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Contents____________Introduction XXXEditorial Principles and Processes XXXCommon Abbreviations and Markings XXXPART I: SYNOPTIC VISIONApril: Sea Turn XXXMay: Washing Day XXXJune: Shadows of Clouds XXXPART II: SECOND NATUREOctober: Gossamer Days XXXNovember: Seek Sheltered Places XXXDecember: Green in Winter XXXAfterword XXXBibliography XXXAcknowledgments XXX

i n t r o d u c t i o n ixINTRODUCTION: To Keep Time_____________________ T  J–      T  trees are investing the evergreens & revealing how dark they are Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is oered me– I feel a little uttered in my thoughts as if I might be too late. Each season is but an inn-itesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone & hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminis-cence & prompting Our thoughts & sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons, as 2 cog wheels t into each other– We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time–from which we receive a prompting & impulse & instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series & number of sensations & thoughts–which have their language in nature. Now I am ice–now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind. – Journal, June 6, 1857In the spring of 1860, at the height of his intellectual powers and the peak of his political engagement, Henry David oreau created something new. Part blueprint for a grand new work, part scientic chart, part picture of temporal experience, this something—which, following a suggestive Journal entry from October 1859 has come to be called his “Kalendar”—was more a tool than a text. Comprised of six multipage charts of “General Phenom-ena,” the Kalendar was an instrument for recording and perceiving not just annual, weather-related phenomena themselves, but also the hidden relations between them—between the skies of one June and the skies of past and fu-ture Junes—relations we often feel but can’t quite hold, stuck as we usually are in our own brief moment of linear time. “Each season,” oreau observed in his Journal in June of 1857, “is but an

x i n t r o d u c t i o ninnitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration.” In other words, loss is fundamental to our experience of time: every moment we experience is already passing away. However, even as oreau acknowledges that “we are conversant with only one point of contact at a time,” he also ges-tures toward another truth about time—that “each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence & prompting,” that our experiences of the world are connected, pointing backward toward past experiences and forward toward future ones. is double nature of our experience of time as simultaneously linear and embedded within cycles of related and recurrent experiences is particularly evident in the natural world, where the trembling aspens of June and the frozen lakes of December can be experienced as both eeting and timeless. e oreau who created the charts of General Phenomena was now sev-eral years beyond the publication of Walden and still further from his two-year experiment in living in the woods. He lived now in his family home on Main Street in Concord and was an active participant in both family and community life—lecturing at the lyceum, speaking at abolitionist events, and working as a surveyor. In the early 1850s, he had committed to a pattern of walking (typically for several hours each day) and writing (usually about the previous day’s walk) that he would continue as long as his health allowed, which turned out to be about a decade. His extraordinary Journal is the record of these practices, and the Kalendar is their culminating gesture: the nal major endeavor of his life.Structure and Sourcese charts of general phenomena derived from oreau’s long-held sense that “our thoughts & sentiments answer to the revolution of the seasons, as 2 cog wheels t into each other,” and his equally long-standing desire to more fully experience and comprehend the complex network of relations—what we would now call the ecosystem—of which he knew himself to be a part. ough oreau had for many years been keeping lists and charts of individ-ual observations of the natural world—bird migration times, the owering and leang out of trees—the Kalendar was a discovery: a crystallization of his long-developing ideas about time, the natural world, and the nature of perception. If in 1857 oreau lamented that “we are conversant with only one point of contact at a time,” by 1860 he had begun to imagine ways of multiplying those points of contact and perceiving them simultaneously, within a single frame.

i n t r o d u c t i o n xie frame itself was borrowed from naturalists before him: a simple chart derived from two axes, one measuring time, the other indexing seasonal phe-nomena. In October of 1859 he had written, “For 30 years I have annually observed about this time, or earlier—, the freshly erected winter lodges of the musquash along the river side. ... is may not be an annual phenomenon to you – It may not be in the Greenwich almanack– or ephemeris–but it has an important place in my Kalendar” (10/16/1859, Journal Transcript 30:57). ese allusions—Greenwich almanack, ephemeris, and Kalendar—tell the story of the predecessors of and models for oreau’s Kalendar. As a classics student at Harvard, oreau was no doubt familiar with the ancient Roman ephemera of Ptolemy—charts tracking the movement of astronomical objects over time. He also knew of the modern versions of these charts published by the Royal Greenwich Observatory beginning in the eighteenth century. e conspicuous spelling of “Kalendar” points to John Evelyn’s Kalendarium Hortense, a gardener’s almanac in the classical tradition of Hesiod’s Works and Days and Cato’s De Re Rustica. A more immediate predecessor, the English naturalist Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne—probably the most signicant in terms of its inuence on oreau—contained a naturalist’s cal-endar, with observations about local species and their rst appearances in a given season. Each of these models provided oreau with tools for thinking about the intersection of place and time, and for understanding the way the particular species of a place actually construct time: dictating the changes in the landscape by which we mark the year. Another model, not for the Kalendar’s formal structure but for the ex-panded ecological vision it reects, was Indigenous knowledge. As John Kucich notes, oreau was a dedicated student of native cultures but largely relied on ethnographic accounts written from a settler-colonial perspective. However, oreau’s participation in the savagist ideology of his time exists alongside his real commitment to learning from Indigenous cultures, and in particular from learning new ways of conceiving of the relationship between humans and a more-than-human world. In an 1858 Journal entry, oreau writes,How much more conversant was the Indian with any wild animal or plant than we are– and in his language is implied all that intimacy as much as ours is expressed in our language– How many words in our language about a moose–or birch bark! & e like. e Indian stood nearer to wild-nature than we.... It was a new light when my guide

