dual personalities

Tag: Henry David THoreau

May 8, 2014

A hill of beans

by chuckofish

I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.

–Henry David Thoreau

Well, I know just what old Thoreau is talking about. Do you?

I go out to see if my pumpkin plants are still where I planted them every morning and then again when I come home from work.

pumpkins

The OM says, ironically, “Are they still there?” But I am worried about them! My past experience teaches me that their chances are not particularly good. Pesky garden varmints enjoy digging around in this bed, but so far so good.

I love this time of year though, don’t you?

azaleas

When the plants are just starting to come up and the weeds and violets and creeping vines have not taken over.

peony buds

peony buds

The first rose bud

The first rose bud

When insect life is minimal. When it is still cool enough to enjoy my time in the yard. I admit I lose interest quickly when our flyover temperatures soar. I am a fair-weather gardener.

But you know how my mind works. Thoreau’s quote got me thinking about “a hill of beans” and how that expression became a synonym for something of negligible importance or value. I wonder how that came to be the case? Anyway, this made me think of that famous scene at the end of Casablanca, when Rick says to Ilsa: “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that…”

BERGMAN BOGART

Yeats, you recall, wanted “Nine bean-rows” and “a hive for the honey-bee” in his Innisfree home.

Hmmm. If my pumpkins amount to even a hill of beans this year, maybe next year I’ll plant some beans.

9 Comments
January 30, 2014

And that’s my opinion from the blue, blue sky

by chuckofish

“Is not January the hardest month to get through? When you have weathered that, you get into the gulfstream of winter, nearer the shores of spring.”

–Henry David Thoreau, 1858

Hiroshige--"Snow Falling on a Town"

Hiroshige–“Snow Falling on a Town”

7 Comments
January 23, 2014

In the midst of the arctic day

by chuckofish

Riverfront Times photo

Riverfront Times photo

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work, the only sound awake ‘twixt Venus and Mars, advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.

Henry David Thoreau, A Winter’s Walk

This is the first paragraph of an essay first published in the Dial, October 1843. You can read the whole thing here.

We have more snow in our flyover state and it is good to read some HDT and imagine him walking through the woods without the benefit of Goretex clothing and Vasque hiking boots.

Stay warm!

2 Comments
January 14, 2014

Darlin’, pardon me

by chuckofish

Some people, like my dual personality, have inconvenient birthdays right before Christmas. Other people, like daughter #3, have birthdays too soon right after Christmas. Hers is January 6, and what with the polar vortex dropping a foot of snow on our flyover town, we were not able to celebrate until last night.

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So, darlin’, happy belated birthday! You are a good sport to come over on a Monday night for toasted ravioli and salad and mini cheesecakes! Best wishes for a fantastic year!

“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”

― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

3 Comments
August 13, 2013

History beckons or “YOLO is just Carpe Diem for stupid people”*

by chuckofish

Somewhere in the Shiloh National Military Park...

Somewhere in the Shiloh National Military Park…

My children give me a lot of way too much grief about the vacations we took when they were youngsters. Excuse me, every trip did not involve a Civil War battlefield. (A lot did but what of it?) Just because they did not spend spring breaks in Destin or Orlando does not make them deprived children. Educational trips are the best, right?

Anyway, daughter #2 is coming home today for a few days and we are taking a little “educational” side trip to Denver, Colorado to do some family research at the Stephen H. Hart Library and Research Center at the brand new History Colorado Center.

HCC_sm_header_MG_0182a copy

I have been curious to see what is included in the archive pertaining to my ancestors John Simpson Hough and John Wesley Prowers, about whom I have written on this blog. John Hough’s son Frank Baron Hough died suddenly while dancing the Charleston in the 1920s (I kid you not) and his widow left all the family letters, documents, manuscripts, photographs, etc. to the state of Colorado. I have been meaning to make this trip for years, but something always prevented me–lack of time, lack of funds, no one to go with me. In the meantime, the old museum was torn down and this new shining edifice was constructed. Determined not to put it off another year, I am going at long last!

While we are out there we are also planning to drive up to Wyoming for a few days to visit an old friend–something else I have been meaning to do for years.

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Wish us luck!

