Burnt Tree Quotes

Do you scent the same things I do?” Ransom made a face when she described what she’d picked up from the passing vamp. “Yeah, except I don’t say shit like ‘cinnamon spice with a hint of burnt oak.’ I say ‘dude smells like an electrified tree with a side of doughnut topping.

Then you compared a woman's love to Hell, To barren land where water will not dwell, And you compared it to a quenchless fire, The more it burns the more is its desire To burn up everything that burnt can be. You say that just as worms destroy a tree A wife destroys her husband and contrives, As husbands know, the ruin of their lives.

I love the autumn—that melancholy season that suits memories so well. When the trees have lost their leaves, when the sky at sunset still preserves the russet hue that fills with gold the withered grass, it is sweet to watch the final fading of the fires that until recently burnt within you.

Far overhead from beyond the veil of blue sky which hid them the stars sang again; a pure, cold, difficult music. Then there came a swift flash like fire (but it burnt nobody) either from the sky or from the Lion itself, and every drop of blood tingled in the children's bodies, and the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: "Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.

February. Get ink, shed tears. Write of it, sob your heart out, sing, While torrential slush that roars Burns in the blackness of the spring. Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas, Race through the noice of bells and wheels To where the ink and all you grieving Are muffled when the rainshower falls. To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal, A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees, Fall down into the puddles, hurl Dry sadness deep into the eyes. Below, the wet black earth shows through, With sudden cries the wind is pitted, The more haphazard, the more true The poetry that sobs its heart out.

It was golden hour in Tarrytown. An incandescent sun cast long shadows that pointed in unison toward nightfall. Birds sang. But their melodies were drowned out by crescendos of cicadas’ chattering. Not to be outdone, the wind came and went in gusts, rising up and across the hills from the lake below. As it did, it blew through the trees agitating the millions of leaves in the canopy, the rustle and crackle of which drew the eyes upward, where an infinite canvas of burnt orange and purple was visible through the branches of proud oaks.

Among them is a renegade king, he who sired five royal heirs without ever unzipping his pants. A man to whom time has imparted great wisdom and an even greater waistline, whose thoughtless courage is rivalled only by his unquenchable thirst. At his shoulder walks a sorcerer, a cosmic conversationalist. Enemy of the incurable rot, absent chairman of combustive sciences at the university in Oddsford, and the only living soul above the age of eight to believe in owlbears. Look here at a warrior born, a scion of power and poverty whose purpose is manifold: to shatter shackles, to murder monarchs, and to demonstrate that even the forces of good must sometimes enlist the service of big, bad motherfuckers. His is an ancient soul destined to die young. And now comes the quiet one, the gentle giant, he who fights his battles with a shield. Stout as the tree that counts its age in aeons, constant as the star that marks true north and shines most brightly on the darkest nights. A step ahead of these four: our hero. He is the candle burnt down to the stump, the cutting blade grown dull with overuse. But see now the spark in his stride. Behold the glint of steel in his gaze. Who dares to stand between a man such as this and that which he holds dear? He will kill, if he must, to protect it. He will die, if that is what it takes. “Go get the boss,” says one guardsman to another. “This bunch looks like trouble.” And they do. They do look like trouble, at least until the wizard trips on the hem of his robe. He stumbles, cursing, and fouls the steps of the others as he falls face-first onto the mud-slick hillside.

The evening light was like honey in the trees When you left me and walked to the end of the street Where the sunset abruptly ended. The wedding-cake drawbridge lowered itself To the fragile forget-me-not flower. You climbed aboard. Burnt horizons suddenly paved with golden stones, Dreams I had, including suicide, Puff out the hot-air balloon now. It is bursting, it is about to burst

You are like that spark of fire, that fell on a leaf and burnt the whole tree down gradually. Look at me now, all you can see is the memories and reflections of a tree that stood tall and strong once before. But I will not let you win. I will show you, how life can rise again from just ashes and dust.

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms, them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.

If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon, and the strip of highway visible -just barely – in the hills, beyond the trees. The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood: just as Hampden, in subsequent years, would always present itself immediately to my imagination in a confused whirl of white and green and red, so the country house first appeared as a glorious blur of watercolors, of ivory and lapis blue, chestnut and burnt orange and gold, separating only gradually into the boundaries of remembered objects: the house, the sky, the maple trees. But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe.

Imagine a land where people are afraid of dragons. It is a reasonable fear: dragons possess a number of qualities that make being afraid of them a very commendable response. Things like their terrible size, their ability to spout fire, or to crack boulders into splinters with their massive talons. In fact, the only terrifying quality that dragons do not possess is that of existence. Now, the people of this land know about dragons because their leaders have warned them about them. They tell stories about cruel dragons with razor teeth and fiery breath. They recount legends of dragons hunting by night on silent wings. In short, the leaders make sure that the people believe in all the qualities of dragons, including that key quality of existence. And then they control the people — when they need to — with their fear of dragons. The people pay a dragon-slaying tax … everyone stays indoors after dark to avoid being snatched by swooping claws … and nobody ever strays out of bounds for fear of being eaten well and truly up. Perhaps somebody will wonder if dragons aren’t, after all, fictitious because — despite their size — nobody seems to have actually seen one. And so it is necessary from time to time to provide evidence: a burnt tree or two, a splintered rock, the mysterious absence of a villager. The population is controlled by the dragons in its collective mind. It’s contrived superstition, and it is possible because the people do not know enough about the way the world works to know that dragons do not exist.

Every tree in the forest has a story to tell. Some of them were burnt but they endured the fire and got revived; some of them were cut, their barks injured, some people pick up their leaves to make medicines for their sicknesses, birds used their leaves to make their nests, etc. Upon all these, the tree is still tree!

I walked along the side with the spray-painted trees, some in white like a starched chemical snowfall, others painted gold, pink, red, even black. The black tree, about three feet high, looked like it had been burnt. I wondered who would want a black tree, but I knew someone would. There was no limit to the ways in which people could be strange." ~ White Oleander

Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day: It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear; Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree: Believe me, love, it was the nightingale. Rom. It was the lark, the herald of the morn, No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east: Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops: I must be gone and live, or stay and die. Jul. Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I: It is some meteor that the sun exhales, To be to thee this night a torch-bearer, And light thee on thy way to Mantua: Therefore stay yet; thou need'st not to be gone, Rom. Let me be ta'en,, let me be put to death; I am content, so thou wilt have it so. I'll say yon grey is not the morning's eye, 'T is but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow; Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat The vaulty heaven so high above our heads: I have more care to stay than will to go: Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so, How is't my soul? let's talk; it is not day. Jul. It is, it is; hie hence, be gone, away! It is the lark that sings so out of tune, Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps. Some say the lark makes sweet division; This doth not so, for she divideth us: Some say the lark and loathed toad change eyes; O! now I would they had changed voices too, Since arm from arm that voice doth us affray, Hunting thee hence with hunt's up to the day. O! now be gone; more light and light it grows. Rom. More light and light; more dark and dark our woes.

I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood fires burn at night so everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two. Autumn in Fairyland is all that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland Forest or the morbidity of a Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces’ eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland. And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as September and her friends rushed through the suddenly cold air on their snorting, roaring high wheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September’s head, dropping their hard, sweet acorns into her spinning spokes. But you must try as hard as you can. Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel to mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.

You can be so much in a room that the world outside turns to water. You've got the heater blowing out burnt air, but you still don't get warm. Your ankles are singed, but your head's in a bucket of ice. Time drips like a stalactite. The water for the coffee boils away in a tree of steam.