xii i n t r o d u c t i o ngave me Indian names for things, for which I had only scientic ones before. In proportion as I understood the language I saw them from a new point of view. (3/5/1858, Journal Transcript 25:107–108)e passage demonstrates the way oreau’s knowledge of Indigenous culture informs one of the driving forces of the Kalendar—oreau’s desire to both achieve and represent a more intimate relationship between human and more-than-human life. I follow Kucich in his contention that the two sides of oreau’s relationship to Indigenous culture pose a unique problem for oreau scholars, and that part of the explanation for this seeming paradox lies in the particular way in which oreau sought to make use of Indigenous epistemology in his late natural history projects, including the Kalendar. Process and Purposeoreau’s ultimate intentions for the Kalendar remain unknown, however, we do have several suggestive pieces of evidence. e April charts, the rst that oreau created, contain a column on the far left that includes what seem to be average dates for each phenomenon. is column is empty in the May and June charts, lled in in October and November, and almost entirely empty again in December. e column numbers are often written in pencil, suggesting that they were determined and added at a later date. Much here remains unclear. Why did oreau skip the ordering step for certain months? What is the meaning of the superscript numbers next to some dates in this column, particularly in 1861? What does seem clear is that the column rep-resents an initial step toward yet another form of organization. But what? Here we have some clues, most signicantly the “Story of March,” an extended Journal entry from 1860, just before the creation of the charts, in which oreau sets out the general phenomena of March in a narrative se-quence (Journal Transcript 31:95–109). During this same period oreau created a chart of spring phenomena—February through April, with clearly delineated composite or average dates written along the vertical axis of the chart. Taken together, the average column and the two texts from the spring of 1860 suggest that oreau was working out ideas for the presentation of seasonal phenomena in narrative form. It seems likely that the charts were originally pieces of a plan for a larger work, perhaps the “Book of Concord” that Bronson Alcott had commissioned him to create for local schoolchildren.

i n t r o d u c t i o n xiiiFrom the posthumously published late manuscript Wild Fruits, we can get a sense of what such a book might have looked like. Organized by date like the almanacs that inspired it, the text likely would have unfolded in the pres-ent tense, providing the reader with a real-time narrative tour of Concord through the seasons. By the thirteenth of May I notice the green fruit; and perhaps two or three days later, as I am walking perhaps, over the southerly slope of some dry and bare hill, or where there are bare and sheltered spaces between the bushes, it occurs to me that strawberries have possibly set; and looking carefully in the most favorable places, just beneath the top of the hill, I discover the reddening fruit, and at length, on the very dri-est and sunniest spot or brow, two or three berries which I am forward to call ripe, though generally only their sunny cheek is red.Unlike the Journal, which documents oreau’s experience day by day in linear time, Wild Fruits consolidates experience into a temporality that is at once precise (“by the thirteenth of May”) and general—a habitual present that also encompasses Mays past and future. is is the temporal space of the Kalendar. In its articulation of an alternative to the forward march of linear time, the Kalendar can be understood as part of oreau’s critique of the “rest-less, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century” and its organization of human life. Intimately linked to the rise of industrialization and capitalism, “standard time” or “clock time” began in the early modern period to gain ascendancy over the cyclical, seasonal temporal structures that had governed life in the agricultural societies of Europe in the medieval period. oreau made the link between the “bustling” speed of life in the second half of the nineteenth century and the rise of industrial capitalism and its ever-increas-ing regimentation of labor: “Where is this division of labor to end?” he asks in Walden, “and what object does it nally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the ex-clusion of my thinking for myself.” Here, oreau perceives the connection between the division of labor and its alienation from intellectual thought and natural processes that would become increasingly common features of work-ing life in the twentieth and twenty-rst centuries. As Jenny Odell details in Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, the rise of the mechanized, assembly-line style workplace popularized by Frederick Winslow Taylor was

