

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness. - Henry David Thoreau