Part 11

Let our preferences be what they may, however, the greater number of us must stay where we are put, and play the hand that is dealt to us, happy if we can face the dark side of the year with a measure of philosophy. If there is a new self, as Thoreau says, there will be a new world and a new season. If we carry the tropics within us, we need not dream of Florida. And even if there is no constraint upon our going and coming, we need not be in haste to run away. We may safely wait a week or two, at least. November is often not half so bad as it is painted--not half so bad, indeed, as Thoreau himself sometimes painted it. For the eleventh month was not one of his favorites. “November Eat-Heart,” he is more than once moved to call it. The experience of it puts his equanimity to the proof. Even his bravest words about it sound rather like a defiance than a welcome,--a little as if he were whistling to keep up his courage. With the month at its worst, he confesses, he has almost to drive himself afield. He can hardly decide upon any route; “all seem so unpromising, mere surface-walking and fronting the cold wind.” “Surface-walking.” How excellent that is! Every contemplative outdoor man knows what is meant, but only Thoreau could have hit it off to such perfection in a word.

I must admit that I am not sorry to find the Walden stoic once in a long while overtaken by such a comparatively unheroic mood. He boasted so often and so well (with all the rest he boasted of his boasting) that it pleases me to hear him complain. So the weather could be too much even for him, I say to myself, with something like a chuckle. He was mortal, after all; and the day was sometimes dark, even in Concord.

Not that he ever whimpered. And had he done so, in any moment of weakness, it should never have been for me to lay a public finger upon the fact. Nobody shall be more loyal to Thoreau than I am, though others may understand him better and praise him more adequately. If he complained, he did it “man-fashion,” and was within a man’s right. To say that the worst of Massachusetts weather is never to be spoken against is to say too much; it is stretching the doctrine of non-resistance to the point of absurdity. As well forbid us to carry umbrellas, or to put up lightning-rods. There is plenty of weather that deserves to be spoken against.

Only let it be done, as I say, “man-fashion;” and having said our say, let us go about our business again, making the best of things as they are--as Thoreau did. For, having owned his disrelish for what the gods provided, he quickly recovered himself, and proceeded to finish his entry in a cheerier strain. Matters are not so desperate with him, after all. He has to force himself out-of-doors, it is true, but once in the woods he often finds himself “unexpectedly compensated.” “The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of.” He meets with something that interests him, and immediately the day is as warm as July--as if the wind had shifted from northwest to south. There is the secret, in November as in May--to be interested. Then there is no longer a question of “surface-walking.” The soul is concerned, and life has begun anew.

Thus far, the present November (I write on the 4th) has been unusually mild; some days have been really summer-like, too warm for comfort; but the sun has shone only by minutes--now and then an hour, at the most. Deciduous trees are nearly bare, the oaks excepted; flowers are few and mostly out of condition, though it would be easy to make a pretty high-sounding list of names; and birds are getting to be almost as scarce as in winter. There is no longer any quiet strolling in the woods. If you wish to listen for small sounds you must stand still. The ground is so thick with crackling leaves that it is impossible to go silently. Everything prophesies of the death of the year. It is almost time for the snow to fall and bury what remains of it.

Yet in warm days one may still see dragon-flies on the wing. Yesterday meadow larks were singing with the greatest abandon and in something like a chorus. I must have seen a dozen, and most if not all of them were in tune. On the 1st of the month a grouse drummed again and again; an unseasonable piece of lyrical enthusiasm, one might think; but I doubt if it was anything so very exceptional. Once, indeed, a few years ago, I heard a grouse drum repeatedly in January, on a cloudy day, when the ground in the woods was deep under snow. That, I believe, was an event much out of the common, though by no means without precedent. I wish Thoreau could have been there; he would have improved the occasion so admirably. So long as the partridge can keep his spirits up to the drumming point, why should the rest of us outdoor people pull a long face over hard times and short rations? Shall we be less manly than a bird?