xiv i n t r o d u c t i o naccompanied by deliberate “de-skilling” of the workforce—the active sup-pression of the worker’s knowledge of the overall process to which they con-tribute. Anticipating the way that clock time would be harnessed to control human labor and thought, oreau sought an alternative to living that is also an alternative to his culture’s temporal conventions. At Walden Pond, oreau designed a life, an economy, outside of the constraints of clock time, a way of being in which “both place and time were changed.” Connecting his own daily habits to the rhythms of the natural world, oreau had dis-covered the plasticity of time. Just as the plants and animals that constituted his world at Walden created the seasons with their appearances and disap-pearances, oreau learned that he, too, could make time through a dierent mode of living in and recording it. e Kalendar represents the last and most elaborate of his many experiments in temporal arrangement. oreau’s process in creating the charts of general phenomena involved several steps, some of which were adapted from previous chart-making activ-ities. He’d begun tracking leaf fall, rst owering times, bird migration, and other seasonal phenomena in the spring of 1851 (see g. 1). As Bradley Dean notes, that same spring the Smithsonian Institute sent to scientists across the country a circular titled “Registry of Periodical Phenomena,” which in-vited “all persons who may have it in their power, to record their ob-servations [of “periodical phenomena of Animal and Vegetable life”], and to transmit them to the Institution.” e circular lists 127 species of plants, using in most cases both common and Latin names, and asks observers to mark opposite each species its date of owering.ough we have no evidence that oreau answered the Smithsonian’s call, we do know that he was aware of it, and it seems likely that the project may have inspired oreau’s own list- and chart-making practices.e innovation represented by the charts of general phenomena, which oreau developed in 1860, had to do with the variety of phenomena ob-served—and with the inclusion of his own habits of seasonal behavior within their scope. is inclusion marked a signicant shift, not only because it pro-vided oreau with the synthetic, comprehensive seasonal view that he sought, but also because it reected his epistemology: the idea that what mattered was not the distantly observed, objective “fact,” but the fact in relation to other facts—including those pertaining to its human observer. Structurally, the

i n t r o d u c t i o n xvcharts mimic those he’d been making of discrete seasonal phenomena for some time, but the creative leap that led to the more inclusive Kalendar charts was profound. In 1852, he’d written, “I have a commonplace book for facts and another for poetry– but I nd it dicult always to preserve the vague distinc-tion which I had in my mind–for the most interesting & beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success.” (2/18/1852, Journal 4:356). ough oreau had long desired and moved toward such a breakdown of the “fact”/“poetry” binary, his chart and list making remained largely repositories of “facts” until 1860. Adapting the “objective” scientic form of the chart to include “subjective” experience, he arrived at a technological solution to the di-vide between “scientic” modes of attention to the natural world and his lived experience of interrelation with it. Seeing the months as the charts of general phenomena presented them allowed oreau to envision his world as what Darwin called “a network of complex relations” over time.To compose his charts—those of individual as well as general phenom-ena—oreau relied on his Journal, a storehouse of observations painstak-ingly gathered through the 1850s. oreau was aided in his backward navi-gation of the Journal by his habit of indexing his text as he wrote—making notes in the back of his notebooks about the page-locations of descriptions of particular phenomena. Sometime in the early 1850s oreau’s indexing habit gave way to a more ecient system of hash marks made in the margins of the Journal next to descriptions of phenomena he might wish to record in a given chart (see g. 2). is system allowed oreau to navigate quickly through the Journal in the next stage of the process: the creation of lists of compelling phenomena organized by year and date. ese lists, often scrawled on the back of business letters or other ready-to-hand scrap paper, were an inter-mediate stage between Journal and chart: a rst winnowing of the volume of seasonal observations contained in each month of the Journal. (Interestingly, while lists exist for all months except July, August, and September, o-reau seems to have only drafted charts of general phenomena for the months of April, May, June, October, November, and December.) Finally, oreau winnowed once again, translating some, but not all, of the list items to his charts of general phenomena, and carefully noting the dates on which each phenomenon occurred in the spaces of the grid. e chain—or more accu-rately, the network—of textual transmission involved in the production of the charts of general phenomena was complex. oreau’s habit was to take eld notes on small scraps of paper he carried with him when walking. e next day, he would use these notes to reconstruct the day’s experiences, indexing

xvi i n t r o d u c t i o nas he went. When, beginning in 1860, he began drawing up the charts, he consulted the indexes of the many volumes of his Journal, then created the yearly lists, then transferred this information to the charts. Field notes, Jour-nal, hash marks, lists, charts—a textual ecosystem. (See g. 3 for a partial illustration of one such chain.) H. Daniel Peck observes, By the fall of 1851 the Journal is already what might be called a material memory, a book deliberately conceived to “keep” time by enlarging the temporal view of reality through the process of cross-reference. Increas-ingly, this process becomes oreau’s major strategy for translating facts into truths—the imperative rst publicly proclaimed in his early essay “A Natural History of Massachusetts” (1842). Facts would, that is, gain spiritual signicance through their gradually revealed placement along the span of time. e disciplined recording of alert observation would provide an invaluable record of facts that, when later remembered (or, recongured) in relation to other facts, might reveal the direction and nature of change. When the past was viewed in this way—and viewing is indeed the right word—it might become possible to “see” time, and to see it whole, as a full matrix of past, present, and even future.e charts of general phenomena never became the “Book of Concord.” oreau charts the spring of that year with enthusiasm, then apparently sets the project aside. In December of 1860, oreau contracts a cold, almost certainly exacerbated by underlying tuberculosis, from which he never fully recovers. He ventures west to Minnesota that spring in an eort to heal his lungs, but to no avail. By late summer he is back in Concord, and by fall it seems clear there will be no recovery. It is at this point that the seriously weakened, mostly bedridden oreau takes up the Kalendar project again, charting the months of October, November, and December.How to Use This Book First and foremost, this book presents previously unpublished images and transcriptions of oreau’s charts of general phenomena for April, May, June, October, November, and December. Images of the manuscript charts are followed by transcriptions. I hope these charts will interest and inspire ecol-ogists and climate scientists, labor activists, poets, philosophers, historians,

