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Henry David Thoreau: Close to Earth

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  Nelson Island #24 (Rowley, Massachusetts): photo by Jim Rohan, 9 February 2014


The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

Henry David Thoreau: from Walden, 1854



Close to Earth: photo by Jim Rohan, 15 January 2011
 

I went to the woods and all I got was this lousy Henry David Thoreau t-shirt(Concord, Massachusetts). (Walden Pond is one of the most "un-wildernessed" places you could ever visit. I'm sure Thoreau is spinning in his grave. I also shot this with people in it (hard not to at Walden Pond) and given the smarmy title I came up with, probably should have posted a peopled version of this...): photo by Jim Rohan, 27 June 2012
 

Bench #2, Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts: photo by Jim Rohan, 6 January 2012
 

The Great Marsh #5 (Newbury, Massachusetts): photo by Jim Rohan, 14 April 2013
 

 Professor Chandler's Long Walk #3 (Rowley, Massachusetts): photo by Jim Rohan, 6 February 2014
 

Abandoned shack, Stackyard Road, Rowley, Massachusetts: photo by Jim Rohan, 18 February 2014
 

Cove, Lynn Woods, Lynn, Massachusetts: photo by Jim Rohan, 12 October 2010

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