Live.

Borrell, Escaping the Critics, 1874

To live sincerely is to live your own life, not your father's life or your mother's life or your neighbor's life; to spend soul on large concerns, not to waste your life as a kind of human ant carrying around small burdens; and finally, to live sincerely is to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life," as Thoreau declares in Walden.  

That may require unsociability.  Thoreau noticed that at a certain age boys remain in shadows and corners of rooms, look a little wild, make up their minds about a given grown up in a second, and may come to supper or not.  Thoreau values that unsociability in both boys and girls.  But those moments soon disappear, replaced by an old anxiety to please.

Robert Bly, from The Winged Life: The Poetic Voice of Henry David Thoreau

Published.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, published on this day in 1854

Happy Birthday, Henry David Thoreau

Green, Henry David Thoreau, 1856

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

Henry David Thoreau, born on this day in 1817, from a letter to Harrison Gray Otis Blake, on April 10, 1853

Affect.

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Henry David Thoreau

Blessed.

The geological origins of the American Revolution ...

In 1635, when the Massachusetts General Court authorized the founding of the town, it possessed a natural setting with distinct advantages replicated nowhere else in New England. Over millennia, the forces of geology had fashioned a physical landscape that the Native inhabitants had improved to sustain their way of life, and had unwittingly made ready for appropriation by the newcomers from across the sea. These resources drew pioneers into the interior, well beyond the seaboard, for the first time, and enabled the creation of new social and intellectual landscapes. Nature blessed Concord from the start. 

Enjoyment.

I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety. I am ready to try this for the next ten thousand years, and exhaust it. How sweet to think of! my extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.

Henry David Thoreau, from a letter to Harrison Blake, December 6, 1853.

Heroic.

Wyeth, Men of Concord, 1936

Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world.

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, or Life in the Woods

Pulse.

Nicholson, Astra, J K-2, 1928 

The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.

Henry David Thoreau

Published.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, published on this day in 1854

Always.

A.W. Hosmer, Walden Pond, Looking southwest from Thoreau's Cabin, 1908

My profession is to always be on the alert to find God in nature.  I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.  Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Henry David Thoreau

Will.

As civilization advances, the sense of wonder almost necessarily declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information, but only for a want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Transcendently.

We hear the kindred vibrations--music!--& we put out our dormant feelers--unto the limits of the universe -- We attain to a wisdom that passeth understanding -- The stable continents undulate.  The hard & fixed becomes fluid. "Unless above himself he doth erect himself how poor a thing is man!" When I hear music fear no danger -- I am invulnerable -- I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times & to the latest.

There are infinite degrees of life--from that which is next to sleep and death, to that which is forever awake & immortal. We must not confound man with man. We cannot conceive of a greater difference than between the life of one man and that of another. I am--constrained to believe that the mass of men are never so lifted above themselves that their destiny is seen to be transcendently beautiful & grand. 

Henry David Thoreau, from his journal dated January 13, 1857

Reminded.

Wülfing, Little Mermaid, 1953

Sept. 7. 

Our ecstatic states, which appear to yield so little fruit, have this value at least: though in the seasons when our genius reigns we may be powerless for expression, yet, in calmer seasons, when our talent is active, the memory of those rarer moods comes to color our picture and is the permanent paint-pot, as it were, into which we dip our brush. Thus no life or experience goes unreported at last; but if it be not solid gold it is gold-leaf, which guild the furniture of the mind. It is an experience of infinite beauty on which we unfailingly draw, which enables us to exaggerate ever truly. Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

Henry David Thoreau, from The Journal: 1837-1861

Published.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, published on this day in 1854

Happy Birthday, Thoreau

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. I do not get nearer by a hair’s breadth to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man.

Henry David Thoreau, born on this day in 1817, from his Journal, October 4, 1859

Absolution.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. 

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray

Affect.

Phelan, Walden Pond in November, Concord Massachusetts, 2009

Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond began on this day in 1845.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

Step.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.  It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

A primary mistake that public education continues to make is in permanently grouping students by age (but doing anything else doesn't fit their industrial model ... "It's important that we keep to schedule/There must be no delay").  As we say in our classroom, popcorn pops at different rates.  Be relentless in the pursuit of learning, but be patient with the progress of the process. Uncle Teddy also reminded us that comparison is the thief of joy.

Advances.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.  If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now, put the foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

Immediately.

Watts, November Evening in a Welsh Wood, 1893

This month taxes a walker’s resources more than any other. For my part, I should sooner think of going into quarters in November than in winter. If you do feel any fire at this season out of doors, you may depend upon it, it is your own.  It is but a short time these afternoons before the night cometh in which no man can walk. If you delay to start till three o-clock, there will be hardly time left for a long and rich adventure, to get fairly out of town. November Eat-heart, is that the name of it? Not only the fingers cease to do their office, but there is often a benumbing of the faculties generally. You can hardly screw up your courage to take a walk when all is thus tightly locked or frozen up, and so little is to be seen in field or wood. I am inclined to take to the swamps or woods as the warmest place, and the former are still the openest. Nature has herself become like the few fruits she still affords, a very thick-shelled nut with a shrunken meat within. If I find anything to excite a warming thought abroad, it is an agreeable disappointment, for I am obliged to go willfully and against my inclination at first, the prospect looks so barren, so many springs are frozen up, not a flower, perchance, and few birds left, not a companion abroad in all these fields for me. I seem to anticipate a fruitless walk. I think to myself hesitatingly, shall I go there, or there, or there? And cannot make up my mind to any route, all seem so unpromising, mere surface-walking and fronting the cold wind, so that I have to force myself to it often, and at random.

But then I am often unexpectedly compensated, and the thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July. I may meet with something that interests me, and immediately it is as warm as in July, as if it were the south instead of the northwest wind that blew. 

Henry David Thoreau, from his journal, 25 November 1857