Winter Landscapes Quotes

I prefer winter and fall, when you can feel the bone structure in the landscape---the lonliness of it---the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it---the whole story dosen't show.

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

How I used to love the dark, sad evenings of late autumn and winter, how eagerly I imbibed their moods of loneliness and melancholy when wrapped in my cloak I strode for half the night through rain and storm, through the leafless winter landscape, lonely enough then too, but full of deep joy, and full of poetry which later I wrote down by candlelight sitting on the edge of my bed!

his heart was afraid. As he looked up at the clouds or down at the precipice, he realised that this woman was the most important thing in his life; that she was the explanation, the sole reason for the existence of those rocks, that sky, that winter. If she were not there with him, it wouldn’t matter if all the angels of heaven came flying down to comfort him – Paradise would make no sense. ‘ I want to tell you that I love you,’ Brida said softly. ‘ Because you’ve shown me the joy of love.’ She felt full, complete, as if the whole landscape were seeping into her soul... and she was sure that, if she took a risk, she would experience love as never before.

The landscape is bathed in the honeyed light of morning. Sometimes the memory of winter comes again. And my days are colored reveries of you, my nights sensuous

There are riches enough for all of us, no matter our abilities or circumstances. It is only the inspiration that requires summoning.

They stay like this, in silence, both aware that they have created something together. Defiance. A pushing back of a darkness that no one has ever pushed at before. A wonderful, criminal liberty to love that which has been so viciously called unlovable.

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing that like being for the first time see, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells un-flamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.

The summer ended. Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Daily, blocks and blocks of children were spirited away. Grownups retreated from the streets, into the houses. Adolescents moved from the sidewalk to the stoop to the hallway to the stairs, and rooftops were abandoned. Such trees as there were allowed their leaves to fall - they fell unnoticed - seeming to promise, not without bitterness, to endure another year. At night, from a distance, the parks and playgrounds seemed inhabited by fireflies, and the night came sooner, inched in closer, fell with a greater weight. The sound of the alarm clock conquered the sound of the tambourine, the houses put on their winter faces. The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

Now is the time of fresh starts This is the season that makes everything new. There is a longstanding rumor that Spring is the time of renewal, but that's only if you ignore the depressing clutter and din of the season. All that flowering and budding and birthing--- the messy youthfulness of Spring actually verges on squalor. Spring is too busy, too full of itself, too much like a 20-year-old to be the best time for reflection, re-grouping, and starting fresh. For that you need December. You need to have lived through the mindless biological imperatives of your life (to bud, and flower, and show off) before you can see that a landscape of new fallen snow is THE REAL YOU. December has the clarity, the simplicity, and the silence you need for the best FRESH START of your life.

There is a heavy price to pay for writing a bad book.

As he looked out and saw the grey landscape through the gently falling snow, he could not help thinking how much better it would be if people could go to sleep like the fields; could be blanketed down under the snow, to wake with their hurts healed and their defeats forgotten.

It is easier to go into the battle in the midst of such beauties of nature than when surrounded by a dead and cold winter landscape. Somehow, it comes to one quite simply that one’s existence is part of an eternal circuit, and that the death of a single individual is no great matter.

And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marshes of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug in to unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future.

Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you are ready. It's a terror. It's a bareness of the soul. He hears the rustle of nuns. Here comes winter in the bone. We've set it loose on the land. There must be some song or poem, some folk magic we can use to ease this fear. Skelly Bone Pete. Here it is in the landscape and sky. We've set it loose. We've opened up the ground and here it is. He took Interstate 45 south. He didn't want them to kill Leon. He felt a saturating sense of death, a dread in the soft filling of his bones, the suckable part, approaching Galveston now.

On winter mornings the light spread like a watery broth over the landscape.

It’s amazing how quickly having someone telling you what you’re seeing replaces you actually seeing what you’re seeing.

If I told you that everything about you had been just made up by someone, that all of your thoughts, all of your memories, even the things you chose to say had been invented and that they weren’t real, that you weren’t real, would you believe me? I don’t think so.

The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape. ("The Triumph Of The Night")

There's a certain slant of light" There's a certain slant of light, On winter afternoons, That oppresses, like the weight Of cathedral tunes. Heavenly hurt it gives us; We can find no scar, But internal difference Where the meanings are. None may teach it anything, 'Tis the seal, despair,- An imperial affliction Sent us of the air. When it comes, the landscape listens, Shadows hold their breath; When it goes, 't is like the distance On the look of death.

Idaho is empty. He is an emptiness. Like the space you leave behind when you get out of a chair. It’s like after a loud noise, when all you hear is the sound of yourself listening. What is there is only was. That’s it. Idaho is was.

I have always hated the emptiness that winter brings, the blank landscape and the stark difference between sky and ground, the way it transforms trees into skeletons and the city into a wasteland. Maybe this winter I can be persuaded otherwise.

It's strange to sleep. Sleep is a mysterious thing even in the simplest of people. When you're sleepy, you seem to be getting sick, losing energy, losing clear thought, lying down out of weakness. Then you succumb to the weakness and what happens next resembles death. And then you dream. You abide in a world whose rules are hidden even from you - you who create it.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape--the loneliness of it--the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it--the whole story doesn't show.

Maybe I went a bit too far, but that’s what people want now. There’s an expectation that children be treated poorly in their literature. Everyone wants to see children treated badly. So that … well, so that when they triumph over evil we all feel lifted up. It’s inspirational.

Now I think of the starling flocks that move across the stripped winter landscape at home; how you'll hear and look up to this great rush of birds, lifting and diving and turning. I think of the ravens, afloat on the air streams. Of the crows, going home at the fade of light, hundreds on hundreds, flowing and flowing, the winter sky filled with their tide. Dark birds, ruffianly dark birds, stronger than birds of light and better survivors. They are the undervoice, scavenging life, living off gleanings. Uncivilised. Shameless. Outside the law. They allow the return of the soul.