And after that they had gone through many streets they came to a little door that was set in a wall that was covered with a pomegranate tree. And the old man touched the door with a ring of graved jaspar and it opened, and they went down five steps of brass into a garden filled with black poppies and green jars of burnt clay.

The Dog-star and Aldebaran, pointing to the restless Pleiades, were half-way up the Southern sky, and between them hung Orion, which gorgeous constellation never burnt more vividly than now, as it soared forth above the rim of the landscape. Castor and Pollux with their quiet shine were almost on the meridian: the barren and gloomy Square of Pegasus was creeping round to the north-west; far away through the plantation Vega sparkled like a lamp suspended amid the leafless trees, and Cassiopeia's chair stood daintily poised on the uppermost boughs. "One o'clock," said Gabriel.

What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing except his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now. When people die they are sometimes put into coffins which means that they don't mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots. But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burnt and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the crematorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antartic, or coming down as rain in rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.

Bugle" Black beetles know where the most recent bones bake in the heat, tendons and meat long gone, bleached white, and if you give them cheap wine -- drizzle a few red drops on a flat stone-- they will lead you to a barren gulch surrounded by sages and nettles, dirt burnt to powdery sand and sharp thorns. Hunch above the skeleton, bow your head, start reciting verses you learned as a child, there, under the sun with rocks and brush, bare locust tree a telling reliquary of dust to dust, all so brutally hot. You must pull ribs from that rotting body, words that matter: love me, love me not.

Smoke! Did all human passion burn away and drift in a blue film over the fields, obscure for a moment the sight of the sun and the shapes of the crops and the trees, then fade into air and leave the clear hard day; and no difference anywhere? Not quite! For smoke was burnt tissue, and where fire had raged there was alteration.

First Love I ne’er was struck before that hour With love so sudden and so sweet, Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower And stole my heart away complete. My face turned pale as deadly pale, My legs refused to walk away, And when she looked, what could I ail? My life and all seemed turned to clay. And then my blood rushed to my face And took my eyesight quite away, The trees and bushes round the place Seemed midnight at noonday. I could not see a single thing, Words from my eyes did start— They spoke as chords do from the string, And blood burnt round my heart. Are flowers the winter’s choice? Is love’s bed always snow? She seemed to hear my silent voice, Not love's appeals to know. I never saw so sweet a face As that I stood before. My heart has left its dwelling-place And can return no more.

We became six people at a table in Hampton Court. We rose and walked together down the avenue. In the thin, the unreal twilight, fitfully like the echo of voices laughing down some alley, geniality returned to me and flesh. Against the gateway, against some cedar tree I saw blaze bright, Neville, Jinny, Rhoda, Louis, Susan and myself, our life, our identity. Still King William seemed an unreal monarch and his crown mere tinsel. But we – against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was enough.

Breathing became a delight and movement a joy, so full was the air of the wine of growing and awakening life. The sun burnt through the veils that had barred him from the world and glowed upon it like a golden smile. The sap ran in the trees; the stags in the forest lifted their heads to sniff the strange glory upon the breezes; and the earth sang her rising-song.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind. We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace, Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place, But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome. With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch, They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch; They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings; So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things. When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know." On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death." In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more. As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire; And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

You big ugly. You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. You scorched suntanned. Old too quickly. Acres of suburbs watching the telly. You bore me. Freckle silly children. You nothing much. With your big sea. Beach beach beach. I’ve seen enough already. You dumb dirty city with bar stools. You’re ugly. You silly shopping town. You copy. You too far everywhere. You laugh at me. When I came this woman gave me a box of biscuits. You try to be friendly but you’re not very friendly. You never ask me to your house. You insult me. You don’t know how to be with me. Road road tree tree. I came from crowded and many. I came from rich. You have nothing to offer. You’re poor and spread thin. You big. So what. I’m small. It’s what’s in. You silent on Sunday. Nobody on your streets. You dead at night. You go to sleep too early. You don’t excite me. You scare me with your hopeless. Asleep when you walk. Too hot to think. You big awful. You don’t match me. You burnt out. You too big sky. You make me a dot in the nowhere. You laugh with your big healthy. You want everyone to be the same. You’re dumb. You do like anybody else. You engaged Doreen. You big cow. You average average. Cold day at school playing around at lunchtime. Running around for nothing. You never accept me. For your own. You always ask me where I’m from. You always ask me. You tell me I look strange. Different. You don’t adopt me. You laugh at the way I speak. You think you’re better than me. You don’t like me. You don’t have any interest in another country. Idiot centre of your own self. You think the rest of the world walks around without shoes or electric light. You don’t go anywhere. You stay at home. You like one another. You go crazy on Saturday night. You get drunk. You don’t like me and you don’t like women. You put your arm around men in bars. You’re rough. I can’t speak to you. You burly burly. You’re just silly to me. You big man. Poor with all your money. You ugly furniture. You ugly house. You relaxed in your summer stupor. All year. Never fully awake. Dull at school. Wait for other people to tell you what to do. Follow the leader. Can’t imagine. Workhorse. Thick legs. You go to work in the morning. You shiver on a tram.

I sat down. I cried, knowing that what I had wanted was a return to normal, but there would never be a return to normal. Papa was gone. In his place was this man whose cheekbones cut hard into his skin, whose burnt-dark color and malnutrition were still present even though he no longer lived in a jungle. This man who allowed me to hold his hand and sob onto his shoulder, even though it made him anxious to be so close, so near to anyone. I needed to learn how to live with this new man, to negotiate a relationship with his body that was not the body I knew.

The north smells different from the city: clearer, thinner. You can see farther. A sawmill, a hill of sawdust, the teepee shape of a sawdust burner; the smokestacks of the copper smelters, the rocks around them bare of trees, burnt-looking, the heaps of blackened slag: I’ve forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.

... they walked to the Mahamega grove in the centre of which was a sacred, thousand-five-hundred-year-old Bodhi tree. Bhikshus, devotees and many others were circumambulating the tree, offering flowers to it and paying it obeisance. The Prince paid his respects to it. He said to the other two, “Kings and kingdoms disappear but this tree is proof that righteousness is eternal.” Looking around, he saw three grooms holding horses that were ready to start out. He went up to them and the grooms greeted him joyfully. He asked them something then turned to Vandiyathevan. “The palace which was burnt down last night was Mahasena's. These people were afraid that we might have been burnt too. They are extremely happy to see us.” “It might be true that a thousand-five-hundred-year-old tree still stands. But righteousness has long been dead,” said Vandiyathevan.