i n t r o d u c t i o n xviiactivists and journal keepers, oreau scholars and time-travel enthusiasts, meteorologists and speculative ction writers. e charts themselves are in-nitely rich, both in their structure and in the particulars they present, and I believe that they can inspire readers to think dierently about the ways we inhabit our times and places, and the agency we have to inhabit them dierently. Each month’s set of charts is accompanied by an essay structured around a few of its key categories and the Journal passages to which they are linked. ese essays seek to operate according to the logic of the Kalendar—connect-ing selected categories back to the descriptive particulars from which they emerged. If a chart presents the zoomed-out picture of a single month over a span of ten years, each date embedded within the chart indexes a close-up view of a given phenomenon on a particular occasion. As Michael Berger writes, in oreau’s late natural history writings, “every phenomenon may be enhanced or intensied from elsewhere in a system of mutually glossing works, establishing various patterns of foregrounding and backgrounding in kaleidoscopic fashion.” Nothing exemplies this “foregrounding and back-grounding” eect as clearly as the Kalendar, the complex temporal scale of which “makes us more aware that our commonplace image of the world falls short, in intensity and fullness of detail, of the living reality we overlook.” In an attempt to make this eect more accessible to readers, I have highlighted selected entries to which the categories are keyed, and drawn out some of the threads of oreau’s thinking across his writings. e intention behind the structure of the essays is to demonstrate the workings of the Kalendar as technology—the way that, “with regard to any phenomenon mentioned in passing, we can recall a richness of sensuous detail expressed elsewhere within the system.” It is clear that the Kalendar project represents an aspect of oreau’s ongoing commitment to detecting order or “law” in the natural world—a commitment that reects not only oreau’s early transcendentalist views of the relationship between nature and spirit but also speaks to a more general nineteenth-century condence in the fundamental coherence of the universe. However, it is also evident that by 1860, oreau had become skeptical of ordering systems, particularly those proposed by the science of his day. Most troublesome about these systems, from oreau’s perspective, was their ten-dency to hierarchize the natural world. oreau himself had come to under-stand nature as a great disrupter of hierarchy, a radically democratic order that could look like order’s opposite:

xviii i n t r o d u c t i o nIn the true natural order–the order or system is not insisted on– Each is rst & each last. at nature presents itself to us this moment–occu-pies the whole of the present–& rests on the very top most point of the sphere–under the zenith. e species & individuals of all the natural kingdomes–ask our attention & admiration in a round robin–We make straight lines– putting a captain at their head & a lieutenant at their tails– (10/13/1860, Journal Transcript 32:163)e “species and individuals of all the natural kingdoms”—in other words, all the diverse living beings of his world—seemed to call to oreau, to demand his attention, and with it, the suspension of his own previously held ideas. Moreover, this demand unfolded in a cyclical fashion: from the blooming of the rst owers in May to skating boys in December. In the structure of the Kalendar, oreau attempted to follow this “round robin” on its own tem-poral terms, and to consolidate views of each phenomenon without giving priority to any—no “captain at their head,” and no “lieutenant at their tales.” Any adequate representation of the life of the natural world had to reect the basic temporal structure of that life: not linear, but cyclical, following the order of the seasons. It also had to reect the essential equality of elements within the natural system: hence the grid, with its uniform and evenly dis-tributed boxes. e development of the charts of general phenomena thus reects an innovative compromise—if not a nal resolution—in oreau’s decades-long grappling with the relationship between law and instance, or whole and part.Within its six essays, this book also contains a biographical sketch of two seasons—among the most interesting and least familiar of oreau’s life. e rst half of the book, “Synoptic Vision,” borrows its title from Michael Berger’s excellent account of oreau’s natural history writings, oreau’s Late Career and the Dispersion of Seeds: e Saunterer’s Synoptic Vision. is portion of the book covers the spring of 1860, a season that witnesses a deeply en-gaged oreau absorbing the lessons of John Brown and Darwin, wrestling with his Emersonian philosophical inheritance, and applying the lessons of John Ruskin to the blooming and cloud-shadowed landscape. e second half of the book, “Second Nature,” moves us forward in time a little more than a year, to the nal autumn and winter of oreau’s life, a period in which he is no longer able to go on long walks or keep his daily Journal, and in which he is dependent on friends to bring him news of the natural world. In this period, what had been a tool for expanded vision becomes a method