Winter Landscape, with Rocks Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone, plunges headlong into that black pond where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind which hungers to haul the white reflection down. The austere sun descends above the fen, an orange cyclops-eye, scorning to look longer on this landscape of chagrin; feathered dark in thought, I stalk like a rook, brooding as the winter night comes on. Last summer's reeds are all engraved in ice as is your image in my eye; dry frost glazes the window of my hurt; what solace can be struck from rock to make heart's waste grow green again? Who'd walk in this bleak place? Sylvia Plath was one of the first and best of the modern confessional poets. She won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for her Collected Poems after committing suicide at the age of 31, something she seemed to have been predicting in her writing and practicing for in real life.

There wasn’t a cloud in the cobalt sky. Gone were the miseries of winter and the encumbered horrors of the recent past. Gone were the naked trees that looked like fingers on a skeleton. The landscape sprouted bits of greenery signaling the advance of spring and the dawning of a new season, year, life.

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons- That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes- Heavenly Hurt, it gives us- We can find no scar, But internal difference, Where the Meanings, are- None may teach-Any- 'Tis the Seal Despair- An imperial affliction Sent us of the air- When it comes, the Landscape listens- Shadows-hold their breath- When it goes.'tis like the Distance On the look of Death-

All those summer drives, no matter where I was going, to a person, a project, an adventure, or home, alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe. Sometimes I thought of my apartment in San Francisco as only a winter camp and home as the whole circuit around the West I travel a few times a year and myself as something of a nomad (nomads, contrary to current popular imagination, have fixed circuits and stable relationships to places; they are far from beign the drifters and dharma bums that the word nomad often connotes nowadays). This meant that it was all home, and certainly the intense emotion that, for example, the sequence of mesas alongside the highway for perhaps fifty miles west of Gallup, N.M., and a hundred miles east has the power even as I write to move me deeply, as do dozens of other places, and I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again. But if this was home, then I was both possessor of an enchanted vastness and profoundly alienated.

There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons – That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes – Heavenly Hurt, it gives us – We can find no scar, But internal difference – Where the Meanings, are – None may teach it – Any – 'Tis the seal Despair – An imperial affliction Sent us of the Air – When it comes, the Landscape listens – Shadows – hold their breath – When it goes, 'tis like the Distance On the look of Death –

That evening I glanced back at the TV as Bella poured half a bottle of the finest brandy into her bowl of cake batter, I waited for tinselly anticipation to land like snowflakes all around me, but I felt nothing. Even when she produced what she described as 'a winter landscape for European cheeses', sprigged with holly and a frosty snow scene, I failed to get my fix. 'Ooh, this is a juicy one,' she said, biting seductively at a maraschino cherry she'd earlier described as 'divinely kitsch'. She swallowed the cherry whole, giggled girlishly and raised a flute of champagne. 'Why have cava when Champagne is sooo much more bubbly? Cheers!' she said, taking a large sip of vintage Krug.

Apart from the peace and emptiness of the landscape, there is a special smell about winter in Provence which is accentuated by the wind and the clean, dry air. Walking in the hills, I was often able to smell a house before I could see it, because of the scent of woodsmoke coming from an invisible chimney. It is one of the most primitive smells in life, and consequently extinct in most cities, where fire regulations and interior decorators have combined to turn fireplaces into blocked-up holes or self-consciously lit "architectural features." The fireplace in Provence is still used - to cook on, to sit around, to warm the toes, and to please the eye - and fires are laid in the early morning and fed throughout the day with scrub oak from the Luberon or beech from the foothills of Mont Ventoux. Coming home with the dogs as dusk fell, I always stopped to look from the top of the valley at the long zigzag of smoke ribbons drifting up from the farms that are scattered along the Bonnieux road. It was a sight that made me think of warm kitchens and well-seasoned stews, and it never failed to make me ravenous.

Mossflower lay deep in the grip of midwinter beneath a sky of leaden gray that showed tinges of scarlet and orange on the horizon. A cold mantle of snow draped the landscape, covering the flatlands to the west. Snow was everywhere, filling ditches, drifting high against hedgerows, making paths invisible, smoothing the contours of earth in its white embrace. The gaunt, leafless ceiling of Mossflower Wood was penetrated by constant snowfall, which carpeted the sprawling woodland floor, building canopies on evergreen shrubs and bushes. Winter had muted the earth; the muffled stillness was broken only by a traveler’s paws.

The seventh guitar was a nervous person, because he was nearly blind. He’d been able to see reasonably well with an extremely thick pair of glasses, but he’d lost these six years ago and since then he’d lived in a confusing landscape distilled to pure color according to season—summer mostly green, winter mostly gray and white—in which blurred figures swam into view and then receded before he could figure out who they were.

I think of two landscapes- one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see-not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology… If you walk up, say, a dry arroyo in the Sonoran Desert you will feel a mounding and rolling of sand and silt beneath your foot that is distinctive. You will anticipate the crumbling of the sedimentary earth in the arroyo bank as your hand reaches out, and in that tangible evidence you will sense the history of water in the region. Perhaps a black-throated sparrow lands in a paloverde bush… the smell of the creosote bush….all elements of the land, and what I mean by “the landscape.” The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. Relationships in the exterior landscape include those that are named and discernible, such as the nitrogen cycle, or a vertical sequence of Ordovician limestone, and others that are uncodified or ineffable, such as winter light falling on a particular kind of granite, or the effect of humidity on the frequency of a blackpoll warbler’s burst of song….the shape and character of these relationships in a person’s thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature- the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes. Among the Navajo, the land is thought to exhibit sacred order…each individual undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape. To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health…Among the various sung ceremonies of this people-Enemyway, Coyoteway, Uglyway- there is one called Beautyway. It is, in part, a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe, that irreducible, holy complexity that manifests itself as all things changing through time (a Navajo definition of beauty).

