Orts #852

It is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time, because to write it is not what interests us.
  - H. D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Thursday


All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences. . . . In other words, the history which we read is only a fainter memory of events which have happened in our own experience.
  - ibid., Wednesday


Behind every man's busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface.
  - ibid. Friday

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December 17: on this date in 1936, bananas rained down on Pittsburgh:
http://pittarchives.tumblr.com/post/135381482147/the-pittsburgh-banana-company-explosion