In the summer Thoreau calls 1852 'my year of observation'. When he makes an observation he is wont to mark the time, to whatever specificity suits the observation. 'Seasons' proliferate in the summer. 'This melting weather makes a stage in the year' in mid-June. A week earlier, 'the season of waving boughs; and the lighter under sides of the new leaves are exposed'. In early July, 'the progress of the season is indescribable':

'It is growing warm again, but the warmth is different from what we have had. We lie in the shade of locust trees. Haymakers go by in a hay-rigging. I am reminded of berrying. I scent the sweet-fern and the dead or dry pine leaves. Cherry-birds alight on a neighboring tree. The warmth is something more normal and steady, ripening fruits. Nature offers fruits now as well as flowers. We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity. The earth is dry. Perhaps the sound of the locust expresses the season as well as anything. The farmers say the abundance of the grass depends on wet in June. I might make a separate season of those days when the locust is heard.'

With only the close intensity of his observations to move you, Thoreau can start a paragraph like that, 'the progress of the season is indescribable', so that your first thought is not wordless sublimes or stand-still reveries, but simply: when?—and so you check the date, July 5.

Time and place and name—and 'I'—must play a crucial role in establishing the particular quality of realism Thoreau's journal has. They counterbalance the features of his style—of writing, of observing in writing—that have a schematic feel, like his love for simple colors or his way of blending one element of an observation with another via transfers of the words that belong with them. Here, the blue of the lupine and the blue of the air:

'June 5. The lupine is now in its glory. It is the more important because it occurs in such extensive patches, even an acre or more together, and of such a pleasing variety of colors,—purple, pink, or lilac, and white,—especially with the sun on it, when the transparency of the flower makes its color changeable. It paints a whole hillside with its blue, making such a field (if not meadow) as Proserpine might have wandered in. Its leaf was made to be covered with dewdrops. I am quite excited by this prospect of blue flowers in clumps with narrow intervals. Such a profusion of the heavenly, the elysian, color, as if these were the Elysian fields. They say the seeds look like babies' faces, and hence the flower is so named. No other flowers exhibit so much blue. That is the value of the lupine. The earth is blued with them. Yet a third of a mile distant I do not detect their color on the hillside. Perchance because it is the color of the air.'

You almost think the germ of this passage, besides obviously seeing a hillside covered with lupine in bloom, could be the thought of blue as a verb. I would like to think I have similar thoughts when I notice the leaves not having turned, but having fallen seemingly all at once, to tint sidewalks and yards alike for the one day before their removal begins; or the first time there is just enough snow to erase the first layer of familiarity from all surroundings.

Thoreau's writing is most beautiful in his journal but it's a beauty that is natural, simple. Any turn of thought or additional inflection of an observation merits being written and seems not to essentially unbalance the paragraph it belongs to. The form seems undramatic, but not uninteresting. Though the sentences obviously have a reader and are written to be read, they seem not written for effect. Other nature writers want their words to become luminous, incantatory; to induce reverent feelings in the reader. For Thoreau, it's enough to see something.

'I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations.'

Academics who think of the internet as a place to dump announcements and CFPs are the worst.

Now that I'm sure you're a serious person I certainly do want to know how we can solve all our problems.

Please, tell me more about evolution. I want to feel scientific too!

Oh! Opinions! Well aren't you special!

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.