Within the grip of winter, it is almost impossible to imagine the spring. The gray perished landscape is shorn of color. Only bleakness meets the eye; everything seems severe and edged. Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation; the cold is relenting; seeds are wakening up. Colors are beginning to imagine how they will return. Then, imperceptibly, somewhere one bug opens and the symphony of renewal is no longer reversible. From the black heart of winter a miraculous, breathing plenitude of color emerges. The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual slow beat always inching its way forward; change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unawares. It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it.

Here in the shadow of the firs lay everything the old house had spat out in the course of its life, everything worn out and unnecessary, everything not to be seen. In the darkening winter evening, this landscape was utterly abandoned, a territory that had no meaning for anyone but him. He found it beautiful.

In January in Northern Russia, everything vanishes beneath a deep blanket of whiteness. Rivers, fields, trees, roads, and houses disappear, and the landscape becomes a white sea of mounds and hollows. On days when the sky is gray, it is hard to see where earth merges with air. On brilliant days when the sky is a rich blue, the sunlight is blinding, as if millions of diamonds were scattered on the snow, refracting light. In Catherine's time, the log roads of summer were covered with a smooth coating of snow and ice that enabled the sledges to glide smoothly at startling speeds; on some days, her procession covered a hundred miles.

It’s my job really, to help you, my reader, in accepting things as real that aren’t. Most books try to get you to accept things that, at the very least, could be real – and that’s difficult enough, goodness knows – but here, in this book, nothing seems to be even trying to be real. Except, I would say, me. I’m here, I’m real. And to be honest, I’ve never been here before. I don’t know where I am, I don’t know what I’m doing. In some ways, I’m afraid this is the most real story I’ve ever written.

For a moment I am jealous: He has grown up here, fearless, happy. Perhaps he will never even know about the world on the other side of the fence, the real world. For him there will be no such thing. But there will also be no medicine for him when he is sick, and never enough food to go around, and winters so cold the mornings are like a punch in the gut. And someday-unless the resistance succeeds and takes the country back-the planes and the fires will find him. Someday the eye will turn in this direction, like a laser beam, consuming everything in its path. Someday all the Wilds will be razed, and we will be left with a concrete landscape, a land of pretty houses and trim gardens and planned parks and forests, and a world that works as smoothly as a clock, neatly wound: a world of metal and gears, and people going tick-tick-tick to their deaths.

Picture the Bay of Bengal as an expanse of tropical water: still and blue in the calm of the January winter, or raging and turbid with silt at the peak of the summer rains. Picture it in two dimensions on a map, overlaid with a web of shipping channels and telegraph cables and inscribed with lines of distance. Now imagine the sea as a mental map: as a family tree of cousins, uncles, sisters, sons, connected by letters and journeys and stories. Think of it as a sea of debt, bound by advances and loans and obligations. Picture the Bay of Bengal even where it is absent — deep in the Malaysian jungle, where Hindu shrines sprout from the landscape as if washed up by the sea, left behind.

Few things are harder to visualise than that a cold snowbound landscape, so marrow-chillingly quiet and lifeless, will, within mere months, be green and lush and warm, quivering with all manner of life, from birds warbling and flying through the trees to swarms of insects hanging in scattered clusters in the air. Nothing in the winter landscape presages the scent of sun-warmed heather and moss, trees bursting with sap and thawed lakes ready for spring and summer, nothing presages the feeling of freedom that can come over you when the only white that can be seen is the clouds gliding across the blue sky above the blue water of the rivers gently flowing down to the sea, the perfect, smooth, cool surface, broken now and then by rocks, rapids and bathing bodies. It is not there, it does not exist, everything is white and still, and if the silence is broken it is by a cold wind or a lone crow caw-cawing. But it is coming ... it is coming... One evening in March the snow turns to rain, and the piles of snow collapse. One morning in April there are buds on the trees, and there is a trace of green in the yellow grass. Daffodils appear, white and blue anemones too. Then the warm air stands like a pillar among the trees on the slopes. On sunny inclines buds have burst, here and there cherry trees are in blossom. If you are sixteen years old all of this makes an impression, all of this leaves its mark, for this is the first spring you know is spring, with all your sense you know this is spring, and it is the last, for all coming springs pale in comparison with your first. If, moreover, you are in love, well, then ... then it is merely a question of holding on. Holding on to all the happiness, all the beauty, all the future that resides in everything.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape-the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

I prefer Winter and Fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape- the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of Winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.

The Northwestern Carpathians, in which I was raised, were a hard place, as unforgiving as the people who lived there, but the Alpine landscape into which Zlee and I were sent that early winter seemed a glimpse of what the surface of the earth looked and felt and acted like when there were no maps or borders, no rifles or artillery, no men or wars to claim possession of land, and snow and rock alone parried in a match of millennial slowness so that time meant nothing, and death meant nothing, for what life there was gave in to the forces of nature surrounding and accepted its fate to play what role was handed down in the sidereal march of seasons capable of crushing in an instant what armies might--millennia later--be foolish enough to assemble on it heights. And yet there we were, ordered to march ourselves, for God, not nature, was with us now, and God would deliver us, in this world and next, when the time came for that.

I have always hated the emptiness that winter brings, the blank landscape and the stark difference between sky and ground, the way it transforms trees into skeletons and the city into a wasteland.

Wild Peaches" When the world turns completely upside down You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore; We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color. Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor, We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown. The winter will be short, the summer long, The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot, Tasting of cider and of scuppernong; All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all. The squirrels in their silver fur will fall Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot. 2 The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold. The misted early mornings will be cold; The little puddles will be roofed with glass. The sun, which burns from copper into brass, Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold Their knitted mufflers; full as they can hold Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass. Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover; A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year; The spring begins before the winter’s over. By February you may find the skins Of garter snakes and water moccasins Dwindled and harsh, dead-white and cloudy-clear. 3 When April pours the colors of a shell Upon the hills, when every little creek Is shot with silver from the Chesapeake In shoals new-minted by the ocean swell, When strawberries go begging, and the sleek Blue plums lie open to the blackbird’s beak, We shall live well — we shall live very well. The months between the cherries and the peaches Are brimming cornucopias which spill Fruits red and purple, sombre-bloomed and black; Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches We’ll trample bright persimmons, while you kill Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback. 4 Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones There’s something in this richness that I hate. I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. There’s something in my very blood that owns Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate, A thread of water, churned to milky spate Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones. I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray, Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves; That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath, Summer, so much too beautiful to stay, Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves, And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

A heavy snow fell outside. In a symbolic kind of way, snow was to Chicago what cotton was to Mississippi. It blanketed the land. It was inevitable. Both were so much a part of the landscape of either place that where you saw snow you by definition would not see cotton and vice versa. Coming to Chicago was a guarantee that you would not be picking cotton. The people sitting at the dining room table this late winter night had chosen snow over cotton.

