Thoreau knew that winter—the harvest harvested, the preserves prepared, and the firewood stored—is a time for meditation and pleasure, for contemplation and reading and writing by the stove. Time to be what we are and what we want to be. Here we have compiled the best winter passages and insights that Thoreau wrote throughout his life. But he would not have liked this book to be an anthology guided by that linear poverty with which we Westerners understand time. A good connoisseur of Hindu culture and Native American cultures, we believe that he would have preferred a compilation oriented through a kind of cyclical time that would remind us that one winter is always all winters and that the Great Winter is the only one that exists.