A Mass of Thawing Clay

Chapter 17 "Spring" paragraph 8

Henry David Thoreau in his Walden (1854)

What is man but a mass of thawing clay?

The ball of the human finger is but a drop

congealed.  The fingers and toes flow to

their extent from the thawing mass of the

body.  Who knows what the human body

would expand and flow out to under a 

more genial heaven?  Is not the hand a 

spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins?

The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a

lichen, umbilicaria [Latin], on the side of

the head, with its lobe or drop.  The lip --

labium [Latin] -- laps or lapses from the

sides of the cavernous mouth.   The nose is

a manifest congealed drop or stalactite.

The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent

dripping of the face.  The cheeks are a slide

from the brows into the valley of the face,

opposed and diffused by the cheekbones.

Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf,

too is a thick and now loitering drop, larger

or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf;

and as many as lobes as it has, in so many

directions it tends to flow, and  more heat or

other genial influences would have caused it

to flow yet farther.