Thoreau
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Purple Martins
It’s been several years since I last ventured to the Purple Martin colony at Lemon Creek on Staten Island. There are at least half a dozen nests going now. It’s hard to count with all the comings and goings. Also, House Sparrows and European Starlings have taken some of the spaces, adding to the difficulty…
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Thoreau Thursday
All biographies end. And, of course, the ending is always the same. Nearing the literal and figurative end of Laura Dassow Walls’s magisterial life of Henry David Thoreau, I suddenly found myself not wanting to go on. I didn’t want him to die. Not right now. Not during our political upheaval. I started reading “Wild Apples” to…
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Thoreau Thursday
Orwell is our go-to guy for the political perversion of language, but I discover that Ralph Waldo Emerson was on a similar track a century earlier. Corruption of character leads to “the corruption of language,” he wrote in “Nature.” “In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding…
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Thoreau Thursday
“When the thermometer is down to 20, the streams of thought tinkle underneath like the rivers under the ice. Thought like the ocean is nearly of one temperature. Ideas, — are they the fishes of thought? Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a particle of it. Would you see your mind, look at the…
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Wigeon And All
An American Wigeon (Anas americana) and American Black Duck (Anas rubripes). The other day a commentor here bemoaned the intrusion of ideas into his refined quest for pictures of nature. Those who refuse to make the connection between politics and the natural world, or what there is of it, are a monstrous problem. From the beginning…
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Thoreau’s Birthday
“I saw Brooks Clark, who is now about eighty and bent like a bow, hastening along the road, barefooted, as usual, with an axe in his hand; was in haste perhaps on account of the cold wind on his bare feet. When he got up to me, I saw that besides the axe in one…
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Cold Tree
“A beautiful form has as much life at one season as another.” ~ Henry David Thoreau. The distinctive cone shape of the Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) is actually kind of similar to the distinctive cone shape of the Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum). Both species grace Brooklyn Bridge Park and both appear “bald” this time of…
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Happy Birthday, Henry
To my mind, the exemplar of America is Henry David Thoreau, who was born on this day in 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. Christened “David Henry,” he changed the order of his given names when he was twenty. He was closely associated with Concord and didn’t sell many books in his lifetime, but his influence as…
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A Wider View
“The poet says the proper study of mankind is man. I say, study to forget all that; take wider views of the universe.” – Henry David Thoreau, Journal, April 2, 1852 This blog was begun nearly two years ago under the influence of Thoreau and remains so. Going with a tweeted recommendation from Geoff Wisner,…
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A scant note on abundance
Extinction is forever. The Anthropocene Extinction we are living through is much discussed, but in this discussion something gets lost as we attempt to save the last hundred or thousand members of a particular species of charismatic megafauna. That something is the antithesis of extinction. It is the incredible abundance of animals and plants that…
Backyard and Beyond 