It's odd how you only see one star, and then you see the rest.

You kind of suspect that people who do text-critical scholarship on Thoreau are extra eager to use the word 'leaf'.

Richardson quotes a salutary thought from the first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:

'though nature's laws are more immutable than any despots yet to our daily life they rarely seem rigid, but permit us to relax with license in summer weather'

Circumstances change, are various; laws are known, their effects experienced, only ever in circumstances. Circumstances are usual, but not uniform.

Usually usual, at least.

Quotation is a way of framing your relation to what you quote (and to what you don't).

Richardson, quoting Thoreau: 'it is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time, because to write it is not what interests us'.

'aware that he is nowhere, has no clue as to what he is about'

The Counterforce!

There are things more disheartening than thinspo tumblrs, but not lots.

How can there be so many Cavellians who never write themselves into their work?