Most ancient thinkers ascribed great influence to the stars. Many also emphasized climate, landscape, diet, and so forth. The Hippocratics taught that these factors affected the balance of four basic fluids, or humors, in the body and that the humors in turn determined the wellness - or sickness - of a person, as well as the kind of child they were likely to have. Hippocrates's son-in-law, Polybus, associates each humor with a season: blood with spring, yellow bile with summer, black bile with fall, and phlegm with winter. He characterizes health as a state in which these humors "are in the correct proportion to each other" and pain and disease as a result of an imbalance.

Vague speculation thrives in weather like this. The world is muffled in white, motor-roads and telegraph-poles vanish, a few castles appear in the middle distance; everything slips back hundreds of years. The details of the landscape - the leafless trees, the sheds, the church towers, the birds and the animals, the sledges and the woodmen, the sliced ricks and the occasional cowmen driving a floundering herd from barn to barn - all these stand out dark in isolation against the snow, distinct and momentous.

The landscape of the mind, against which our thoughts and expectations move, when the wind of the imagination is active, changes as quickly as the clouds; and indeed it consists often of several landscapes, semi-transparent and showing through one another.

Alma knelt in the tall grass and brought her face as near as she could to the stone. And there, rising no more than an inch above the surface of the boulder, she saw a great and tiny forest. Nothing moved within this mossy world. She peered at it so closely that she could smell it- dank and rich and old. Gently, Alma pressed her hand into this tight little timberland. It compacted itself under her palm and then sprang back to form without complaint. There was something stirring about its response to her. The moss felt warm and spongy, several degrees warmer than the air around it, and far more damp than she had expected. It appeared to have its own weather. Alma put the magnifying lens to her eye and looked again. Now the miniature forest below her gaze sprang into majestic detail. She felt her breath catch. This was a stupefying kingdom. This was the Amazon jungle as seen from the back of a harpy eagle. She rode her eye above the surprising landscape, following its paths in every direction. Here were rich, abundant valleys filled with tiny trees of braided mermaid hair and minuscule, tangled vines. Here were barely visible tributaries running through that jungle, and here was a miniature ocean in a depression in the center of the boulder, where all the water pooled. Just across this ocean- which was half the size of Alma's shawl- she found another continent of moss altogether. On this new continent, everything was different. This corner of the boulder must receive more sunlight than the other, she surmised. Or slightly less rain? In any case, this was a new climate entirely. Here, the moss grew in mountain ranges the length of Alma's arms, in elegant, pine tree-shaped clusters of darker, more somber green. On another quadrant of the same boulder still, she found patches of infinitesimally small deserts, inhabited by some kind of sturdy, dry, flaking moss that had the appearance of cactus. Elsewhere, she found deep, diminutive fjords- so deep that, incredibly, even now in the month of June- the mosses within were still chilled by lingering traces of winter ice. But she also found warm estuaries, miniature cathedrals, and limestone caves the size of her thumb. Then Alma lifted her face and saw what was before her- dozens more such boulders, more than she could count, each one similarly carpeted, each one subtly different. She felt herself growing breathless. 'This was the entire world.' This was bigger than a world. This was the firmament of the universe, as seen through one of William Herschel's mighty telescopes. This was planetary and vast. These were ancient, unexplored galaxies, rolling forth in front of her- and it was all right here!

How is it the seasons change? Do they change so slowly so creepingly because we so rarely break away from whatever it was that we were dreaming to notice? What the season brings us to suffer (because seasons, no matter how lovely, will bring us to suffer) it brings when we are not looking. I know the look of a cracked landscape, winter in black and white, flat and finite with a sunset on the horizon like a red heartbeat suffering there. It will take me longer each morning now to go out and face it, the leaves shivering then falling about as if to remind that somehow despite leavings, there is some magic, some beauty there. I don’t want it: the mountain view, the shimmer of summer rain, a troutfilled creek. How is it that I came to be here this way with the wind a suggestion that it was, indubitably was, autumn (already and again)?

The winter solstice marks the longest night of the year and the promise that soon the sun will be back again. But winter is not merely a trial to be got through while we wait for warmer times. You must embrace the cold days and long dark nights and learn to find the joy in them, for there is much joy to be found. Hunker down and revel in the warmth of soft blankets when the weather is howling outside. Make the time to take time, not just for others but for yourselves. Read books, light candles, take long baths, watch the flames flickering in the fireplace or the rain dribbling down the windowpanes. Open your eyes to the beauty in the winter landscape and count your blessings every single day. Slow down. There will be time enough for buzzing around with the bees when the sun comes back. For now, let the moments stretch long and lazy. Recuperate, rejuvenate, reflect, and let winter soothe you. Let this winter solstice be the first of many times this winter that you come together to give thanks and appreciate the people in your life. Gratitude is everything. It is infinite, and even in death I know that the warmth of my gratitude for all of you lives on in the spirit of this season." -Augustus

Last I was here, Winter was a desolate, iced landscape with drift blasting across the terrain, fogging the air white, tumbles of stone and ice and statues barely visible. Today it’s clear, if not sunny. Sun doesn’t exist in Winter; there lurks only an intermittently glimpsed frost-bitten orb of wan blue.