The partridge will neither migrate nor hibernate, but looks winter in the eye and bids the wind whistle. It is too bad if we who command the services of coal dealers and plumbers, tailors and butchers, doctors and clergymen, cannot stand our ground with a creature that knows neither house nor fuel, and has nothing for it, summer and winter, but to live by his wits. To the partridge man must look like a weak brother, a coddler of himself, ruined by civilization and “modern improvements;” a lubber who would freeze to death where a chickadee bubbles over with the very joy of living.

With weather-braving souls like these Thoreau would associate; and so will I. It is true, what all the moralists have told us, that it is good for a man to keep company with his superiors. Not that in my own case I look for their example and tuition to make me inherently better; it is getting late for that; “nothing that happens after we are twelve counts for very much;” I shall be content if they make me happier. And so much I surely depend upon. Good spirits are contagious. It is the great advantage of keeping a dog, that he has happiness to spare, and gives to his master. So a flock of chickadees, or snowbirds, or kinglets, or tree sparrows, or goldfinches brighten a man’s day. He comes away smiling. I will go out now and prove it.

THE PLEASURES OF MELANCHOLY

This wintry November forenoon I was on a sea beach; the sky clouded, the wind high and cold, cutting to the marrow; a bleak and comfortless place. A boy, dragging a child’s cart, was gathering chips of driftwood along the upper edge of the sand,--one human figure, such as painters use to make a lonesome scene more lonesome. A loon, well offshore, sat rocking upon the water, now lifted into sight for an instant, now lost behind a wave. Distant sails and a steamship were barely visible through the fog. So much for the world on its seaward side. There was little to cheer a man’s soul in that quarter.

On the landward side were thickets of leafless rosebushes covered with scarlet hips; groves of tall, tree-like, smooth-barked alders; swampy tracts, wherein were ilex bushes bright with red Christmas berries, and blueberry bushes scarcely less bright with red leaves. Sometimes it was necessary to put up an opera-glass before I could tell one from the other. Here was a marshy spot; dry, shivering sedges standing above the ice, and among them four or five mud-built domes of muskrat houses. Shrewd muskrats! They knew better than to be stirring abroad on a day like this. “If you haven’t a house, why don’t you build one?” they might have said to the man hurrying past, with his neck drawn down into his coat collar. Here I skirted a purple cranberry bog, having tufts of dwarfed, stubby bayberry bushes scattered over it, each with its winter crop of pale-blue, densely packed, tightly held berry clusters.

Not a flower; not a bird. Not so much as a crow or a robin in one of the stunted savin trees. I remembered winter days here, a dozen years ago, when the alder clumps were lively with tree sparrows, myrtle warblers, and goldfinches. Now the whole peninsula was a place forsaken. I had better have stayed away myself. Here, as so often elsewhere, memory was the better sight.

By a summer cottage upon the rocks was a ledge matted over with the Japanese trailing white rose. There were no blossoms, of course, but what with the leaves, still of a glossy green, and the bunches of handsome, high-colored hips, the vine could hardly have been more beautiful, I was ready to say, even when the roses were thickest upon it. Beside another house a pink poppy still looked fresh. Frail, belated child of summer! I could hardly believe my eyes. All its human admirers were gone long since. Every cottage stood vacant. Nobody would live here in this icy wind, if he could find another place to flee to. I remembered Florida beaches, summery abodes, where every breath from the sea brought a welcome coolness. Why should I not take the next train southward? Shall a man be less sensible than a bird?

That was five or six hours ago. Now I am a dozen miles inland. The air is so still that the sifting snowflakes fall straight downward. Even the finest twigs of the gray-birches, so sensitive to the faintest breath, can hardly be seen to stir. A narrow foot-path under the window is a line of white running through the green grass. Beyond that is the brown hillside, brightened with a few pitch-pines; and then a veil shuts down upon the world, with a spray of bare treetops breaking through. It is the gray month in its grayest mood.

Be it so. I will sit at my window and enjoy the world as it is. This sombre day has a beauty and charm of its own--the charm of melancholy. The wise course is to tune our thought to nature’s mood of soberness, rather than to force a different note, profaning the hour, and cheating ourselves with shallow talk and laughter. There is a time for everything under the sun--L’ Allegro and Il Penseroso, each in its turn.

Now is a time to think of what has been and of what will be. Only the other day the year was young; grass was greening, violets were budding, birds were mating and singing. Now the birds are gone, the flowers are dead, the year is ending as all the years have ended before it.

