Walden; or life in the woods - By Henry David Thoreau.

I started reading Walden, or life in the woods from Chapter 13 “House-warming”. I jumped over Chapter 14 “Former Inhabitants”, started again with Chapter 15 “Winter Animals” and plodded along Chapter 16 “The Pond in Winter”. Then I stopped, checked the length of the last two Chapters, Chapter 17 “Spring” and Chapter 18 “Conclusion”, and judiciously decided to ignore them to dash myself randomly in the previous twelve Chapters.

This book is included in the selection of authors I have to study for my Anglo-American Literature exam. At first, it seemed inviting: a report of two years and two months spent by the author in a small house he built himself, on the shore of Walden pond, in a wood close to the small town of Concord, Massachusetts. I did not suppose it to be particularly exciting or surprising, but a pleasant and fluent reading, neither discouragingly long nor excessively boring.
To my surprise, all my endeavours ended in slumbering readings quickly neglected, with faint excuses, for sudden, more important tasks.

Then, there came the snow: large, white snowflakes whirled slow and fast for an entire day, the last day of the Christmas holidays. Snowfalls are not unusual in early January in Milan. What retained my eyes was the obstinacy and the disarming energy of these snowflakes that silently were covering the town. They reminded me a passage of the book. I started turning over the pages to find it, towards the end:

“…The snow had already covered the ground…, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavoured to keep a bright fire both within my house and my breast.” (chapter 13)

Winter did not surprise him: he had gathered wild apples and shiny chestnuts, had stored in his cellar potatoes, peas, a little rice and a jug of molasses. He had lathered and plastered his house, regretting …the rough brown boards full of knots … that let cool air and light in, but admitting that now his dwelling had become more comfortable and suitable for the freezing weather. He had built a chimney too, the most vital part of the house, devoting days of hard work towards the end of summer. Snow and ice confined his world for months; in the morning, he looked for water with axe and pail and collected dead wood for the fire, a trusty companion that warmed and purified his thoughts. Silence and solitude enhanced the voices of the wood. The melodious sound of different birds sketched in his words, which combine the preciseness of science to the intenseness of literature, perfect pictures of a life ...above a forest of solemn pines bent down with snow. The morning run of red squirrels over his roof, that woke him up and then amused him with their quick and crazy acts. The raged and demoniacal bark of foxes which ranged over the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game (chapter 15). The creaking of the snow while he travelled, some eight or ten miles away, to pay a visit to an old pine, a beech-tree or a yellow-birch whose outlines had been shaped and re-design by the snow. The sound of the ice, which had turned the smooth surface of the pond in a living lesson, applies to nature and to men as well.

This is not my winter. This is a wild nature, not hostile but mysterious and unknown. Busy in a never-ending cycle that repeats itself in seasons, in days, in the life of all beings, always the same but always different and so worth to be present at it.

He went to the woods to front only the essential facts of life. Simplicity and discipline were his means to reach pure thoughts, to find an inspiration that was always more difficult to seize, to reconcile to a life that was addressed, by then, to maturity without the fruits he had hoped to pick up.
Thoreau wrote this book in 1847, when he left this house, but it was released just seven years later, eight years before his death. It took time to find the right words to express the renewal of his spirit using the imagines of Nature, to write an hymn to celebrate her infinitive and unrestrainable strength.

I have not finished the book yet. The glorious rebirth, the encouraging certainty that light and warm sun will rise again have just been skimmed. It is too early, even if days are longer and showy primroses are on sale. I still feel winter with its cold, low and grey sky. I still see its naked, twiggy and brown trees; brighten by car lights, with heaps of dry leaves squashed at their feet. They would only disappear, sink under the frozen asphalt covered with dirty snow, blend their brown-greyish shades with the dark ground. I still hear twittering from invisible and unknown birds that drown, for an instant, town noises, and I still need …the suggestive inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy of Winter… this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer (chapter 17).

Chapter 17 will wait until the snow has melted and new hopes are ready to spring.

Photos:
Travel in a garden.

VENICE - ITALY (second part).

The pointed grey leaves of a thick olive tree grove rose to a similar grey sky during the Saturday afternoon visit at the friaries’ garden on the island of La Giudecca.
In the shade of the Basilica del Redentore seven-something hundreds years of history were summarized in a few minutes while the small group of visitors silently swarmed through the extensive fields. Here an elderly Capuchin monk cultivates violet artichokes and other vegetables with sporadic help of younger monks, forced to leave their studies and meditations to prune vines and pick up kiwi and jujube.
A long line of faultless cypresses, introduced as ornamental plant just in the 16th Century, protects these cultivations from cold winter winds and escorts you towards the end of the garden, to a low wall overlooking the lagoon.
Just a few trees, besides cypress, stand such particular conditions of thin soil and salt water as taxus baccata and celtis australis, magnolias, for example, does not survive for a long time.

The next day, a warm, sunny Saturday, I joined the group in time to see, behind a ruined palace and a tall hedge, the roof of a once famous library. This quiet, isolated building called loggia preserved a famous collection with rare literature and history books. The simple green lawn with fruit trees could have disappointed me, as there was not much more to see, if I had not realized that what seemed to be an ordinary plantation was the result of a huge work to recover the garden from a fatal decline. I put back my notebook and I enjoyed the sun listening to the lectures laying my eyes around: ripen pomegranates weighted down the branches of the trees, a lonely statue stood proud in front of severe cypresses, a crimson ribbon of the last pelargonium flowers overhung holding vases.
I would not have found pelargonium five hundreds years ago but citrus fruits, myrtus and roses or aromatic combinations of majorana, dianthus and basilicus in terra cotta vases decorated with festoon and garlands and painted in bright red, green, blue or white to show up the flowers.

Later, after a quick pasta and confused information, I reached by vaporetto - steam-boat -the last garden, two stops before the isle of Murano, one stop before the Isle of San Michele, Venice’ cemetery.
Quiet streets led to the main door of this garden nested in the Sestiere di Cannareggio, and today owned by a religious institution. It was not its glamorous past that struck my imagination but the pink-reddish, brick wall that surrounds the garden, with intriguing windows opening on the North lagoon, that enchanted me.
An ordinary life runs close to the San Marco square: fast motorboats, old houses with washing hanging out the windows and televisions switched on at the highest volume, and not so far away the melancholy cemetery of San Michele.
Venetian gardeners never neglected boundaries walls: they had to protect but not to segregate the property. They were inspired by oriental gardens, decorated with bold battlements, with windows to let the world in.
Two snow-white angels stood at the top of two thin white columns on the wall, they smile looking at the garden ignoring those steam-boats full of tourists that tirelessly sail to and from the isle of Murano.

I left Venice late in the afternoon, loving these gardens snatched from the sea and from the oblivion, loving a town I always dislike and loving the dark clouds that, coming from east, closed again the sky.


Gardens visited in Venice – Italy on October 2005:
Giardini dei Palazzi Gradenigo e Cappello - Santa Croce Rio Marin;

Chiostro e Orto del Convento del Redentore – Giudecca; Giardino dei Palazzi Vendramin e Foscarini- Dorsoduro Carmini; Giardino di Palazzo Contarini dal Zaffo – Cannaregio, Madonna dell’Orto.

Photos:

Travel in a garden.

Further Readings:
Il Giardino Veneziano. La storia, l’architettura, la botanica. Mariapia Cunico, Marsilio, 1989.