THOSE BORN UNDER Pacific Northwest skies are like daffodils: they can achieve beauty only after a long, cold sulk in the rain. Henry, our mother, and I were Pacific Northwest babies. At the first patter of raindrops on the roof, a comfortable melancholy settled over the house. The three of us spent dark, wet days wrapped in old quilts, sitting and sighing at the watery sky. Viviane, with her acute gift for smell, could close her eyes and know the season just by the smell of the rain. Summer rain smelled like newly clipped grass, like mouths stained red with berry juice — blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. It smelled like late nights spent pointing constellations out from their starry guises, freshly washed laundry drying outside on the line, like barbecues and stolen kisses in a 1932 Ford Coupe. The first of the many autumn rains smelled smoky, like a doused campsite fire, as if the ground itself had been aflame during those hot summer months. It smelled like burnt piles of collected leaves, the cough of a newly revived chimney, roasted chestnuts, the scent of a man’s hands after hours spent in a woodshop. Fall rain was not Viviane’s favorite. Rain in the winter smelled simply like ice, the cold air burning the tips of ears, cheeks, and eyelashes. Winter rain was for hiding in quilts and blankets, for tying woolen scarves around noses and mouths — the moisture of rasping breaths stinging chapped lips. The first bout of warm spring rain caused normally respectable women to pull off their stockings and run through muddy puddles alongside their children. Viviane was convinced it was due to the way the rain smelled: like the earth, tulip bulbs, and dahlia roots. It smelled like the mud along a riverbed, like if she opened her mouth wide enough, she could taste the minerals in the air. Viviane could feel the heat of the rain against her fingers when she pressed her hand to the ground after a storm. But in 1959, the year Henry and I turned fifteen, those warm spring rains never arrived. March came and went without a single drop falling from the sky. The air that month smelled dry and flat. Viviane would wake up in the morning unsure of where she was or what she should be doing. Did the wash need to be hung on the line? Was there firewood to be brought in from the woodshed and stacked on the back porch? Even nature seemed confused. When the rains didn’t appear, the daffodil bulbs dried to dust in their beds of mulch and soil. The trees remained leafless, and the squirrels, without acorns to feed on and with nests to build, ran in confused circles below the bare limbs. The only person who seemed unfazed by the disappearance of the rain was my grandmother. Emilienne was not a Pacific Northwest baby nor a daffodil. Emilienne was more like a petunia. She needed the water but could do without the puddles and wet feet. She didn’t have any desire to ponder the gray skies. She found all the rain to be a bit of an inconvenience, to be honest.

And do you think," said the schoolmaster, marking the glance she had thrown around, "That an unvisited grave, withered tree, a faded flower or two, tokens of forgetfulness or cold neglect? Do you think there are no deeds, far away from here, in which these dead may be best remembered? Nell, Nell, there may be people busy in the world, at this instant, in whose good action and good thoughts these very Graves--neglected as they look to us-- are chief instruments.".... "There is nothing," cried her friend, "no, no thing innocent or good, that dies, and is forgotten. Let us hold to that faith, or none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in its cradle, will live again in the better thoughts of those who loved it, and will play its part, through them, in the redeeming actions of the world, though its body be burnt to ashes or drowned in the deepest sea. There is not an angel added to the Host of Heaven but does its blessed work on earth in those that loved it here Forgotten! Oh, if the good deeds of human creatures could be traced to their source, how beautiful would even death appear; for how much charity, mercy and purified affection, would be seen to have their growth in dusty graves!

I had lain quiet and still, but I remembered the ravening hunger that was in me always: to climb into my father’s lap, to rise and run and shout, snatch the draughts from the board and batter them against the walls. To stare at the logs until they burst into flame, to shake him for every secret, as fruits are shaken from a tree. But if I had done even one of those things there would have been no mercy. He would have burnt me down to ash. The moon lay on my son’s forehead. I saw the smudges that water and cloth had not quite scrubbed away. Why should he be peaceful? I never was, nor his father either, when I knew him. The difference was that he was not afraid to be burnt.

DEPARTURE The figs on the fig tree in the yard are green; Green, also, the grapes on the green vine Shading the brickred porch tiles. The money’s run out. How nature, sensing this, compounds her bitters. Ungifted, ungrieved, our leavetaking. The sun shines on unripe corn. Cats play in the stalks. Retrospect shall not soften such penury— Sun’s brass, the moon’s steely patinas, The leaden slag of the world— But always expose The scraggy rock spit shielding the town’s blue bay Against which the burnt of outher sea Beats, is brutal endlessly. Gull-fouled, a stone hut Bares its low lintel to corroding weathers: Across the jut of ochreous rock Goats shamble, morose, rank-haired, To lick the sea-salt. --written 1956

The sun was setting behind a line of trees; it cast a great bird's wing halfway across the field when she finally headed back towards the house. In the warm shade of the first enclosed garden, the datura plants were already releasing pulses of their heady night scent. The coffee aroma of earlier was now a burnt chocolate and earthy spice smell that would deepen with the night. Ellie felt a burning sensation in her nose, like mustard.

Kostas Papaioannou" the wave of your laughter surged over the chatting and the rattle of the cups and spoons, it was the sound of spotted goats clambering in a rush over a land of burnt hills, the couple at the next table stopped talking and froze with blank stares, as if reality had become naked and nothing remained except the silent spinning of atoms and molecules, it was a flapping of wings over blue and white waves, a sparkle of sun on the rocks, we heard the sound of the footsteps of the nomadic waters on slabs the color of embers, we saw a butterfly land on the cashier’s head, open its wings of flame and shatter into reflections, we touched the thoughts we thought and saw the words we said, and then the clatter of the spoons returned, the tide swelled, the people came and went, but you were on the edge of the cliff, the bay was a broad smile, and above, the light and the wind conspired : Psyche blew across your forehead.

me was the glittering desolation of the sea, the awful solitude upon which I had already suffered so much; behind me the island, hushed under the dawn, its Beast People silent and unseen. The enclosure, with all its provisions and ammunition, burnt noisily, with sudden gusts of flame, a fitful crackling, and now and then a crash. The heavy smoke drove up the beach away from me, rolling low over the distant tree-tops towards the huts in the ravine. Beside me were the charred vestiges of the boats and these four dead bodies.

the tree to get a little wood for cooking. The little bit of food that we people get is immediately burnt up with heavy logs; we do not swallow so much as you coarse, greedy folk. I had just driven the wedge safely in, and everything was going as I wished; but the cursed wedge was too smooth and suddenly sprang out, and the tree closed so quickly that I could not pull out my beautiful white beard; so now it is tight and I cannot get away, and the silly, sleek, milk-faced things laugh! Ugh! how odious you are!' The children tried very hard, but they

HAVE YOU EVER sailed in a longship? Not a stubby, robust knörr laden with trade goods and wallowing like a packhorse across the sea, but a sleek, deathly quick, terror-stirring thing – a dragon ship. Have you ever stood at the bow with the salt wind whipping your hair as Rán’s white-haired daughters cream beneath the beast’s strong, curving chest? Have you travelled the whale road with wind-burnt warriors whose rare skill with axe and sword is a gift from mighty Óðin, Lord of War? Men whose death work feeds the wolf and the eagle and the raven? I have done all this. It has been my life and though it would make those skirt-wearing White Christ followers sick with disgust (and fear, I shouldn’t wonder) I have been happy with my lot. For some men are born closer to the gods than others. By the well of Urd, beneath one of the roots of the great life tree Yggdrasil, the Norns, those sisters of fate, of present and future, take the threads of men’s lives and weave them into patterns full of pain and suffering, glory and riches, and death. And their ancient fingers must have tired at the spinning of my life.

The third day one of the messengers came back, and said, ‘I have travelled two days without hearing of any other names; but yesterday, as I was climbing a high hill, among the trees of the forest where the fox and the hare bid each other good night, I saw a little hut; and before the hut burnt a fire; and round about the fire a funny little dwarf was dancing upon one leg, and singing: “Merrily the feast I’ll make. Today I’ll brew, tomorrow bake; Merrily I’ll dance and sing, For next day will a stranger bring. Little does my lady dream Rumpelstiltskin is my name!

In our hands we hold the shadow of our hands. The night is kind―the others do not see us holding our shadow. We reinforce the night. We watch ourselves. So we think better of others. The sea still seeks our eyes and we are not there. A young girl buttons up her love in her breast and we look away smiling at the great distance. Perhaps high up, in the starlight, a skylight opens up that looks out on the sea, the olive trees and the burnt houses― We listen to the butterfly gyrating in the glass of All Soul’s Day, and the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee- grinder.

