The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,—mere courtliness, small-clothes, and knee-buckles,—have the vice of getting out of date; an attitude merely. The vice of manners is that they are continually deserted by the character; they are cast-off clothes or shells, claiming the respect of the living creature. You are presented with the shells instead of the meat, and it is no excuse generally that, in the case of some fish, the shells are of more worth than the meat. The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wish to see himself. Manners are conscious; character is unconscious.[144]
My neighbor does not recover from his formal bow so soon as I do from the pleasure of meeting him.
Feb. 18. Tuesday. Ground nearly bare of snow. Pleasant day with a strong south wind. Skated, though the ice was soft in spots. Saw the skunk-cabbage in flower. Gathered nuts and apples on the bare ground, still sound and preserving their colors, red and green, many of them.
Yesterday the river was over the road by Hubbard’s Bridge.
Surveyed White Pond yesterday, February 17th.
There is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting an honest living. Neither the New Testament nor Poor Richard speaks to our condition. I cannot think of a single page which entertains, much less answers, the questions which I put to myself on this subject. How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not life but death that we get. Is it that men are too disgusted with their experience to speak of it? or that commonly they do not question the common modes? The most practically important of all questions, it seems to me, is how shall I get my living, and yet I find little or nothing said to the purpose in any book. Those who are living on the interest of money inherited, or dishonestly, i. e. by false methods, acquired, are of course incompetent to answer it. I consider that society with all its arts, has done nothing for us in this respect. One would think, from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary individual’s musings. Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.[145] If it were not that I desire to do something here,—accomplish some work,—I should certainly prefer to suffer and die rather than be at the pains to get a living by the modes men propose.
There may be an excess even of informing light.
Niepce, a Frenchman, announced that “no substance can be exposed to the sun’s rays without undergoing a chemical change.” Granite rocks and stone structures and statues of metal, etc., “are,” says Robert Hunt, “all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions of nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe.” But Niepce showed, says Hunt, “that those bodies which underwent this change during daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them.” So, in the case of the daguerreotype, “the picture which we receive to-night, unless we adopt some method of securing its permanency, fades away before the morning, and we try to restore it in vain.” (Infers) “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Such is the influence of “actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect.[146]
Feb. 25. A very windy day. A slight snow which fell last night was melted at noon. A strong, gusty wind; the waves on the meadows make a fine show. I saw at Hubbard’s Bridge that all the ice had been blown up-stream from the meadows, and was collected over the channel against the bridge in large cakes. These were covered and intermingled with a remarkable quantity of the meadow’s crust. There was no ice to be seen up-stream and no more downstream.
The meadows have been flooded for a fortnight, and this water has been frozen barely thick enough to bear once only. The old ice on the meadows was covered several feet deep. I observed from the bridge, a few rods off northward, what looked like an island directly over the channel. It was the crust of the meadow afloat. I reached [it] with a little risk and found it to be four rods long by one broad,—the surface of the meadow with cranberry vines, etc., all connected and in their natural position, and no ice visible but around its edges. It appeared to be the frozen crust (which was separated from the unfrozen soil as ice is from the water beneath), buoyed up (?), perchance, by the ice around its edges frozen to the stubble. Was there any pure ice under it? Had there been any above it? Will frozen meadow float? Had ice which originally supported it from above melted except about the edges? When the ice melts or the soil thaws, of course it falls to the bottom, wherever it may be. Here is another agent employed in the distribution of plants. I have seen where a smooth shore which I frequented for bathing was in one season strewn with these hummocks, bearing the button-bush with them, which have now changed the character of the shore. There were many rushes and lily-pad stems on the ice. Had the ice formed about them as they grew, broken them off when it floated away, and so they were strewn about on it?