i n t r o d u c t i o n xixfor accessing what I am calling a “second” or virtual nature, a natural world reconstructed from his years of recordkeeping as well as from the real-time contributions of his friends. In this second season of the Kalendar, I argue, oreau came to use the charts not as a blueprint for a new work, but as a way to bring himself into closer relation with a natural world he could no longer directly access with his body. e categories I’ve chosen to focus in and elaborate on are a reection of my own interests and engagements with oreau. Another writer, with dierent interests, would have chosen dierently. is means that the book you’re reading is a self-portrait of its author at least as much as it is a portrait of oreau. I have tried to make this clear, rather than attempt to mitigate or obscure it, by placing myself, my own time and season, at the start of each chapter. (As oreau puts it in Walden, “In most books, the I, or rst person, is omitted; in this it will be retained.”) e connections I have made—be-tween Kalendar entries and Journal entries, as well as between oreau’s bi-ography and his writings—necessarily reect my own path through the mas-sive body of written material that oreau left behind. e lines of meaning I have drawn can—and, I hope, will—be drawn dierently by other students of the material presented here.How to Love the WorldI rst encountered the charts of general phenomena as a graduate student liv-ing in a small rural town in upstate New York. At the time, I was struggling with what felt like the meaninglessness of my academic work, which felt impossibly distant from the reality of the world in which I found myself. To combat the fatigue that invariably set in during my long afternoons of read-ing and writing, I took walks through the woods and, returning to the desk in my small study, drew maps of the roads and elds and trails along which I had walked. ese activities were immensely relieving to me. Exhausted from looking for meaning in philosophical and literary texts, I stepped out into a world in which meaning simply was: where every new ower or leaf that presented itself to my eyes seemed to repeat its own, singular name. e names themselves were poems—hemlock, white pine, trillium, Sawyer Pond Road—and I began to work to know more and more of them, and to track how they changed over time. e maps I drew were not “objective”—they did not reect the points of the compass. Starting in one corner I drew the way I

xx i n t r o d u c t i o nwalked: rst here, to the stone wall, then left, then here, to the break in the trees, then right at the path.When I discovered oreau’s charts of general phenomena in H. Dan-iel Peck’s oreau’s Morning Work, I felt an immediate sense of recognition. oreau, too, had felt and tried to represent this way things had of showing themselves, of saying their own names, of speaking to us. And oreau, too, had made maps that included himself, his own way of feeling and seeing the species that surrounded him and made his world. “I think that the man of sci-ence makes this mistake–& the mass of mankind along with him,” he wrote in his Journal in 1857, “that you should coolly give your chief attention to the phenomenon which excites you–as something independent on you–and not as it is related to you.... With regard to such objects I nd that it is not they themselves–(with which the men of science deal) that concern me. e point of interest is somewhere between me & them (i.e. the objects)” (11/5/1857, Journal Transcript 24:610). Here was a new model of meaning, one according to which my meandering, hand-drawn path through the woods was as real, as true, as the digital map of those woods I can call up on my phone from 376 miles northeast and more than a decade in the future. My encounter with oreau’s charts of general phenomena reorganized my thinking, allowing me to envision a mode of scholarship from which my life—the day and its weather, the patterns and demands of domestic life, my feelings—was not excluded from the picture. Moreover, it encouraged me to understand myself as a seasonal creature, one among many who sought warmth in winter and shade in summer. I began to see the world as more-than-human, and meaning itself as a collective undertaking involving many human and nonhuman actors. I began not only to see but to feel the relation-ships between my being and the climate in which I lived. In the years in which I have been working on these manuscripts, the seasons of my own life have changed the eyes through which I look at them, and the meanings they oer. In the wake of two important losses in my life, the charts began to speak to me of oreau’s grief, and of the way mourning thickens and reorganizes time. As I suggest in the second half of this book, the Kalendar became, for oreau, a means of living with loss—including the impending loss of his own life. As work by Richard Primack has dramat-ically illustrated, oreau’s charts of seasonal phenomena are also linked to larger, more collective losses. In March of 1856, oreau wrote the following Journal entry, in which he laments the “maimed and imperfect nature” with which he is intimately connected:

i n t r o d u c t i o n xxiI spend a considerable portion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals my brute neighbors– By their various movements & mi-grations they fetch the year about to me– Very signicant are the ight of geese & the migration of suckers &c &c– But when I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here–the cougar– panther–lynx–wolverine wolf–bear moose–deer the beaver, the turkey&c &c–I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed &, as it were, emasculated coun-try– Would not the motions of those larger & wilder animals have been more signicant still– Is it not a maimed & imperfect nature that I am conversant with? ... –I am reminded that this my life in Nature –this particular round of natural phenomena which I call a year–is lamentably incomplete– I listen to concert–in which so many parts are wanting.... I take innite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance–thinking that I have here the entire poem–& then to my cha-grin I learn that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess & have read–that my ancestors have torn out many of the rst leaves & grandest passages–& mutilated it in many places. (3/23/1856, Journal Transcript 20:166–67)As Rochelle Johnson has observed, this passage registers a haunted grief for an ecological wound that has only deepened with time: “Like many of us, oreau knows he walks with and among the disappeared nonetheless still there. His world is replete with ghosts—each missing mammal, each vanished species, each shrunken stream still present, apparitions felt as he moves through space and time. He walks amid them. Even through them. Presences in absence. Sounds of silence.” e entry registers both grief and intimacy, both loss and love. As the realities of the climate crisis and mass extinction become ever more apparent, we nd ourselves looking for ways to grieve what is lost while continuing to love the world that remains to us in the time that remains to us. roughout his life, oreau was steadfast in his commitment to living a meaningful life, to remaining awake to his own experience, and to honoring the wonder of the world in which he lived. In his last year of life, he found ways to maintain this state of reverent alertness, even as he recognized the depth of his own losses and the losses sustained by the more-than-human community in which he lived. e Kalendar was, among other things, a tool for loving a life, and a world, riven by loss.