Thomas preferred their supernatural figure Nanabozho, who fooled ducks, got angry at his own butt and burnt it off, created a shit mountain to climb down when stuck high in a tree, had a wolf for his nephew, and no conscience at any time, who painted the kingfisher lovely colors and by trickery fed his children when they starved, who threw his penis over his shoulder and his balls to the west, who changed himself to a stump and made his penis look like a branch where the kingfisher perched, who killed a god by shooting its shadow, and created everything useful and much that was essential, like laughter.

Sunk for a long time in profound thoughts as to the value of obscurity, and the delight of having no name, but being like a wave which returns to the deep body of the sea; thinking how obscurity rids the mind of the irk of envy and spite; how it sets running in the veins the free waters of generosity and magnanimity; and allows giving and taking without thanks offered or praise given; which must have been the way of all great poets, he supposed (though his knowledge of Greek was not enough to bear him out), for, he thought, Shakespeare must have written like that, and the church builders built like that, anonymously, needing no thanking or naming, but only their work in the daytime and a little ale perhaps at night-'What an admirable life this is,' he thought, stretching his limbs out under the oak tree. 'And why not enjoy it this very moment?' The thought struck him like a bullet. Ambition dropped like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected love, and of vanity rebuked, and all the other stings and pricks which the nettle-bed of life had burnt upon him when ambitious of fame, but could no longer inflict upon once careless of glory, he opened his eyes, which had been wide open all the time, but had seen only thoughts, and saw, lying in the hollow beneath him, his house.

To them all, especially the humorless book Elnath and Vernon had left, Thomas preferred their supernatural figure Nanabozho, who fooled ducks, got angry at his own butt and burnt it off, created a shit mountain to climb down when stuck high in a tree, had a wolf for his nephew, and no conscience at any time, who painted the kingfisher lovely colors and by trickery fed his children when they starved, who threw his penis over his shoulder and his balls to the west, who changed himself to a stump and made his penis look like a branch where the kingfisher perched, who killed a god by shooting its shadow, and created everything useful and much that was essential, like laughter.

That peculiar feeling—it was only a feeling, you couldn’t describe it as an activity—that we used to call “Church.” The sweet corpsy smell, the rustle of Sunday dresses, the wheeze of the organ and the roaring voices, the spot of light from the hole in the window creeping slowly up the nave. In some way the grown-ups could put it across that this extraordinary performance was necessary. You took it for granted, just as you took the Bible, which you got in big doses in those days. There were texts on every wall and you knew whole chapters of the O.T. by heart. Even now my head’s stuffed full of bits out of the Bible. And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord. And Asher abode in his breaches. Followed them from Dan until thou come unto Beersheba. Smote him under the fifth rib, so that he died. You never understood it, you didn’t try to or want to, it was just a kind of medicine, a queer-tasting stuff that you had to swallow and knew to be in some way necessary. An extraordinary rigmarole about people with names like Shimei and Nebuchadnezzar and Ahithophel and Hash-badada; people with long stiff garments and Assyrian beards, riding up and down on camels among temples and cedar trees and doing extraordinary things. Sacrificing burnt offerings, walking about in fiery furnaces, getting nailed on crosses, getting swallowed by whales. And all mixed up with the sweet graveyard smell and the serge dresses and the wheeze of the organ.

Classical Sanskrit prose writers made very long sentences like this: "Lost in the forest and in thought, bent upon death and at the root of a tree, fallen upon calamity and her nurse's bosom, parted from her husband and happiness, burnt with the fierce sunshine and the woes of widowhood, her mouth closed with silence as well as by her hand, held fast by her companions as well as by grief, I saw her with her kindred and her graces all gone, her ears and her soul left bare, her ornaments and her aims abandoned, her bracelets and her hopes broken, her companions and the needle-like grass-spears clinging round her feet, her eyes and her beloved fixed within her bosom, her sighs and her hair long, her limbs and her merits exhausted, her aged attendants and her streams of tears falling down at her feet...." and it goes on.

Which got Thomas thinking. What religious book was any better? The Holy Bible, full of power and poetry, was also filled with tall tales. Thomas had found them enthralling, but in the end they were all just stories, less important than the Sky Woman story, the manidoog at creation, the Nanabozho stories. To them all, especially the humorless book Elnath and Vernon had left, Thomas preferred their supernatural figure Nanabozho, who fooled ducks, got angry at his own butt and burnt it off, created a shit mountain to climb down when stuck high in a tree, had a wolf for his nephew, and no conscience at any time, who painted the kingfisher lovely colors and by trickery fed his children when they starved, who threw his penis over his shoulder and his balls to the west, who changed himself to a stump and made his penis look like a branch where the kingfisher perched, who killed a god by shooting its shadow, and created everything useful and much that was essential, like laughter.

When was it that first I heard of the grass harp? Long before the autumn we lived in the China tree; an earlier autumn, then; and of course it was Dolly who told me, no one else would have known to call it that, a grass harp. . . If on leaving town you take the church road you soon will pass a glaring hill of bonewhite slabs and brown burnt flowers: this is the Baptist cemetery. . . below the hill grows a field of high Indian grass that changes color with the seasons: go to see it in the fall, late September, when it has gone red as sunset, when scarlet shadows light firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves sighing human music, a harp of voices. . . It must have been on one of those September days when we were there in the woods gathering roots that Dolly said: Do you hear? that is the grass harp, always telling a story -- it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, of all the people who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours, too.

A sudden wind rustled through the birches; a gust of yellow leaves came storming down. I took a sip of my drink. If I had grown up in that house I couldn’t have loved it more, couldn’t have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon, and the strip of highway visible—just barely—in the hills, beyond the trees. The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood: just as Hampden, in subsequent years, would always present itself immediately to my imagination in a confused whirl of white and green and red, so the country house first appeared as a glorious blur of watercolors, of ivory and lapis blue, chestnut and burnt orange and gold, separating only gradually into the boundaries of remembered objects: the house, the sky, the maple trees. But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe.

THE sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually. As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow, spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp reused it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold. The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue fingerprint of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

And now, for the first time, the Lion was quite silent. He was going to and fro among the animals. And every now and then he would go up to two of them (always two at a time) and touch their noses with his. He would touch two beavers among all the beavers, two leopards among all the leopards, one stag and one deer among all the deer, and leave the rest. Some sorts of animal he passed over altogether. But the pairs which he had touched instantly left their own kinds and followed him. At last he stood still and all the creatures whom he had touched came and stood in a wide circle around him. The others whom he had not touched began to wander away. Their noises faded gradually into the distance. The chosen beasts who remained were now utterly silent, all with their eyes fixed intently upon the Lion. The cat-like ones gave an occasional twitch of the tail but otherwise all were still. For the first time that day there was complete silence, except for the noise of running water. Digory’s heart beat wildly; he knew something very solemn was going to be done. He had not forgotten about his Mother, but he knew jolly well that, even for her, he couldn’t interrupt a thing like this. The Lion, whose eyes never blinked, stared at the animals as hard as if he was going to burn them up with his mere stare. And gradually a change came over them. The smaller ones—the rabbits, moles, and such-like—grew a good deal larger. The very big ones—you noticed it most with the elephants—grew a little smaller. Many animals sat up on their hind legs. Most put their heads on one side as if they were trying very hard to understand. The Lion opened his mouth, but no sound came from it; he was breathing out, a long, warm breath; it seemed to sway all the beasts as the wind sways a line of trees. Far overhead from beyond the veil of blue sky which hid them the stars sang again; a pure, cold, difficult music. Then there came a swift flash like fire (but it burnt nobody) either from the sky or from the Lion itself, and every drop of blood tingled in the children’s bodies, and the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.

