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How can a man quietly sit down and pare his nails, while the earth goes gyrating ahead amid such a din of sphere music, whirling him along about her axis some twenty-four thousand miles between sun and sun, but mainly in a circle some two millions of miles actual progress? and then such a hurly-burley on the surface - wind always blowing - now a zepher, now a hurricane - tides never idle, ever fluctuating - no rest for Niagara, but perpetual ran-tan on those limestone rocks - and then that summer simmering which our ears are used to, which would otherwise be christened confusion worse confounded,but is now ironically called "silence audible", and above all the incessant tinkering named "hum of industry". The hurrying to and fro and the confused jabbering of men. Can man do less than get up and shake himself.
Henry David Thoreau,The Heart of Thoreau's Journals, edited by Odell Shepard, New York, 1961, p. 4.
TIME: March 6, 1838
CIRCUMSTANCE: Thoreau's acoustic cosmology.
PLACE: Indefinite
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