Nevertheless, there was something extraordinary about it when a man so young, with so little experience in flight test, was selected to go to Muroc Field in California for the XS–1 project. Muroc was up in the high elevations of the Mojave Desert. It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. It was full of huge dry lake beds, the biggest being Rogers Lake. Other than sagebrush the only vegetation was Joshua trees, twisted freaks of the plant world that looked like a cross between cactus and Japanese bonsai. They had a dark petrified green color and horribly crippled branches. At dusk the Joshua trees stood out in silhouette on the fossil wasteland like some arthritic nightmare. In the summer the temperature went up to 110 degrees as a matter of course, and the dry lake beds were covered in sand, and there would be windstorms and sandstorms right out of a Foreign Legion movie. At night it would drop to near freezing, and in December it would start raining, and the dry lakes would fill up with a few inches of water, and some sort of putrid prehistoric shrimps would work their way up from out of the ooze, and sea gulls would come flying in a hundred miles or more from the ocean, over the mountains, to gobble up these squirming little throwbacks. A person had to see it to believe it: flocks of sea gulls wheeling around in the air out in the middle of the high desert in the dead of winter and grazing on antediluvian crustaceans in the primordial ooze. When

This scroll, five hundred years old and more, had been inspired by her favorite, the great Wang Wei, master of landscape art, who had painted the scenes from his own home, where he lived for thirty years before he died. Now behind the palace walls on this winter’s day, where she could see only sky and falling snow, Tzu His gazed upon the green landscapes of continuing spring. One landscape melted into another as slowly she unrolled the scroll, so that she might dwell upon every detail of tree and brook and distant hillside. So did she, in imagination, pass beyond the high walls which enclosed her, and she traveled through a delectable country, beside flowing brooks and spreading lakes, and following the ever-flowing river she crossed over wooden bridges and climbed the stony pathways upon a high mountainside and thence looked down a gorge to see a torrent fed by still higher springs, and breaking into waterfalls as it traveled toward the plains. Down from the mountain again she came, past small villages nestling in pine forests and into the warmer valleys among bamboo groves, and she paused in a poet’s pavilion, and so reached at last the shore where the river lost itself in a bay. There among the reeds a fisherman’s boat rose and fell upon the rising tide. Here the river ended, its horizon the open sea and the misted mountains of infinity. This scroll, Lady Miao had once told her, was the artist’s picture of the human soul, passing through the pleasantest scenes of earth to the last view of the unknown future, far beyond.

Winter tightened its grip on Alaska. The vastness of the landscape dwindled down to the confines of their cabin. The sun rose at quarter past ten in the morning and set only fifteen minutes after the end of the school day. Less than six hours of light a day. Snow fell endlessly, blanketed everything. It piled up in drifts and spun its lace across windowpanes, leaving them nothing to see except themselves. In the few daylight hours, the sky stretched gray overhead; some days there was merely the memory of light rather than any real glow. Wind scoured the landscape, cried out as if in pain. The fireweed froze, turned into intricate ice sculptures that stuck up from the snow. In the freezing cold, everything stuck -- car doors froze, windows cracked, engines refused to start. The ham radio filled with warnings of bad weather and listed the deaths that were as common in Alaska in the winter as frozen eyelashes. People died for the smallest mistake -- car keys dropped in a river, a gas tank gone dry, a snow machine breaking down, a turn taken too fast. Leni couldn't go anywhere or do anything without a warning. Already the winter seemed to have gone on forever. Shore ice seized the coastline, glazed the shells and stones until the beach looked like a silver-sequined collar. Wind roared across the homestead, as it had all winter, transforming the white landscape with every breath. Trees cowered in the face of it, animals built dens and burrowed in holes and went into hiding. Not so different from the humans, who hunkered down in this cold, took special care.

Kay yawned and rested her forehead against the windowpane, her fingers idly strumming the guitar: the strings sang a hollow, lulling tune, as monotonously soothing as the Southern landscape, smudged in darkness, flowing past the window. An icy winter moon rolled above the train across the night sky like a thin white wheel.

It was early autumn, then, before the snow began to fly. –(There’s an expression for you, born in the country, born from the imaginations of men and their feeling for the right word, the only word, to mirror clearly what they see! Those with few words must know how to use them.) Men who have seen it, who have watched it day by day outside their cabin window coming down from the sky, like the visible remorse of an ageing year; who have watched it bead upon the ears of the horses they rode, muffle the sound of hoofs on the trail, lie upon spruce boughs and over grass – cover, as if forever, the landscape in which they moved, round off the mountains, blanket the ice in the rivers – for them the snow flies. The snow doesn’t fall. It may ride the wind. It may descend slowly, in utter quiet, from the grey and laden clouds, so that you can hear the flakes touching lightly on the wide white waste, as they come to rest at the end of their flight. Flight – that’s the word. They beat in the air like wings, as if reluctant ever to touch the ground. I have observed them coming down, on a very cold day, near its end when the sky above me was still blue, in flakes great and wide as the palm of my hand. They were like immense moths winging down in the twilight, making the silence about me visible.

WINTER HAS settled down over the Divide again; the season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring. The birds have gone. The teeming life that goes on down in the long grass is exterminated. The prairie-dog keeps his hole. The rabbits run shivering from one frozen garden patch to another and are hard put to it to find frost-bitten cabbage-stalks. At night the coyotes roam the wintry waste, howling for food. The variegated fields are all one color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the sky are the same leaden gray. The hedgerows and trees are scarcely perceptible against the bare earth, whose slaty hue they have taken on. The ground is frozen so hard that it bruises the foot to walk in the roads or in the ploughed fields. It is like an iron country, and the spirit is oppressed by its rigor and melancholy. One could easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever.

He’d been able to see reasonably well with an extremely thick pair of glasses, but he’d lost these six years ago and since then he’d lived in a confusing landscape distilled to pure color according to season—summer mostly green, winter mostly gray and white—in which blurred figures swam into view and then receded before he could figure out who they were. He couldn’t tell if his headaches were caused by straining to see or by his anxiety at never being able to see what was coming, but he did know the situation wasn’t helped by the first flute, who had a habit of sighing loudly whenever the seventh guitar had to stop rehearsal to ask for clarification on the score that he couldn’t see.