I doubt; Therefore, I think Therefore, I am. I see; I take in the colours around me. The patterns, the lights, the rainbows. I see the night and the stars that glow. I dream; Therefore, I think. Therefore, I am. I smell; The perfumes, the roses. The stench, the rotten and the putrid. The aromas and delicacies; Cooking. I inhale; The green, the forest, the trees. Therefore, I think. Therefore, I am. I hear; The noises. The people, the cheer. The wails, the screams, the tears. The rejoicing. The laughter, and happiness. I listen; Therefore, I think. Therefore, I am. I taste; The sweetness, the fire. The treats, and savoury delights. The burnt, the spoilt and the tasteless. The sourness and the bitterness. I eat; Therefore, I think. Therefore, I am. I speak; Short messages. Long speeches. Quiet whispers. Bellowing noises. I scream; Therefore, I think, Therefore, I am. I feel; The despair. The anguish, the fear. The pricks, the cuts, the injuries. The joy. The pride. The seething. The envy, greed, and jealousy. The cold, the heat and the shivering. The pain, the sickness, the ageing. I die; Therefore, I lived. Therefore, I was.

Sunk for a long time in profound thoughts as to the value of obscurity, and the delight of having no name, but being like a wave which returns to the deep body of the sea; thinking how obscurity rids the mind of the irk of envy and spite; how it sets running in the veins the free waters of generosity and magnanimity; and allows giving and taking without thanks offered or praise given; which must have been the way of all great poets, he supposed (though his knowledge of Greek was not enough to bear him out), for, he thought, Shakespeare must have written like that, and the church builders built like that, anonymously, needing no thanking or naming, but only their work in the daytime and a little ale perhaps at night-'What an admirable life this is,' he thought, stretching his limbs out under the oak tree. 'And why not enjoy it this very moment?' The thought struck him like a bullet. Ambition dropped like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected love, and of vanity rebuked, and all the other stings and pricks which the nettle-bed of life had burnt upon him when ambitious of fame, but could no longer inflict upon one careless of glory, he opened his eyes, which had been wide open all the time, but had seen only thoughts, and saw, lying in the hollow beneath him, his house.

In the water-thickets, the path wound tortuously between umber iron-bogs, albescent quicksands of aluminum and magnesium oxides, and sumps of cuprous blue or permanganate mauve fed by slow, gelid streams and fringed by silver reeds and tall black grasses. The twisted, smooth-barked boles of the trees were yellow-ochre and burnt orange; through their tightly woven foliage filtered a gloomy, tinted light. At their roots grew great clumps of multifaceted translucent crystal like alien fungi. Charcoal grey frogs with viridescent eyes croaked as the column floundered between the pools. Beneath the greasy surface of the water unidentifiable reptiles moved slowly and sinuously. Dragonflies whose webby wings spanned a foot or more hummed and hovered between the sedges: their long, wicked bodies glittered bold green and ultramarine; they took their prey on the wing, pouncing with an audible snap of jaws on whining, ephemeral mosquitoes and fluttering moths of april blue and chevrolet cerise. Over everything hung the heavy, oppressive stench of rotting metal. After an hour, Cromis’ mouth was coated with a bitter deposit, and he tasted acids. He found it difficult to speak. While his horse stumbled and slithered beneath him, he gazed about in wonder, and poetry moved in his skull, swift as the jewelled mosquito-hawks over a dark slow current of ancient decay.

If I had grown up in that house I couldn’t have loved it more, couldn’t have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon, and the strip of highway visible—just barely—in the hills, beyond the trees. The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood: just as Hampden, in subsequent years, would always present itself immediately to my imagination in a confused whirl of white and green and red, so the country house first appeared as a glorious blur of watercolors, of ivory and lapis blue, chestnut and burnt orange and gold, separating only gradually into the boundaries of remembered objects: the house, the sky, the maple trees. But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe. It was getting dark; soon it would be time for dinner. I finished my drink in a swallow. The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture; of living there with Charles and Camilla and Henry and Francis and maybe even Bunny; of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college; of everything remaining exactly as it was, that instant—the idea was so truly heavenly that I’m not sure I thought, even then, it could ever really happen, but I like to believe I did.

Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilization is burnt out. The sky is dark as polished whalebone. But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir of some sort--sparrows on plane trees somewhere chirping. There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening of the sky; some sort of renewal. Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of March, January, or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again. 'And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!' The waves broke on the shore.

It was true what Doc had said, that Christmas succeeds Christmas rather than the days it follows. That had become apparent to Smoky in the last few days. Not because of the repeated ritual, the tree sledded home, the antique ornaments lovingly brought out, the Druid greenery hung on the lintels. It was only since last Christmas that all that had become imbued for him with dense emotion, an emotion having nothing to do with Yuletide, a day which for him as a child had nothing like the fascination of Hallowe'en, when he went masked and recognizable (pirate, clown) in the burnt and smoky night. Yet he saw that it was an emotion that would cover him now, as with snow, each time the season came. She was the cause, not he to whom he wrote. "Any," he began again, "my desires this year are a little clouded. I would like one of those instruments you use to sharpen the blades of an old-fashioned lawn mower. I would like the missing volume of Gibbon (Vol. II) which somebody's apparently taken out to use as a doorstop or something and lost." He thought of listing publisher and date, but a feeling of futility and silence came over him, drifting deep. "Santa," he wrote, "I would like to be one person only, not a whole crowd of them, half of them always trying to turn their backs and run whenever somebody" - Sophie, he meant, Alice, Cloud, Doc, Mother; Alice most of all - "looks at me. I want to be brave and honest and shoulder my burdens. I don't want to leave myself out while a bunch of slyboots figments do my living for me." He stopped, seeing he was growing unintelligible. He hesitated over the complimentary close; he thought of using "Yours as ever," but thought that might sound ironic or sneering, and at last wrote only "Yours &c.," as his father always had, which then seemed ambiguous and cool; what the hell anyway; and he signed it: Evan. S. Barnable.

