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Thoreau's Journal, Nov. 7, 1858, at Bateman's Pond
Nov. 7, 1858. "To Bateman's Pond. It cleared up this forenoon....I see the cold sunlight from some glade between the clouds falling on distant oak woods, now nearly bare, and as I glance up the hill between them, seeing the bare but bright hillside beyond, I think, Now we are left to the hemlocks and pines with their silvery light, to the bare trees and the withered grass. The very rocks and stones in the rocky roads (that beyond Farmer's) look white in the clear November light, especially after the rain. We are left to the chickadee's familiar notes, and the jay for trumpeter. What struck me was a certain emptiness beyond, between the hemlocks and the hill, in the cool, washed air, as if I appreciated even here the absence of insects from it. It suggested agreeably to me a mere space in which to walk briskly. The fields are bleak, and they are, as it were, vacated. The very earth is like a house shut up for the winter, and I go knocking about it in vain. But just then I heard a chickadee on a hemlock, and was inexpressibly cheered to find that an old acquaintance was yet stirring about the premises, and was, I was assured, to be there all winter. All that is evergreen in me revived at once....
"Methinks those scarlet oaks, those burning bushes, begin to be rare in the landscape. They are about Bateman's Pond, at any rate."
"My apple harvest! It is to glean after the husbandman and the cows, or to gather the crop of those wild trees far away on the edge of swamps which have escaped their notice....[W]ith experienced eyes I explore among the clumps of alder (now bare) and in the crevices of the rocks full of leaves, and prying under the fallen and decaying ferns, ferns which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. From amid the leaves anywhere within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet and glossy, nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, but still with the bloom on it and at least as ripe and well kept, if not better than those in barrels, while those which lay exposed are quite brown and rotten. Showing only a blooming cheek here and there between the wet leaves, or fallen into hollows long since and covered up with the leaves of the tree,-a proper kind of packing. I fill my pockets on each side, and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, in order to preserve my balance. And here and there is one lodged as it fell between the bases of the suckers which spring thickly from a horizontal limb. In the midst of an alder clump, covered by leaves, there it lies, safe from cows which might smell it out and unobserved by the husbandman; reserved for me."
Notes about Wild apples. Thoreau is talking here about his personal harvest--one of ideas and experiences in nature. He believed that nature was a complex system of wondrous beauty (even its moments of terror and grief), the high laws and harmonies of which could be approached by the human mind through close (what he called sympathetic) observation and an intuitive or illuminative experience. The passage appears as the opening paragraph of the section "The Last Gleaning" in the essay "Wild Apples" (p. 205 of Natural History Essays, Salt Lake City, 1980). (In the essay, Thoreau edited the journal entry to insert the phrase [included above] "in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home.")
At a more literal level, the wild apple tree of which he speaks was not the "native and aboriginal crab apple," which apparently had been almost extirpated. He then expanded the thought: "But our wild apple is wild perchance like myself who belong not to the original race here--but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock--where the birds where winged thoughts or agents have planted or are planting me. Even these at length furnish hardy stocks for the orchard" (May 23, 1851).
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