To affect the quality of the day, that is the…

The line comes from “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”, the second chapter of Walden. Thoreau is praising the morning: “Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.” Few people, he says, are ever quite awake, yet nothing is more encouraging than man’s ability “to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor”. To paint a picture or carve a statue is something; it is far more glorious “to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look”.

The line makes living itself the highest art. Every man, Thoreau adds, is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of his “most elevated and critical hour”. Then comes the book’s most famous passage: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately”.

Thoreau spent two years at Walden Pond, from 1845 to 1847, and published the book in 1854. Less famous than its neighbour, this line states the same program: to live awake, attentive to the details of an ordinary day.

Walden; or, Life in the Woods, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”, 1854

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