How to Die

It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould!—painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last resting-place, light and frisky. They put on no weeds, but merrily they go scampering over the earth, selecting the spot, choosing a lot, ordering no iron fence, whispering all through the woods about it,—some choosing the spot where the bodies of men are mouldering beneath, and meeting them half-way. How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.

In "Autumnal Tints," printed five months after he died, Thoreau watches the fallen leaves go back into the ground and takes them as teachers.

Source: Henry D. Thoreau, "Autumnal Tints," section "Fallen Leaves," in Excursions (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863); first printed in The Atlantic Monthly, October 1862. Text: scan or ebook. Public domain in the US. Pairs with: Pentacles: Ten or Four of Pentacles, or Major Arcana: Death A note from 2026: Thoreau does not name the decomposers. The "subtle chemistry" that turns leaves into soil is done mostly by fungi and bacteria.

Public domain in the United States.