xxii i n t r o d u c t i o nFeeling TimeChronoception—our sense of the passage of time—is both deeply internal, keyed to the operations of entropy in the cells of the body, and thoroughly collective, connected to diurnal and planetary cycles, social calendars and the shared rhythms of cultural life. As Barbara Adam writes, we experience time neither as an arrow nor as a recurrent cycle but always as both: ere can be no un-ageing, no undying, no un-birth. We can relive past moments in our lives but we cannot reverse the processes of the living and material world. We know the unidirectionality of time from geological and historic records, from physical processes involving energy exchange, from the irreversible accumulation of knowledge, and from the fact that people and things get older and never younger. We know that the sequence of the diurnal cycle goes from dawn to midday to dusk to night and never backwards from dusk to midday to morning. ese examples demonstrate that cyclicality and irreversible linearity are not, as so frequently asserted, the dominant time perceptions of traditional and modern societies respectively. Rather they are integral to all rhyth-mically structured phenomena. Implicit in this understanding of the double nature of our sense of time is the complex way our individual senses of the passage of time are linked to those of other species and to physical processes of regeneration and decay that gov-ern that material world. Recent psychological studies on the experience of awe suggests that the expansiveness associated with this state is connected to our experience of time, and in particular with a feeling of temporal expan-sion. e more fully we engage with our felt experience of time, it seems, the more deeply we learn both lessons: that our experience of time is surprisingly manipulable, and that we are powerless to turn the arrow. oreau’s Kalen-dar, in its attempts to integrate human and more-than-human timescales and to extend moments of wonder at the abundance of the natural world, exem-plies the power of a radically expanded conception of time. As an elegy to a life lived in nature, it is also a testament to the irreversibility of time’s arrow. I hope that readers of this book will conduct their own investigations, following the Kalendar’s numbers back to the Journal entries to which they point and discovering their own constellations of meaning. e transcriptions published here can also be found at the online home of oreau’s Kalendar:

i n t r o d u c t i o n xxiiioreauskalendar.org. Here you can follow links from each Kalendar date directly to the relevant Journal entries, walking backward in oreau’s foot-steps, and moving, as he did in his nal months, between the seasons of his life. I have made such journeys myself countless times over the past decade, and doing so has taught me to think dierently about my life’s own seasons. e arrow of time demands that we live also in its circles, in the slow time of wonder and in the wide orbit of our planet. I hope readers will be inspired by oreau’s slow, devoted attention to his world, and by his relentless creativity in reimagining the time in which he lived. May we nd in his example the courage to reimagine our own.

xxiv c o m m o n a b b r e v i a t i o n s a n d m a r k i n g sCommon Abbreviations and Markings____________________oreau uses the following abbreviations and markings frequently in the charts of General Phenomena:V. vide – Latin for “see.” is is oreau’s most commonly used notation, and it often signals a relation between similar phenomena occurring on dierent datesDo. – Ditto Ap. – ApparentlyS.L. – Summer Level (Average water depth in summer)Ind. Sum. – Indian SummerConsid. – Considerably Calc. – Calculate Ult. Ultimo mense – Latin for “last month” F.H.P. – Fair Haven PondInc. – Inclusive N.B. – Nota Bene – Latin for “note well”

c o m m o n a b b r e v i a t i o n s a n d m a r k i n g s xxvN.p. – Next Pagee charts contain many other abbreviations that can be derived from con-text, e.g., T & L for “thunder and lightning,” c for “chamber,” etc. Many place-names and botanical names are also shortened by one or more syllable. oreau’s most common markings are wavy lines, arrows, circles, and underlines, which I have presented in the transcriptions as clearly as possible. ese markings generally have to do with placement of text. Circles, lines, and arrows usually signify that a given entry should be moved to another square in the grid—either to a dierent year or to a dierent category. Cir-cles and lines are also used to demarcate entries that overow their squares, a very frequent occurrence. Carets are used to indicate additions to text. When oreau puts a wavy line through an entire row of the chart, this signies that he wished to strike this category from the month in question—usually in order to include it in a dierent month. (ere are several instances of this in November and December.)

April KalendarApril 1851–1860

General Phenomena for AprilAp. 1 Walden openav. of 13 years 52 53 54 556 or overcast April weatherStill sober gentle April rain or moist weather before mid of month 2ndturns to sleet Mar 30th 4th& ½ or5” night of1st& am of 2nd Mar 31stdrizzling after cold & windy Ap 1st 101st ½ day after very warm & hazy day followed by cold N.W. wind 5mizzling rain after haze in the day25The sameaftermid of month26th14&15with smooth waters – followed by a very warm day25- &26(followed by cool & windy) &30thUncertain or April weather10 April shower before mid of month6 13th(atHaverhill) three days18 April shower after mid of month21scarcely an Ap. shower yet 22- &23rdMar 2422 Thunder shower (with or with-out lightning in Ap. alone)Some thunder 5th[uncl]Quite heavy thunder showers eve of26th Mar. 16th18thwith lightning in the west6?1st of yearLightning in April(v. Mar)1st of year the Sunday beforeMay 19th1st the6th 5 26- 2nd(?) lightning 1stMar. 818thseen in west16 17 15Rain inpmfollowed by clear yellow light 11 9thjust before sunset18 v below Rain with some sleet or hail before mid month2ndThe same after mid monthWarm in 1st half of month14th6 Rain with fog frost coming out.16 Rain 15th26 22-3 (27th in night & 28 by day) 17-&20taking out frost ?21April rainstorm(2 days or more)With E wind 5 days incessantly 18 – 22nd inclusive after E. wind 17th wind keeps water in river 28-9-&30th Principal rain storm of year 16 & 171st Rainbowv. Mar 1st of year Mar 4th9th&18th2ndHigh wind rocking house &c 16-51100 pines blown down onF.H. Hill2nd 5516 Strong winds 28 10thStrong S.24 Whirl wind taking up leaves2ndHorn icicles 2nd5 Cold weather in 1st half 2ndnearly 1 inch thick of ice 27&28good fires required14 Tanned by snow 14th15 or 16thA whitening of snow 1st -28 &2nd 3rd11th&29th15 More than 3 inches of snow6th&13th8 inches15to19thinclusive 4 inches kills birds 16have none in fields(V. Mar)1st of yearSay earlier& May 30or more ofApril TranscriptionsApril 1851–1860 pg.1