And as the year is, so are we. A few days ago we were children, just venturing to run alone. We knew nothing, had seen nothing, looked forward to nothing. Life for us was only a day in a house and a dooryard, a span of playtime between two sleeps.

A few days ago, I say. Yet what a weary distance we have traveled since then, and what an infinity of things we have seen and dealt with. How many thoughts we have had, coming we know not whence, how many hopes, one making way for the other, how many dreams. We have made friends; friends that were to be friends forever; and long, long ago, with no fault on either side, the currents of the world carrying us, they and we have drifted apart. It is all we can do now to recall their names and their manner of being. Some of them we should pass for strangers if we met them face to face.

What a long procession of things and events have gone by us and been forgotten. Almost we have forgotten our own childish names, it is so many years since any one called us by them. Should we know ourselves, even, if we met in the street the boy or girl of thirty or forty or fifty years ago? Was it indeed we who lived then? who believed such things, enjoyed such things, concerned ourselves with such things, trembled with such fears, were lifted up by such hopes, felt ourselves enriched by such havings? How shadowy and unreal they look now; and once they were as substantial as life and death. Nay, it is some one else whose past we are remembering. The boy and the man cannot be the same.

Shall we rejoice or be sad that we have outgrown ourselves thus completely? Something of both, perhaps. It matters not. The year is ending, the night is falling. The past is as if it had never been; the future is nothing; and the present is less than either of them. Life is a vapor; nothing, and less than nothing, and vanity.

So we say to ourselves, not sadly, but with a kind of satisfaction to have it so. Yet we love to live over the past, and, with less assurance, to dream of the future.

“The flower that once has blown forever dies.”

Yes, we have heard that, and we will not dispute; this is not an hour for disputing; but the flowers that bloomed forty years ago--the iris and the four-o’clocks in a child’s garden--we can still see in recollection’s magic glass. And they are brighter than any rose that opened this morning. We have forgotten things without number; but other things--we shall never forget them. A friend or two that died when they and we were young; “the loveliest and the best;” we can see them more plainly than most of those whose empty, conventionalized faces, each like the other, each wearing its mask, we meet day by day in the common round of business and pleasure. Death, which seemed to destroy them, has but set them beyond the risk of alteration and forgetfulness.

After all, the past is our one sure possession. There is our miser’s chest. With that, while memory holds for us the key, we shall still be rich. There we will spend our gray hours, with friends that have kept their youth; one of the best of them our own true self, not as we were, nor as we are, but as we meant to be.

“These pleasures, Melancholy, give; And I with thee will choose to live.”

IN THE OLD PATHS

For men who know how to bear themselves company there are few better ways of improving a holiday, especially a home-keeping, home-coming, family feast, like our autumnal Thanksgiving, than to walk in one’s own childish steps--up through the old cattle pasture behind the old homestead, into the old woods. Every jutting stone in the path--and there are many--is just where it was. Your feet remember them perfectly (as your hand remembers which way the door-knob turns, though you yourself might be puzzled to tell), and of their own accord take a zigzag course among them, coming down without fail in the clear intermediary spaces. Or if, by chance, in some peculiarly awkward spot, the toe of your boot forgets itself, the jar only helps you to feel the more at home. You say with the poet, “I have been here before.” Some things are unaltered, you are glad to find. The largest of the trees have been felled, but nobody has dug out the protruding boulders or blasted away the outcropping ledges. One good word we may say for death. It lasts well. It is nothing like a vapor.

Not a rod of the way but talks to you of something. Here, on the left, down in the hollow by the swamp, you used to set snares. Once--fateful day!--you found a partridge in the noose. Then what a fury possessed you! If you had shot your first elephant you could hardly have been more completely beside yourself. It was a cruel sight; you felt it so; but you had caught a partridge! With all your boyish unskillfulness you had lured the unhappy bird to his death. A spray of red barberries had been too bright for his resistance. He discovered his mistake when the cord began to pull. “Oh, why was I such a fool!” he thought; just as you have thought more than once since then, when you have run your own neck into some snare of the fowler.