In the spring of 1860, at the height of his intellectual powers and the peak of his political engagement, Henry David Thoreau created something new. Part blueprint for a grand new work, part scientific chart, part picture of temporal experience, this something—which, following a suggestive Journal entry from October 1859 has come to be called his “Kalendar”—was more a tool than a text. Comprised of six multipage charts of “General Phenomena,” the Kalendar was an instrument for recording and perceiving not just annual, weather-related phenomena themselves, but also the hidden relations between them—between the skies of one June and the skies of past and future Junes—relations we often feel but can’t quite hold, stuck as we usually are in our own brief moment of linear time.
It was the fall of 1996, a lunar eclipse was looming, and the world was different. Back in Boulder the four of us—my younger brother, my old friend Hones, my wife, Nina, and me—had semi-secured four bikes to the back of a rental Saab, crammed our backpacks and ourselves inside, and pointed the car toward the canyons of southeast Utah.
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