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually. As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woolen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold. The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

Nevertheless, it would be prudent to remain concerned. For, like death, IT would come: Armageddon. There would be-without exaggeration-a series of catastrophes. As a consequence of the evil in man...-no mere virus, however virulent, was even a burnt match for our madness, our unconcern, our cruelty-...there would arise a race of champions, predators of humans: namely earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, tornados, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts-the magnificent seven. Floods, winds, fires, slides. The classical elements, only angry. Oceans would warm, the sky boil and burn, the ice cap melt, the seas rise. Rogue nations, like kids killing kids at their grammar school, would fire atomic-hydrogen-neutron bombs at one another. Smallpox would revive, or out of the African jungle would slide a virus no one understood. Though reptilian only in spirit, the disease would make us shed our skins like snakes and, naked to the nerves, we'd expire in a froth of red spit. Markets worldwide would crash as reckless cars on a speedway do, striking the wall and rebounding into one another, hurling pieces of themselves at the spectators in the stands. With money worthless-that last faith lost-the multitude would riot, race against race at first, God against God, the gots against the gimmes. Insects hardened by generations of chemicals would consume our food, weeds smother our fields, fire ants, killer bees sting us while we're fleeing into refuge water, where, thrashing we would drown, our pride a sodden wafer. Pestilence. War. Famine. A cataclysm of one kind or another-coming-making millions of migrants. Wearing out the roads. Foraging in the fields. Looting the villages. Raping boys and women. There'd be no tent cities, no Red Cross lunches, hay drops. Deserts would appear as suddenly as patches of crusty skin. Only the sun would feel their itch. Floods would sweep suddenly over all those newly arid lands as if invited by the beach. Forest fires would burn, like those in coal mines, for years, uttering smoke, making soot for speech, blackening every tree leaf ahead of their actual charring. Volcanoes would erupt in series, and mountains melt as though made of rock candy till the cities beneath them were caught inside the lava flow where they would appear to later eyes, if there were any eyes after, like peanuts in brittle. May earthquakes jelly the earth, Professor Skizzen hotly whispered. Let glaciers advance like motorboats, he bellowed, threatening a book with his fist. These convulsions would be a sign the parasites had killed their host, evils having eaten all they could; we'd hear a groan that was the going of the Holy Ghost; we'd see the last of life pissed away like beer from a carouse; we'd feel a shudder move deeply through this universe of dirt, rock, water, ice, and air, because after its long illness the earth would have finally died, its engine out of oil, its sky of light, winds unable to catch a breath, oceans only acid; we'd be witnessing a world that's come to pieces bleeding searing steam from its many wounds; we'd hear it rattling its atoms around like dice in a cup before spilling randomly out through a split in the stratosphere, night and silence its place-well-not of rest-of disappearance. My wish be willed, he thought. Then this will be done, he whispered so no God could hear him. That justice may be served, he said to the four winds that raged in the corners of his attic.

Finn slipped an arm around her waist and squeezed. "We've got to keep them, Callie. I'm already attached to the critters." "We talkin' about Angel and Pistol or the kids?" "The whole lot of them. Verdie included. A ranch is just dirt without kids and animals even if they knock over Christmas trees and fall in mud and cow shit. But it needs a good woman, too." "You callin' me a good woman, or are you going to put an ad in the newspaper for one?" she asked.

Circulation of Song after Rumi Once again I'm climbing the mountain Circle on circle like a winding rose Below me the mountains fall away like rose-petals I wish to be at the centre of the mystic rose Where I shall meet Him He shall greet me: Beloved! So long in coming -- He shall be the lonely pine tree On the flattened promontory And I, the spider clinging to Him by a mere thread, against the sun and the wind Each dawn the sunrise tinting gold the burnt Sienna houses Each dusk the alpine rosy glow on the mountain Each afternoon such darkness in the glen Fold on fold in a foliage all the shades of green: They have crept into my dream He is the air I breathe Purest mountain-air: I'm cleaned He is the lark's descant And in the evening, the nightingale He is the star's ascent and the moon's cloud-hiding He is all the circles and in this circulation of song: I read you / you read me circulating In my blood from head to heel He is the fruit of my unfulfilled life The peach pooped with juice And running with the Argentine waters, the pear In the Chinese nectarine flecked like a child's cheek with red And in the sour loquat and the sweet cherry In the fragrance of the jasmine of India And the Shiraz rose that makes the bee mad for them In the grape that becomes wine to suffuse my cheek In the olive that becomes a lamp to shine through my cupped hands In these and not only in these does He circulate Pouring from the sun at 5' o'clock as if at noon Dancing on the lake, pure honey And all the chatter over tea! But in the quiet you find me out You find me out Plucking myself from Me So that I become you The breath in my nape-nerve Sweetly saying: I bow to the God in you

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.

Until this night, this awful night, he’d had a little joke about himself. He didn’t know who he was, or where he’d come from, but he knew what he liked. And what he liked was all around him-the flower stands on the corners, the big steel and glass buildings filled with milky evening light, the trees, of course, the grass beneath his feet. And the telephones-it didn’t matter. He liked to figure them out, master them, then crush them into tiny hard multicolored balls which he could then juggle or toss through plate glass windows when nobody was about. He liked piano music, the motion pictures, and the poems he found in books. He also liked the automobiles that burnt oil from the earth like lamps. And the great jet planes that flew on the same scientific principles, above the clouds. He always stopped and listened to the people laughing and talking up there when one of the people laughing and talking up there when one of the planes flew overhead. Driving was an extraordinary pleasure. In a silver Mercedes-Benz, he had sped on smooth empty roads from Rome to Florence to Venice in one night. He also liked television-the entire electric process of it, with tiny bits of lights. How soothing it was to have the company of the television, the intimacy with so many artfully painted faces speaking to you in friendship from the glowing screen. The rock and roll, he liked that too. He liked the music. He liked the Vampire Lestat singing “Requiem for the Marquise”. He didn’t pay attention to the words much. It was the melancholy and the dark undertone of drums and cymbals. Made him want to dance. He liked the giant yellow machines that dug into the earth late at night in the big cities with men in uniforms, crawling all over them; he liked the double-decker buses of London, and the people-the clever mortals everywhere-he liked, too, of course. He liked walking in Damascus during the evening, and seeing in sudden flashes of disconnected memory the city of the ancients. Romans, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians in these streets. He liked the libraries where he could find photographs of ancient monuments in big smooth good-smelling books. He took his own photographs of the new cities around him and sometimes he could put images on those pictures which came from his thoughts. For example, in his photograph of Rome there were Roman people in tunics and sandals superimposed upon the modern versions in their thick ungraceful clothes. Oh, yes, much to like around him always-the violin music of Bartók, little girls in snow white dresses coming out of the church at midnight having sung at the Christmas mass. He liked the blood of his victims too, of course. That went without saying. It was no part of his little joke. Death was not funny to him. He stalked his prey in silence; he didn’t want to know his victims. All a mortal had to do was speak to him and he was turned away. Not proper, as he saw it, to talk to these sweet, soft-eyed things and then gobble their blood, break their bones and lick the marrow, squeeze their limbs to dripping pulp. And that was the way he feasted now, so violently. He felt no great need for blood anymore; but he wanted it. And the desire overpowered him in all its ravening purity, quite apart from the thirst. He could have feasted upon three or four mortals a night.

The pollution seems like a curse to him, the curse of the million-year-old fossils, excavated out of seams deep in the ground and burnt as fuel. The spirits of the ancient trees and animals, protesting at being dug out of their resting places with lung-blackening particulates that poison the air.

Another regular spring occurrence was the burning of the prairies. In April 1828 Taliaferro reported “Extensive fires in every direction. The Pra[i]ries are and will be burnt over—much damage to the under growth & trees. The fact of the origin of the extensive plains in the north and west may be ascribed to the yearly inroads made by fire on the wood Lands.” The previous year he had noted that native people employed fires to aid in hunting, writing, “The moment they Start upon their Winter or fall hunt, they set fire to the Prairies—which starts off the Game in every direction, to avoid otherwise certain destruction.

Granddad always said the best things about fishing were beyond the senses. He said the mountains, rivers and fish were the center of why you were there, but not the heart, that the heart was in those pure moments in and around the fishing, or rather what was on the other side of those moments that can only be felt, not told because words were not up to the job. That’s what hooked your soul.

Sullivan and his army arrived at Genesee river, where they destroyed every article of the food kind that they could lay their hands on. A part of our corn they burnt, and threw the remainder into the river. They burnt our houses, killed what few cattle and horses they could find, destroyed our fruit trees, and left nothing but the bare soil and timber.