For years, walking round London, I had been aware of the actual land, lying concealed but not entirely changed or destroyed, beneath the surface of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century city. It has been said that 'God made the country and man made the town', but that is not true: the town is simply disguised countryside. Main roads, some older than history itself, still bend to avoid long-dried marshes, or veer off at an angle where the wall of a manor house once stood. Hills and valleys still remain; rivers, even though entombed in sewer pipes, still cause trouble in the foundations of neighbouring buildings and become a local focus for winter mists. Garden walls follow the line of hedgerows; the very street-patterns have been determined by the holdings of individual farmers and landlords, parcels of land some of which can be traced back to the Norman Conquest. The situation of specific buildings - pubs, churches, institutions - often dates from long distant decisions and actions on the part of men whose names have vanished from any record.

I do love a good tree. There it stands so strong and sturdy, and yet so beautiful, a very type of the best sort of man. How proudly it lifts its bare head to the winter storms, and with what a full heart it rejoices when the spring has come again! How grand its voice is, too, when it talks with the wind: a thousand aeolian harps cannot equal the beauty of the sighing of a great tree in leaf. All day it points to the sunshine and all night to the stars, and thus passionless, and yet full of life, it endures through the centuries, come storm, come shine, drawing its sustenance from the cool bosom of its mother earth, and as the slow years roll by, learning the great mysteries of growth and of decay. And so on and on through generations, outliving individuals, customs, dynasties -- all save the landscape it adorns and human nature -- till the appointed day when the wind wins the long battle and rejoices over a reclaimed space, or decay puts the last stroke to his fungus-fingered work. Ah, one should always think twice before one cuts down a tree!

January snow lay thick on the ground—crusty, pitted, and hardened, some of it like the bubbly honeycomb of air-dried sea foam in the tide wrack down at the beach, the sort of snow that stays so long you get used to the intrusion of that world of uninvited white, a hooded subverted landscape, sparkling in the low flame of a sallow sunrise on a winter morning.

The negatives he did manage were made in the hour or two when the sun seemed to rally with a yellowy light reminiscent of an egg yolk; usually, it looked pale as a pearl on the steely blue or leaden sky above the snow-scrubbed lake. That's a purple passage fit for a novel but hardly descriptive of the actuality of that winter, which was almost past enduring.

Wearing bright color became a way to make herself more accessible to people, short-circuiting their tendency to judge her too quickly. Beth owns no dark coats, only ones in vivid shades like yellow and green. On a miserable winter day she notices that people walk by and smile. It’s almost as if a colorful garment is a tiny gift, a brilliant spot of joy in a bleak landscape.

Each blooming flower breathe an open soul of nature's gratitude. Every blooming friendship is an opening of both heart and mind to touch a unique growth of one's soul. Jolly good friends make you bloom with joy even on a coldest winter as you share your common interests in life, in work, in art, with people and of your passion. Treasure your true friends and feel blessed in your life to have them.

Winter is the time for the lonely – both among men and among wolves – and for those who live on the borderline. It covers the life of the solid ground and reveals the life to which we must lift our eyes. It is not the time of animals, nor of flowers, but the time of the stars. Snow does not grow up from the earth, it falls from the stars. It is cold and pure like the stars themselves. There can be no hiding of tracks in winter, neither by man nor by wolf. Whoever walks over the snow must answer for it. Snow does not spring up again as trampled grass does. In the landscape a man towers as high as the pillar of fire in the wilderness. He who marks out the first track through the waste of snow must have courage. He who can face this winter desert must know inner harmony. The only live thing in winter is fire. It rules evening and night. Whoever sits before it must have dismissed the specters that live in the heart or they will stare at him out of each flame. He must have forgotten the cries of the past or he will hear them in the low hum that each fire makes. A man must have gained his white hair in peace to be able to sit quietly by the fire, his hands clasped around his knees and the shadows of familiar objects about him.

For a moment I am jealous: He has grown up here, fearless, happy. Perhaps he will never even know about the world on the other side of the fence, the real world. For him there will be no such thing. But there will also be no medicine for him when he is sick, and never enough food to go around, and winters so cold the mornings are like a punch to the gut. And someday—unless the resistance succeeds and takes the country back—the planes and the fires will find him. Someday the eye will turn in this direction, like a laser beam, consuming everything in its path. Someday all the Wilds will be razed, and we will be left with a concrete landscape, a land of pretty houses and trim gardens and planned parks and forests, and a world that works as smoothly as a clock, neatly wound: a world of metal and gears, and people going tick-tick-tick to their deaths.

On harsh, frigid January days, when the winds are relentless and the snow piles up around us, I often think of our small feathered friends back on the Third Line. I wonder if the old feeder is still standing in the orchard and if anyone thinks to put out a few crumbs and some bacon drippings for our beautiful, hungry, winter birds. In the stark, white landscape they provided a welcome splash of colour and their songs gave us hope through the long, silent winter.

It was another mild day, signaling the transition from winter to spring. The trees unfolded their leaves as they awoke from their long winter nap. In the cloudless blue sky, birds chirped as they floated from tree to tree on the light breeze and alighted to outstretched limbs. The first flowers of spring dotted the landscape with a prelude of the bright, vibrant colors about to spill over the muted and dull tones dominating the palate of the lifeless winter season just passed.

The letter Q for question, seared into human flesh. As I started to sleepwrite my questions, the margin seemed to expand. The paper throbbed with light. Swelling, it engulfed me, until I realized with a mixture of trepidation and wonderment that I was enclosed in the grain of the paper, embedded in the white interior of the story itself. Weightless, I wandered all night long in Miss Winter’s story, plotting its landscape, measuring its contours and, on tiptoe at its borders, peering at the mysteries beyond its bounds.

