Journal, May 19th, 1856: “Thick fog this morning, which lasted late in the forenoon and left behind it rainy clouds for the afternoon.”
It is still. It is quiet. The days of rowdy, sun-stirred air end with this gray morning fog in the trees; it is perfect for a Sunday, the slowest kind of time, contemplative, a piney retreat from the wound-up weeks on either side.
It seems to me that fog’s human expression is unlabored breathing, the slow, quiet in and out of merger with what’s beyond. A morning like this is as close as I come to being a tree, as close, perhaps, as I come to simply being in place. I am not a religious sort, but if I were, I’d say this fog is visible prayer; surely it is subtle song seen.
Thoreau, of course, was not kept in by thick air or promise of rain; instead in the afternoon, he is sailing up the Assabet, when he hears this:”…a traveller riding a long the highway is watching my sail while he hums a tune. How inspiring and elysian to hear when the traveller or laborer from a call to his horse or the murmur of ordinary conversation rises into song! It paints the landscape suddenly as no agriculture , no flower crop that can be raised. It is at once another land, the abode of poetry.”
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