No More Learning

There is a wild apple on Nawshawtuct Hill in my town which has to me a
peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is
three-quarters tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you eat it, it
smells exactly like a squash-bug. It is a sort of triumph to eat and
relish it.

I hear that the fruit of a kind of plum tree in Provence is "called
_Prunes sibarelles_, because it is impossible to whistle after having
eaten them, from their sourness. " But perhaps they were only eaten in
the house and in summer, and if tried out-of-doors in a stinging
atmosphere, who knows but you could whistle an octave higher and
clearer?

In the fields only are the sours and bitters of Nature appreciated;
just as the woodchopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle
of a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray there, and dreams
of summer in a degree of cold which, experienced in a chamber, would
make a student miserable. They who are at work abroad are not cold,
but rather it is they who sit shivering in houses. As with
temperatures, so with flavors; as with cold and heat, so with sour and
sweet. This natural raciness, the sours and bitters which the diseased
palate refuses, are the true condiments.

Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. To appreciate
the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses,
_papillae_ firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily
flattened and tamed.

From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may
be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the
civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It
takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.
What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of
life, the apple of the world, then!

"Nor is it every apple I desire,
Nor that which pleases every palate best;
'Tis not the lasting Deuxan I require,
Nor yet the red-cheeked Greening I request,
Nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife,
Nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife:
No, no! bring me an apple from the tree of life. "

So there is one _thought_ for the field, another for the house. I
would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and
will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house.


THEIR BEAUTY

Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and
crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming
traits even to the eye. You will discover some evening redness dashed
or sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare that
the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some
part of its sphere. It will have some red stains, commemorating the
mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches,
in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over
it; and a spacious field of green reflecting the general face of
nature,--green even as the fields; or a yellow ground, which implies a
milder flavor,--yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills.

Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair,--apples not of Discord, but of
Concord! Yet not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share.
Painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or
crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the
influence of the sun on all sides alike,--some with the faintest pink
blush imaginable,--some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or
with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from the
stem-dimple to the blossom end, like meridional lines, on a
straw-colored ground,--some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine
lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less
confluent and fiery when wet,--and others gnarly, and freckled or
peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white
ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of Him who paints
the autumn leaves. Others, again, are sometimes red inside, perfused
with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat,--apple of
the Hesperides, apple of the evening sky! But like shells and pebbles
on the seashore, they must be seen as they sparkle amid the withering
leaves in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal air, or as they lie
in the wet grass, and not when they have wilted and faded in the
house.