But mostly, finally, ultimately, I'm here for the weather. As a result of the weather, ours is a landscape in a minor key, a sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tent to melt together, creating a perpetual blurred effect, as if God, after creating Northwestern Washington, had second thoughts and tried unsuccessfully to erase it. Living here is not unlike living inside a classical Chinese painting before the intense wisps of mineral pigment had dried upon the silk - although, depending on the bite in the wind, they're times when it's more akin to being trapped in a bad Chinese restaurant; a dubious joint where gruff waiters slam chopsticks against the horizon, where service is haphazard, noodles soggy, wallpaper a tad too green, and considerable amounts of tea are spilt; but in each and every fortune cookie there's a line of poetry you can never forget. Invariably, the poems comment on the weather. In the deepest, darkest heart of winter, when the sky resembles bad banana baby food for months on end, and the witch measles that meteorologists call "drizzle" are a chronic gray rash on the skin of the land, folks all around me sink into a dismal funk. Many are depressed, a few actually suicidal. But I, I grow happier with each fresh storm, each thickening of the crinkly stratocumulus. "What's so hot about the sun?" I ask. Sunbeams are a lot like tourists: intruding where they don't belong, promoting noise and forced activity, faking a shallow cheerfulness, dumb little cameras slung around their necks. Raindrops, on the other hand, introverted, feral, buddhistically cool, behave as if they were locals. Which, of course, they are.

However, climbs like these don’t simply demarcate fitness, but also the cyclical passage of time. No matter how your life might change, that particular climb – your climb – remains a touchstone. As people are born and others die, you ride past the same features of the landscape – bearing witness to its changes just as much as yours: in early spring, leaves emerge from well-known trees only to wither in the gutter in the fall. While, during the last throes of winter, the brown hillsides gradually return to green – silently announcing that life has renewed itself and the worst of the cold and darkness has passed.

It could snow We don’t take care. The end of November came without coldness, with haunting and limp rains, pretty much leaves still laying anywhere on the sidewalks. It comes a morning with another grey, compact, closed, air changes its texture. Under the pharmacy green cross the thermometer sticks, in red, two degrees. The number, a bit blurred thins down in the space. We didn’t expect it, but it grows, far inside us, the little sentence. It comes to the lips like a forgotten song: “It could snow …” We should not dare to mention it in loud voice, it is still so much autumn, all could finish in a stupid freezing sudden shower, in a fog of boredom. But the idea of a possible snow came back, it’s what matters. No downhill in a sledge-trash-bag, no snowman, no children shouting,no pictures of landscape metamorphosis. Largely best then all that, because the essential snow is inside the unformulated. Before. Something we didn’t know we knew. Before snow, before love, the same lack, the same dimmed grey which days’ triteness creates pretending to suffocate. We shall cross somebody: - This time it’s almost winter! - Yes we start to be crestfallen! Workers hang pieces of tinsel. We didn’t say too much. Especially do not frighten away the slight shade of the idea. The red thermometer went down, one degree. It could snow.

The first blast of the snowstorm snatched me up like a scrap of torn newspaper and transported me from a practice in the depths of the countryside to the town. What, you may wonder, is so special about a country town? If like me you have ever spent the winters snowbound and the summers deep in a landscape of sparse, monotonous woodland, without a single day off in more than a year; if you have ever torn the wrapper off last week's newspaper with your heart beating as if you were a lover joyfully ripping open a pale blue envelope; if you have ever driven twelve miles in a tandem-harnessed sleigh to a woman in labor, then you may realize what the town mean to me. Kerosene lamps may be very cosy, but I prefer electricity.

THE NORTHWESTERN CARPATHIANS, IN WHICH I WAS RAISED, were a hard place, as unforgiving as the people who lived there, but the Alpine landscape into which Zlee and I were sent that early winter seemed a glimpse of what the surface of the earth looked and felt and acted like when there were no maps or borders, no rifles or artillery, no men or wars to claim possession of land, and snow and rock alone parried in a match of millennial slowness so that time meant nothing, and death meant nothing, for what life there was gave in to the forces of nature surrounding and accepted its fate to play what role was handed down in the sidereal march of seasons capable of crushing in an instant what armies might—millennia later—be foolish enough to assemble on it heights.

and here instead’s another version of what was happening that morning, as if from a novel in which sophia is the kind of character she’d choose to be, prefer to be, a character in a much more classic sort of story, perfectly honed and comforting, about how sombre yet bright the major-symphony of winter is and how beautiful everything looks under a high frost, how every grassblade is enhanced and silvered into individual beauty by it, how even the dull tarmac of the roads, the paving under our feet, shines when the weather’s been cold enough and how something at the heart of us, at the heart of all our cold and frozen states, melts when we encounter a time of peace on earth, goodwill to all men; a story in which there’s no room for severed heads; a work in which sophia’s perfectly honed minor-symphony modesty and narrative decorum complement the story she’s in with the right kind of quiet wisdom-from-experience ageing-female status, making it a story that’s thoughtful, dignified, conventional in structure thank god, the kind of quality literary fiction where the slow drift of snow across the landscape is merciful, has a perfect muffling decorum of its own, snow falling to whiten, soften, blur and prettify even further a landscape where there are no heads divided from bodies hanging around in the air or anywhere, either new ones, from new atrocities or murders or terrorisms, or old ones, left over from old historic atrocities and murders and terrorisms and bequeathed to the future as if in old french revolution baskets, their wickerwork brown with the old dried blood, placed on the doorsteps of the neat and central-heating-interactive houses of now with notes tied to the handles saying please look after this head thank you, well, no, thank you, thank you very much:

…we know what to do with rebels here. They are dug into shallow graves, the Cornishmen who came up the country when he was a boy; but there are always more Cornishmen. And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marches of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and in hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will sear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug into unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of the uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future.