56 57 58 59 6015&16 4-6-8-9 10-1124-27 22 12717th 1616in night 29th2nd thunder1st thunder shower 9thof May-Feb. 23rd13th & 14th at eve17th 13 & 14 May 10th 1st lightning of season1st the 13&14that eve25th16rain & hail in night20begins with hail9th3rdremarkably warm (perch spawn)3with fog chiefly, taking o snow also4-&5 Rain none of consequence but Dec. &Ap. 312consid. after w. wind & thick haze by day10atN. Bedford 14th “ 17almost every other day for a fortnight 9th 20th past3rd11th14 after E wind 23followed by cooler & windier20[?]raising river 2 days& nights A NE stormeve of 12[?]13th &14th13&14th(? 26last of spring rains?10thdrying up fields 9thhave had scarcely any wind for a month. Strong NW18th28blustering NW & wintry aspect 7blustering19th of Mar thru’59th of Ap. 22 days ½ of them remarkably cold NW & strongcold & windy 2nd&3rd strong cold N.W. 14&15thMay 1stAp. 7thmore NE &27thmore SE6meadow skimmed over in night 13froze in the night2last night very cold.6&7put on great coats again31°+ the2nd (having been 71°+ the1st) 14th- 44+°15th- 37°+& thin ice on mead. edge2nd26th15th&13th21st(lasts till 29th) 3 inches

4thFrost out of garden Plowing generallyFeb. 5Out of ground in many placesGround soaks up rain3rd 2nd some plowMar. 28Thawed 6 inches out of gardenAp. 4but not on N. banks 18 out enough for plowing in most open ground20th 6th—Frost still in ground feel it in meadowsMarch 30that 10 inches deep where I dig parsnips. Ap. 2in swamps ice-like 1st in RR Mar. 30on upland Ap. 10meadows sti still.Ap. 4 ,not out of N banks Mar. 18much in swamps Mar 2ndabout 6 inch in swamps 7 Ap.hinders deep plowing even in sandy fieldsup to 12thStill use gloves in morning16thprevents digging in hollows 20thcannot set a post for frost 10-55sinceAp.1st only in morning 16 Heels of snow left side 28 snow in hollows 3rd 2 or 3 ft deep on N hills in woods 25 much in2nd Div. road9th 13some icy snow still under N sides of woods in hollows12thStow’s cold pond hole still full of ice16still full - the only one I know18 HailSay to 12th2 51-2“a good solid winter” 52The high water year53 5435510River when lowest in April &meadowApril 4-56not yet so high by 4 or 5 feet as lastwinter4notice marks of river May 15(?) but still prob. up 2water on meadows1stbeen going down a month at least3rdgone down so that I have to steer carefully to avoid hummocks on meadows 23rdjust left bare for black-birds 30highest for AprilMay 4generally o meads. fast & very low 29rapidly going down shows grass on meadow Say2?16River when highest in April &howhigh. (May 31-50higher) than it has been at this season for many years - water over roadbelowmaster Cheney’s10high, but not high for spring. 23rdhighestfor year 8 ½ inch above horizontal truss (i.e. 8 ft 7½ inch above SL.) 2”up but falling7river raised so that I crossthe great meads. May 17or 9thmeads but part- ially flooded – say7(??) & nothigh.say29& high 24- rises a little 29nearly as high as any time in this year ^ far May 5^ highest in very high the year54 as year(on ac. of rain the3rd and4th)arches quite concealed - highest since 23rd-5214steadily rising since1st 19fallen a little 21risen again a little on ac. of rain 23at height for this rise high-er than before since winter whole ofLee Mead.covered 28another wrack& 26th14? Smooth reflecting water 11placid eve & reflecting water26- over cast 15still cloudy day water smooth & full of reflections 5thor6th?12 or be-foreRipples on ripple lakes13 Spearing 8th&30th1st-7 5thto8th16-25Mar 25?1st leave o greatcoat vMar.)Mar 15 next ?)Ap. 26Mar 26th Ap. 13- hear toads & take o inHaverhillMar 17too warm in one Ap 25begin to take o April 5take o &6161st regret wearing great coat 1718- &19thyet warmer & go without greatcoat15(?) Wear greatcoat again 2028–29th&30th 55 10th21Begin to wear one coat commonly 28am getting great coat oowing to rain of22 & 23rdApril 1851–1860 pg.2