There was an extravagant winter storm outside. The tinfoil sky flashed beyond the window, rattling in the frame, and once or twice a white fork like a vein. Through the opposite window, which looked out onto the other side of the house, the light was pale, picking out where the wall was still broken from the last big storm, with the scorched telegraph pole and the burnt tree.

I never thought I’d envy you,” she said. “Never in a million years. You’re so composed, so serious. So cold.” His hands balled into fists. How dare she? How dare she burst into his room and kiss him and dive into a river and invade his dreams and make him go shopping and throw herself headlong into danger and lean back against a pear tree in a dress the exact color of her hair kissed by fading sunlight? How dare she make him forget? Damn it all. Damn her for making him care. “I want to go cold,” she said. “All these feelings—they’re like flames inside me. I’m tired of getting burnt. I don’t want them anymore. I want to put out the fire and just go cold. I never imagined I’d envy you, but today …” Her voice wavered. “Today, I do.

When you move to another country, the only thing that stays in your memory is your house, the tree next to your house, and the bench," Igor tells me, as a mortified Daniela sighs. She had warned me that her father liked to speak in metaphors. "He has a metaphor for every situation in life," she says as he smiles and ignores her. On that trip in 1995, he founds out that the house was gone, the tree cut down and the bench burnt. "The only thing in your memory and now it's nothing. Even after only four years, I realized that Israel is my home." Their feelings track with what some scholars of diaspora and return immigration say about the relegation of the country of origin into the realm of nostalgia and memory after just a few years in the new homeland.

A sudden wind rustled through the birches; a gust of yellow leaves came storming down. I took a sip of my drink. If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon, and the strip of highway visible—just barely—in the hills, beyond the trees. The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood: just as Hampden, in subsequent years, would always present itself immediately in my imagination in a confused whirl of white and green and red, so the country house first appeared as a glorious blur of watercolors, of ivory and lapis blue, chestnut and burnt orange and gold, separating only gradually into the boundaries of remembered objects: the house, the sky, the maple trees. But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe.

No one loved him. His head burnt up lies and licentiousness in twilit rooms. The blue rustling of a woman's dress turned him into a pillar of stone and in the doorway stood the night-dark figure of his mother. Over his head reared the shadow of Evil. O, you nights and stars. At evening he walked by the mountain with the cripple; upon the icy summit lay the roseate gleam of sunset and his heart rang quietly in the twilight. The stormy pines sank heavily over them and the red huntsman stepped out of the forest. When night fell, his heart broke like crystal and darkness beat his brow. Beneath bare oak trees with icy hands he strangled a wild cat. At the right hand appeared the white form of an angel lamenting, and in the darkness the cripple's shadow grew. But he took up a stone and threw it at the man that he fled howling, and sighing the gentle countenance of the angel vanished in the shadow of the tree. Long he lay on the stony field and gazed astonished at the golden canopy of the stars. Pursued by bats he plunged into darkness. Breathless he stepped into the derelict house. In the courtyard he, a wild animal, drank from the blue waters of the well till he felt the chill. Feverish he sat on the icy steps, raging against God that he was dying. O, the grey countenance of terror, as he raised his round eyes over the slit throat of a dove. Hastening over strange stairways he encountered a Jewish girl and clutched at her black hair and he took her mouth. A hostile force followed him through gloomy streets and an iron clash rent his ear. By autumnal walls he, now an altar boy, quietly followed the silent priest; under arid trees in ecstasy he breathed the scarlet of that venerated garment. O, the derelict disc of the sun. Sweet torments consumed his flesh. In a deserted half-way house a bleeding figure appeared to him rigid with refuse. He loved the sublime works of stone more deeply; the tower which assails the starry blue firmament with fiendish grimace; the cool grave in which Man's fiery heart is preserved. Woe to the unspeakable guilt which declares all this. But since he walked down along the autumn river pondering glowing things beneath bare trees, a flaming demon in a mantle of hair appeared to him, his sister. On awakening, the stars about their heads went out.

Rapture of the rivers, banks of thicket and fragrance, sudden boulders, burnt-out trees, and land, ample and lonely... [from Isla Negra]

Thus, at the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining 'The Oak Tree', which was his boyish dream and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it.

Curse you then. However beat and done with it all I am, I must haul myself up, and find the particular coat that belongs to me; must push my arms into the sleeves; must muffle myself up against the night air and be off. I, I, I, tired as I am, spent as I am, and almost worn out with all this rubbing of my nose along the surfaces of things, even I, an elderly man who is getting rather heavy and dislikes exertion, must take myself off and catch some last train. Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilization is burnt out. The sky is dark as polished whalebone. But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir of some sort—sparrows on plane tree somewhere chirping. There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening of the sky; some sort of renewal. Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of March, January, or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again. And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s, like Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! The waves broke on the shore.

There are serious doubts that Meghan saw any violence, not even the minor looting in a store near the ABC studio. In her absence the riots spread to Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards. After five days the curfew was lifted and they returned to Los Angeles. Meghan drove past burnt-out buildings, though no houses near her home were damaged. More than 20 years later Meghan recalled a different experience: ‘I remember the curfew and I remember rushing back home and on that drive home, seeing ash fall from the sky and smelling the smoke and seeing it billow out of buildings and seeing people run out of buildings carrying bags and looting.’22 She also saw ‘men in the back of a van just holding guns and rifles’. Equally memorable was a familiar tree outside her father’s home ‘completely charred. And those memories don’t go away.’23

He could not swear, ride a horse, wear a ring (unless open and hollow) or any knot at his belt or on his head, touch a dog, a horse, a she-goat, fermented flour or raw flesh, ivy or broad beans, or pass under the shoots of vines stretched overhead, stay away from home three nights in a row, or leave the house without his headdress, which was cut from the white skin of a victim sacrificed to Jupiter and topped by an olive wood wand enveloped in woollen thread (filum), to which the flamen perhaps owed his name. He must never go where a dead person was being burnt, or touch a corpse. The feet of his bed had to be smeared with mud, and no one but he had the right to sleep in it. His nail clippings and hair cuttings had to be buried at the foot of a 'lucky' tree (dear to the gods, and fruit-bearing). A thick woollen cloak (laena) woven by his wife distinguished him when he sacrificed. If he lost his wife (the flaminica), he lost his priesthood, which was matrimonial.

I wonder for the first time, with a sharply caught breath, if I did love Peeta then. If the grief that poured out of me during his Games had been the outcry of a breaking heart, rendered powerless to prevent her beloved's pain. If I agreed to his bargain not simply to save my family but because my heart desperately wanted to live in the glow of his. If the kiss I clumsily pressed to his cheek after the Reaping – the kiss that sent me sprinting back to the woods to burrow among the roots of an old tree and cry myself sick – had nothing to do with debt or gratitude and everything to do with love and loss. I wonder if I've loved him since that moment under the apple tree when a boy with a bruised cheek threw burnt bread and life to a dying girl. A girl who grew and thrived because of that boy and that bread, who wished for five years that she could have soothed his cruel bruise with a kiss. Was that why I kissed him after the Reaping? Had I been carrying that clumsy kiss inside of me all that while? Had Peeta brought life to my heart as well as my body that hopeless day in the rain? Have I ever not loved him? I shake away these troubling thoughts with a shiver that reaches to my bones. My love for Peeta is fresh and fragile as a hatchling, I'm sure of it; kindled by his compassion and coaxed into its present brave blaze by the tenderness he shows me at every moment. It's foolish and futile to wonder whether I might have loved him before coming here, let alone when that love might first have flickered into existence. I am a wild creature, devoted to the boy who tamed me with warmth and food and gentle touches, and I accordingly express that love with woodland gifts. Like a courting bird in an old tale, bringing her sweetheart all manner of odd little presents to feather his nest.

