Author Archives: Sandy Stott

Part of the pleasure of reading Henry Thoreau’s journals lies in their humdrum nature. Day after day, Thoreau gets up, goes about his day, takes his walk and records what he finds. He is, of course, an uncommon observer, but what he sees and hears each day is often common nature. Miraculous, yes, but there, everywhere, readily seen…if one will look.

On the first day of April, there is hum and drum to my walk as well. On my way to Fairhaven Bay via a loop around Walden Pond, I scuff the dry leaves and crunch over the last stretches of foot-beaten ice, ambling at an easy pace. The only hurried part of the world whistles by above the white pines; rumor of cold front is becoming word of arrival. The sky in the northwest is bruised.

But here at ground-level, where I live, the day is placid, and my middling mix of polar-tec top and shorts-clad legs seems the perfect arrangement. The pond, lightly-ruffled and glittering in its greens, is low, I note; the pondlet near the house site is separated from the main body by a dry ridge of ground. And, out in midpond, what look like small, rogue burgs of ice are really white-bottomed birds, too indistinct for my distance-fuzzed eyes to ID. Happily, given license, I deem them loons. Given kindreds, I walk on.

Beyond the pond, as I skirt the Andromeda Ponds, I hear my first chorus of spring; the peepers are singing sex; they are in riot along the eastern shores, where the direct afternoon sun slants in. I ease down near the swampy water, then close my eyes. The peepers insist; shrilling fills my ears; “hereherehereherehere…here,” they call, “here.”
Where else?

What, I wonder as I walk on, is this hatch of insects? Black, winged and many, they are little meteors across my sightlines; I inhale a few, wave aimlessly at others. Do they know the cold front is on the way? It is a one-day life. It is. Though the water-snake I come upon stretched out in a slat of sun is thumb-thick and, even in his spring torpor, he looks like forever.

And now, along the cliffy stretch just downriver from Fairhaven, the front arrives. A gray sheet of rain wavers in the air, and whitecaps leap on the river. Is that thunder, tentative, unsure of its season? Yes, rumble, yes. No hum now, only drum. Here, amid the flying water, I pull over to follow its suggestion. The wind, all the waters, the flying air, the river in tumult, it makes me want to laugh.

Then he does…the laughing bird. A long ahahahahahah issues from the pine above. Ahahahahahahahahahahah. There he is – pileated woodpecker. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

by Corinne H. Smith

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” ~ H.D. Thoreau, Walden

Last year when I read Susan Cain’s new book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, I found myself in its pages.  I already knew that my personality tends naturally toward introversion.  Cain’s ground-breaking book gives people like me a voice and validation.  She’s getting lots of well-deserved publicity, too.  Quiet has landed on many bestseller lists, and more than four million people have viewed Cain’s online TED talk. You can see that talk at   http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html.

Quiet is a book that I keep referring to in conversation and recommending to others.  I know that reading it has enhanced my life.

I wasn’t the only person I recognized in Susan Cain’s descriptions, however.  After all, introverts make up one third to one half of our population.  So we’re apt to have a few in our lives, even if we aren’t introverts ourselves.  In addition to several close friends and other family members, I was also strongly reminded of Henry David Thoreau.

Ms. Cain mentions Thoreau by name only once in her text.  He joins the ranks of famous introverts who contributed worthy ideas and words to western culture.  They include Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, William Wordsworth, Frederic Chopin, Marcel Proust, George Orwell, Dr. Seuss, Steven Spielberg, and J. K. Rowling.  These individuals found that they could best channel their creative or problem-solving juices when given stretches of solitude.

Early in the book, Cain offers readers a 20-point quiz to gauge their own habits.  You can take that quiz yourself at  http://www.thepowerofintroverts.com/quiet-quiz-are-you-an-introvert/. Here are the first four statements.  Participants are asked to agree or disagree with them.

1. I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities.
2. I often prefer to express myself in writing.
3. I enjoy solitude.
4. I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status.

To me, these sentences sound as if they came straight from a Henry David Thoreau autobiography, or from some of the more introspective pages of his journal.  The very traits that others have judged to be major defects – that this man didn’t seem to want to socialize with people much, and that he preferred being by himself in Nature instead – can be seen as concrete examples of his introversion.  Skim through his writings, and you’ll find ample evidence of this.  Two selections come to my mind:

“I feel the necessity of deepening the stream of my life; I must cultivate privacy.  It is very dissipating to be with people too much.  As C. says, it takes the edge off a man’s thoughts to have been much in society.  I cannot spare my moonlight and my mountains for the best of man I am likely to get in exchange.” ~ Journal, August 2, 1854

“I thrive best on solitude.  If I have had a companion only one day in a week, unless it were one or two I could name, I find that the value of the week to me has been seriously affected.  It dissipates my days, and often it takes me another week to get over it.” ~ Journal, December 28, 1856

I can relate to Henry’s experiences.  I too have had times full of people who have “dissipated my days.”  And I too have found it best at times to get away from them.

Categorizing individuals as introverts or extroverts would have been an alien concept to Thoreau, since it was first brought forth by Carl Jung in 1921.  Susan Cain has expanded upon the topic and made it relevant to the general public.  I highly recommend Quiet to every reader, and especially to those who long to think more deeply about Thoreau.  His name may appear only once in Cain’s book, but the man himself seems evident throughout.

Ten days ago, I took clippers and crossed the then-bare ground to the fringe of brush that separates our yard from our neighbors. More winter snow was forecast for later in the week, and I wanted reminder of spring for when the white returned. There, in the untended bushes, I cut tight-budded sprays and whips of forsythia and brought them inside; I trimmed some winterkill and put them in a small pitcher of mild water. Then, I waited.

Days passed; the storm arrived, bringing with it the town plows, the new snowbanks, the shoveling; the yard went white…again. The juncos and chickadees and I communed by the birdfeeder. Often, when I passed the table where the pitcher and its stalky sticks were, I checked the buds, and a couple of times I refreshed the water. But like our recent winter, the buds weren’t budging; spring was stalled outside and in.

A few evenings ago, I burrowed into my pillow and dreams, a winter’s sleep even as the season tipped that night toward light; I rose in the morning to a longer day than the night I’d left and trundled out for the sunrise of coffee. I was greeted by a burst of yellow. The forsythia had bloomed overnight.

My mild seasonal mania for forcing forsythia is a gift from my father, who was fond of cuttings and bouquets in any and all seasons. Most of them came from fringes of fields and yards and woodlands rather than from gardens; they featured stalks of grass, sprays of juniper, flowering “weeds,” and, in their season, sprigs of the totem-blueberry (best of all ground-dwellers). Even as I join Henry Thoreau in my enthusiasm for getting out and walking to see what’s at work on any given day in the meadows and woods, I like also the reminder of where I’ve been (and will go again) atop the table in early spring.

A bouquet or spray of flowers is the habit of optimism, a looking ahead…though not too far: I am no futurist; I like to be present. But, even against the current of news and history, I am an optimist, at least under the influence of flowers, a believer in the yellow promise of spring.