6can dig in garden where the snow is gone 11one field plowed & harrowed.Mar. 28none inMonroe’sgarden Feb. 18out in many placesMar 31stout of our gardenMar. 4thout of upper part of garden. all out of garden 14th & prob 12.Mar 27not out even of upper part of garden but under snow only in warm slopes 16out of most soilMar. 27 not quite out of upland & garden but plowingMar. 20feel it in low ground 6but just coming out of cold paths N side of hillsAp. 19 21 prevents digging some pines.12.a little snow still on N side house (sinceDec 25) 17some snow- banks yet – one the 22Mar. 27none visible from window but in swallow hole.29(some of27th)none after Ap. 1st11th3/4 full16&17 20th& thin ice on mead. edge 16ground appearsin ridges on E. Hosmer’s 56 meadow12wrack on meadow57 581st lowest willow bare59Say 10th6012going down leaving its wrack May 1stwater on meads rapidly going down. am confined to river for most part 3rd& quite low Say 1st (??) &4 63rd Heron rock more than 1 foot out & falling to6th at leastto 9th say9th&prob.below summer level10thspring freshet ends began Mar. 8 (not to mention the winter one)17up again so that I[unclear] further toMantatuket’s rock but already fallingLowest for Mar. the31st3 ft. belowH’s wall or 6 ½ in above summer level Lowestap. 30 or 3+ inches below - summer level very low lowest as yet11at its height (v.23rd) 23rdrisen again over [unclear] mead. also 23rdbegins to fall 3rdrain at last & r. rapidly rises 5over the meads 8higher23nearly as high as can just get over E. Hosmer’s meadow 8thcannot get under24at its height - higher than before. (22higher than before & rising --- cut o great bends & fairly go over Hub B. causeway) owing to melting snow14a little higher on ac. of rain but no rise of consequence say14? but quite low (?)1sttoAssabet over meads in boat 10cannot cross meads 28Great Meadowpartly over X withB & B Say1st(?) I go to rock in boatagainrises some slightly fromAp. 7to14th falls from15thto end being ½ inch above summer level the 24th at summer level26th... highest the14th for Ap. but very little on meads.stone bridge 15[unclear] morning [unclear]& overcast May 3-57 Sunday 171*warm& smooth& no ripple9th 5 15F.H. pond25 8th267th&8warm enough to leave o put it on when I leave boat 9thleave itFeb. 25(65+° left at home - single coat too much76&7th put on great coat again after a week of warm weatherMar. 17wear but one -- weather for half-thick coat 27th & 30thMar 31st1st leave o & Ap.1st7th AM fire most of AprilSay 21(?) 19-60wear but 1 coat the last 10 days of Ap.(14going down rapidly Hunt’s causewayjust bare)11

28 1st(& [unclear]) sit without fire commonly v below30-30 2626 do with little now19th 1st time 1927 1stamthat I sit with open window19th 55weather for half-thick coat20 Dark evening 26-54a single cloud 17thrainy & very dark23 Burning of brush vwinterMar 30)23rd18smokes in horizon25? Fires in woods late in month 2816 Plowing & planting going on generally17th19th52 53 54 5521? Scuddingclouds10thdark barred spring clouds 10th18 Still almost sultry - with wet looking clouds hanging about - 1st time18th21 Sea Turn 18th(a warm day warmest yet)7 1stHazy 1st slight29th1st&9th 31st time but not so warm as Mar. 17th24cannot see distant hills17 Fog over river in morningsome21st24? Cold in last half of month 28cold & wintery 16 27&28good fires required25? Mtns still spotted with snow 1st&4th&28 18th 4-121st moon to walk by 11th 5419 Willow (alba) peels 19thhow long? 27thhow long?19 (?) Bass peels 19thhow long?19 (?) S. discolor peels20 (?)Tremula aspen peels14 Rain after E wind 185 daysstorm begins after & with E wind21? White frosts May 1st platforms white with 5 wets feet2 12(after clear moon-light)21saves feet a wetting 8th - 1617 Evenings very consid. shortened25 Very few leaves indeed on young oaksBegin to sit without fire commonly30 26 19thWarm in last half month 20th-27 18th-19thFlower like scent 21st-26Dark night26thin thunder showerveryLast ice [unclear] forms 161 foot [unclear]a little

May 3rdMay 1st & 2nd3030 20beg to sit [unclear]without fires more commonly27&30th28th65+ butonethickish coat is best16thrainy & very dark2721 May 4th dry leaves in woods time for fires27th16-56 15many planting nowMay 6about end of very dry leaves1256 57 58 59 6021-24-252424th&28-29 &30th12thhazy 6ththe 1st slight bluish haze2nd28th quite a fog 6 pretty foggy for several mornings28icy cold N.W. wind24cold NW wind no frogs out & for 3 or 4 days18cold with strong wind 46+ 25-47+28 snow whitening the mts24peels several days 17but not 4 or 5 days ago18peels well18just begun13-14snow & rain after E wind the 7th (beginning18 March) 11thafter E wind the10thfollowingan E. wind another22nd29th& 9 30th meltingearly17th26thMay 3rdMay 1st&2 30 20th30th