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”

― Henry David Thoreau

*Jack Black

5 Comments
May 8, 2013

The daily tide

by chuckofish

May 6 (Monday) was the 149th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s death of consumption in 1862 at age 44. I’m sorry I missed it, but these things happen.

When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded: “I did not know we had ever quarreled.” His last words were “Now comes good sailing”, followed by two lone words, “moose” and “Indian”.

Bronson Alcott planned the service. The Boston Transcript reported:

Selections from the Bible were read by the minister. A brief ode, written for the purpose by William Ellery Channing, was plaintively sung. Mr. Emerson read an address of considerable length, marked by all his felicity of conception and diction — an exquisite appreciation of the salient and subtle traits of his friend’s genius — a high strain of sanitive thoughts, full of beauty and cheerfulness, chastened by the gentle sorrow of the hour. Referring to the Alpine flower adelweiss, or noble purity, which the young Switzers sometimes lose their lives in plucking from perilous heights, Mr. Emerson said, “Could we pierce to where he is we would see him wearing profuse chaplets of it; for it belongs to him. Where there is knowledge, where there is virtue, where there is beauty, where there is progress, there is now his home.” Mr. Alcott read some very appropriate passages from the writings of the deceased, and the service closed with a prayer by the Rev. Mr. Reynolds. A long procession was then formed to follow the body to the grave. The hands of friends reverently lowered it into the bosom of the earth, on the pleasant hillside of his native village, whose prospects will long wait to unfurl themselves to another observer so competent to discriminate their features, and so attuned to their moods.

Can you imagine such a funeral? It must have been something.

Originally buried in the Dunbar family plot, Thoreau and members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

thoreau-head2

Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable. No day will have been wholly misspent, if one sincere, thoughtful page has been written. Let the daily tide leave some deposit on these pages, as it leaves sand and shells on the shore. So much increase of terra firma. this may be a calendar of the ebbs and flows of the soul; and on these sheets as a beach, the waves may cast up pearls and seaweed.

—Journals

4 Comments
March 20, 2013

At least we amuse ourselves

by chuckofish

thoreau-head2

Feb. 3, 1859 “The writer must to some extent inspire himself. Most of his sentences may at first lie dead in his essay, but when all are arranged, some life and color will be reflected on them from the mature and successful lines; they will appear to pulsate with fresh life, and he will be enabled to eke out their slumbering sense, and make them worthy of the neighborhood.”

Feb. 20, 1859 “How much the writer lives and endures in coming before the public so often! A few years or books are with him equal to a long life of experience, suffering, etc. It is well if he does not become hardened. He learns how to bear contempt and to despise himself. He makes, as it were, post-mortem examination of himself before he is dead. Such is art.”

–H.D. Thoreau, A Writer’s Journal

I wonder what old Thoreau would have thought of blogging? I think it would have suited him, don’t you? A laptop in a little cabin in the woods.

3 Comments
January 9, 2013

Note to self

by chuckofish

sky

I felt my spirits rise when I had got off the road into the open fields, and the sky had a new appearance. I stepped along more buoyantly. There was a warm sunset over the wooded valleys, a yellowish tinge on the pines. Reddish dun-colored clouds like dusky flames stood over it. And then streaks of blue sky were seen here and there. The life, the joy, that is in blue sky after a storm! There is no account of the blue sky in history. Before I walked in the ruts of travel; now I adventured.

Henry David Thoreau, Journals, Jan. 7, 1851

Oh so many books to read (and re-read) in 2013! Do you have a pile of new books to read in January?

Books

6 Comments
October 3, 2012

It’s the Great Pumpkin, right?

by chuckofish

Despite the fact that I visited Eckert’s Farm on Saturday where there was a cornucopia of fresh produce for sale, including pumpkins, on Sunday afternoon I ventured to our neighborhood “pumpkin patch” at the Methodist Church.

This is where I always buy my pumpkins, because, well, I like to support the Methodists. This year they had a huge supply of orange beauties which were surprisingly reasonably priced.

I only bought one (not three as I used to), but I picked a doozy.

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
–Henry David Thoreau

(This pumpkin would not really be good for sitting on, but Thoreau’s point is well taken.)

P.S. The Cardinals clinched the wildcard spot! Hello, post-season!

7 Comments
May 11, 2012

Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry

by chuckofish

“We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste–sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill,–and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry.”

–Henry David Thoreau

3 Comments