The old sable house sat nestled in maple, oak, and sweet gum trees dripping with her Autumnal hues. Agatha might prefer black, but she claimed it was because her trees demanded all the luxurious brilliance. This time, her lips tipped up as the chill breeze brushed her cheek and the trees’ branches swayed in its caress. She had to admit, her little corner of the woods was more devoid of light than most, even in midday—like someone had taken a burnt amber brush and painted Agatha’s abyss in hues of warm gloom. But that was precisely how she liked it. The barest tendrils of smoke rose from her chimney—curious, considering the flames had been strong and of magical nature when she’d left. In her short absence, fog had also begun crawling in, curling up to her pumpkins and nestling amongst the leaves. Sister Autumn’s Season had truly arrived.

We danced for a long time. The trees towered into the sky, the moon hid behind the leaves and the sky seemed like a forest burnt in a fire – dark with its empire of smoldering stars. It was charming. I felt I was dancing with the presiding deity of darkness.

Soft washed river sand is still the best toy ever invented for children. It serves countless other purposes too. It cannot be beat for scouring dirty pots and pans and for cleaning wooden floors. Mixed with burnt powdered clam shells, you have the finest cement. Take a smooth slab of wood and cover it with tree or bush resin, sprinkle different colored river sand on the sticky resin to form colored pictures. River sand laid under animal traps prevent them from freezing down even in the coldest weather. River sand makes fine sidewalks and good insulation under buildings.

Resilience of a tree When young, it was bent and deformed for elegance In youth, it was cut into pieces for prosperity And in its prime, it was burnt to slay the frost Yet, it stands in perfection as an exemplar For the humanity to behold and contemplate The resilience of a tree.

We never know when the hardest moment will strike in our life. Before it strikes, life is full of color. When it hits, we fall like a burnt down tree. The best thing in life is love. The hardest thing in life is to live.

Most urban cherries had been wiped out in Japan during the war, leaving the cities bereft of colour and character. The revival began on a small scale as early as 1948, just three years after Japan’s surrender, when 1,250 trees were planted in the war-burnt fields of Tokyo’s spacious Ueno Park, one of the capital’s first public parks. This had been a popular cherry-viewing, or hanami, site since the early seventeenth century, so it was natural that the government wanted to re-establish this tradition.

I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I carried off prisoners, possessions, oxen and cattle from them. I captured many troops alive: I cut off of others their noses, ears and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city. I burnt their adolescent boys and girls. I razed, destroyed, burnt and consumed the city.

I have just taught Soli to make borscht! Yesterday I bought beets with big, glossy leaves still caked with wet soil. Naneh washed them in the tub until her arthritis flared, but she's promised to make dolmas with the leaves. After we closed Soli tucked the beets under coals and roasted them all night. When I woke up I smelled caramel and winter and smoke. It made me so hungry, I peeled a hot, slippery one for breakfast and licked the ashes and charred juices off with my burnt fingertips. Noor, bruised from betrayal, remembered borscht, remembered stirring sour cream into the broth and making pink paisley shapes with the tip of her spoon, always surprised by the first tangy taste, each time anticipating sweetness. Her mother had called it a soup for the brokenhearted. She marveled at her father's enthusiasm for borscht, when for thirty years each day had been a struggle. Another man would've untied his apron long ago and left the country for a softer life, but not Zod. He would not walk away from his courtyard with its turquoise fountain and rose-colored tables beneath the shade of giant mulberry trees, nor the gazebo, now overgrown with jasmine, where an orchestra once played and his wife sang into the summer nights.

Ordinary days deliver joy easily again & I can’t take it. If I could tell you how her eyes laughed or describe the rage of her suffering, I must admit that lately my memories are sometimes like a color warping in my blue mind. Metal abandoned in rain. My mother will not move. Which is to say that sometimes the true color of her casket jumps from my head like something burnt down in the genesis of a struck flame. Which is to say that I miss the mind I had when I had my mother. I own what is yet. Which means I am already holding my own absence in faith. I still carry a faded slip of paper where she once wrote a word with a pencil & crossed it out. From tree to tree, around her grave I have walked, & turned back if only to remind myself that there are some kinds of peace, which will not be moved. How awful to have such wonder. The final way wonder itself opened beneath my mother’s face at the last moment. As if she was a small girl kneeling in a puddle & looking at her face for the first time, her fingers gripping the loud, wet rim of the universe.

I consider myself a student of colours and shades and hues and tints. Crimson lake, burnt umber, ultramarine … I was too clumsy as a child to paint with my moistened brush the scenery that I would have liked to bring into being. I preferred to leave untouched in their white metallic surroundings my rows of powdery rectangles of water-colours, to read aloud one after another of the tiny printed names of the coloured rectangles, and to let each colour seem to soak into each word of its name or even into each syllable of each word of each name so that I could afterwards call to mind an exact shade or hue from an image of no more than black letters on a white ground. Deep cadmium, geranium lake, imperial purple, parchment … after the last of our children had found employment and had moved out of our home, my wife and I were able to buy for ourselves things that had previously been beyond our means. I bought my first such luxury, as I called it, in a shop selling artists’ supplies. I bought there a complete set of coloured pencils made by a famous maker of pencils in England: a hundred and twenty pencils, each stamped with gold lettering along its side and having at its end a perfectly tapered wick. The collection of pencils is behind me as I write these words. It rests near the jars of glass marbles and the kaleidoscope mentioned earlier. None of the pencils has ever been used in the way that most pencils are used, but I have sometimes used the many-striped collection in order to confirm my suspicion as a child that each of what I called my long-lost moods might be recollected and, perhaps, preserved if only I could look again at the precise shade or hue that had become connected with the mood – that had absorbed, as it were, or had been permeated with, one or more of the indefinable qualities that constitute what is called a mood or a state of feeling. During the weeks since I first wrote in the earlier pages of this report about the windows in the church of white stone, I have spent every day an increasing amount of time in moving my pencils to and fro among the hollow spaces allotted to them in their container. I seem to recall that I tried sometimes, many years ago, to move my glass marbles from place to place on the carpet near my desk with the vague hope that some or another chance arrangement of them would restore to me some previously irretrievable mood. The marbles, however, were too variously coloured, and each differed too markedly from the other. Their colours seemed to vie, to compete. Or, a single marble might suggest more than I was in search of: a whole afternoon in my childhood or a row of trees in a backyard when I had wanted back only a certain few moments when my face was brushed by a certain few leaves. Among the pencils are many differing only subtly from their neighbours. Six at least I might have called simply red if I had not learned long ago their true names. With these six, and with still others from each side of them, I often arrange one after another of many possible sequences, hoping to see in the conjectured space between some or another unlikely pair a certain tint that I have wanted for long to see.

I sat down. I cried, knowing that what I had wanted was a return to normal, but there would never be a return to normal. Papá was gone. In his place was this man whose cheekbones cut hard into his skin, whose burnt-dark color and malnutrition were still present even though he no longer lived in a jungle. This man who allowed me to hold his hand and sob onto his shoulder, even though it made him anxious to be so close, so near to anyone. I needed to learn how to live with this new man, to negotiate a relationship with his body that was not the body I knew.