November

Abstract

These are dark days now, when the sun lies low against the valley and the dusk spreads out each late afternoon toward the horizon. There is nothing like arriving in a dark forest on a darkening night. The first sensation is the smell; almost like touch or sight, it comes out of the woods and fills the nostrils and the mind at the same instant: musty and cool but delicately sweet as well. It is the smell of drying and dying leaves, of green ferns turned brown, of countless newly dead insect bodies lying in the damp leaf-mold, cool damp fungus and mossy moisture behind thick tree bark, mouldering and melting. When I step out of the front door tonight, I cannot see my hand six inches from my face; that is how dark the woods have grown. The clouds cover the stars on this moonless night, while darkness fills up the woods like endless water in the sea. But even in this pitch-blackness, I can still smell that deep smell of autumn, that leaf-moss and mold-damp smell of the dying surface layer of the forest. It smells almost warm in this cold, almost light in this dark. I breathe it in deeply and slowly, again and again. Then I turn from the dark woods and go back inside the cabin.

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature.

—Thoreau, Walden