One of the special delights of my childhood was to go and see the cases of illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum, and to walk, as every child can, right into their pages--losing myself in an enchanted world of gold, landscapes and skies whose colours were indwelt with light as if their sun shone not above but in them. Most marvelous of all were the many manuscripts mysteriously entitled "Book of Hours", since I did not know how one kept hours in a book. Their title-pages and richly ornamented initials showed scenes of times and seasons--ploughing in springtime, formal gardens bright in summer with heraldic roses, autumn harvesting, and logging in winter snow under clear, cold skies seen through a filigree screen of black trees. I could only assume that these books were some ancient device for marking the passage of time and they associated themselves in my mind with sundials in old country yards upon hot afternoons, with the whirring and booming of clocks in towers, with astrolabes engraved with the mysterious signs of the Zodiac, and-above all-with the slow, cyclic sweep of the sun, moon and stars over my head.

Ah, New England. An amalgam of picket fences and crumbling bricks; Ivy League schools and dropped Rs; social tolerance and the Salem witch trials, Henry David Thoreau and Stephen King, P-town rainbows and mill-town rust; Norman Rockwell and Aerosmith; lobster and Moxie; plus the simmering aromas of a million melting pot cuisines originally brought here by immigrants from everywhere else searching for new ways to live. It’s a place where rapidly-growing progressive cities full of the ‘wicked smaaht’ coexist alongside blight-inflicted Industrial Revolution landscapes full of the ‘wicked poor’. A place of forested mountains, roaring rivers, crystalline lakes, urban sprawl, and a trillion dollar stores. A place of seasonal tourism beach towns where the wild, rank scent of squishy seaweed casts its cryptic spell along the vast and spindrift-misted seacoast, while the polished yachts of the elite glisten like rare jewels on the horizon, just out of reach. Where there are fiery autumn hues and leaves that need raking. Powder snow ski slopes and icy windshields that need scraping. Crisp daffodil mornings and mud season. Beach cottage bliss and endless miles of soul-sucking summer traffic . Perceived together, the dissonant nuances of New England stir the imagination in compelling and chromatic whorls.

As she stepped through the front door onto the verandah, a warm breeze brushed her face and she felt a heavy wave of deep familiarity: the smell of eucalyptus and sunbaked dirt, the light so bright it put creases around her eyes just to look at it. The slender blue gums on the ridge, ancient and watchful. This was the landscape of her childhood and she would never be able to escape its influence. But just as Daniel Miller had brought her to Halcyon, the books that she'd read as a child, lying beneath the ferns at Darling House, had taken her to lands where trees with names like oak and chestnut and elm grew in great, ancient forests, and the soil was moist and the sun was gentle, where there were magical words like "hedgerow" and "conker," and snow kissed the glass of windows in winter, and children went sledding at Christmas and ate "pudding" and "blancmange." And so, she had come to know another landscape, not just intellectually, but viscerally: a landscape of the imagination as real to her as the geographical landscape in which she moved. When she first arrived in England as a twenty-year-old graduate, she had stepped off the plane and known it already. Standing here now, looking across the valley toward the facing hill, Jess could imagine how homesick Isabel must have felt at times. She herself had been thinking about "home" a lot. Home, she'd realized, wasn't a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of "home" wasn't "away", it was "lonely." When someone said, "I want to go home," what they really meant was that they didn't want to feel lonely anymore.

All at once the anger ran out of John Harkless; he was a hard man for anger to tarry with. And in place of it a strong sense of home-coming began to take possession of him. He was going home. “Back to Plattville, where I belong,” he had said; and he said it again without bitterness, for it was the truth. “Every man cometh to his own place in the end.” Yes, as one leaves a gay acquaintance of the playhouse lobby for some hard-handed, tried old friend, so he would wave the outer world God-speed and come back to the old ways of Carlow. What though the years were dusty, he had his friends and his memories and his old black brier pipe. He had a girl’s picture that he should carry in his heart till his last day; and if his life was sadder, it was infinitely richer for it. His winter fireside should be not so lonely for her sake; and losing her, he lost not everything, for he had the rare blessing of having known her. And what man could wish to be healed of such a hurt? Far better to have had it than to trot a smug pace unscathed. He had been a dullard; he had lain prostrate in the wretchedness of his loss. “A girl you could put in your hat — and there you have a strong man prone.” He had been a sluggard, weary of himself, unfit to fight, a failure in life and a failure in love. That was ended; he was tired of failing, and it was time to succeed for a while. To accept the worst that Fate can deal, and to wring courage from it instead of despair, that is success; and it was the success that he would have. He would take Fate by the neck. But had it done him unkindness? He looked out over the beautiful, “monotonous” landscape, and he answered heartily, “No!” There was ignorance in man, but no unkindness; were man utterly wise he were utterly kind.

Put yourself in the way of grace,' says a friend of ours, who is a monk, and a bishop; and he smiles his floating and shining smile. And truly, can there be a subject of more interest to each of us than whether or not grace exists, and the soul? And, consequent upon the existence of the soul, a whole landscape of incorruptible forces, perhaps even a source, an almost palpably suggested second universe? A world that is incomprehensible through reason? To believe in the soul---to believe in it exactly as much and as hardily as one believes in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view---imagine the consequences! How far-reaching, and thoroughly wonderful! For everything, by such a belief, would be charged, and changed. You wake in the morning, the soul exists, your mouth sings it, your mind accepts it. And the perceived, tactile world is, upon the instant, only half the world! How easily I travel, about halfway, through such a scenario. I believe in the soul---in mine, and yours, and the blue-jay's, and the pilot whale's. I believe each goldfinch flying away over the coarse ragweed has a soul, and the ragweed too, plant by plant, and the tiny stones in the earth below, and the grains of earth as well. Not romantically do I believe this, nor poetically, nor emotionally, nor metaphorically except as all reality is metaphor, but steadily, lumpishly, and absolutely. The wild waste spaces of the sea, and the pale dunes with one hawk hanging in the wind, they are for me the formal spaces that, in a liturgy, are taken up by prayer, song, sermon, silence, homily, scripture, the architecture of the church itself. And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable. Now winter, the winter I am writing about, begins to ease. And what, if anything, has been determined, selected, nailed down? This is the lesson of age---events pass, things change, trauma fades, good fortune rises, fades, rises again but different. Whereas what happens when one is twenty, as I remember it, happens forever. I have not been twenty for a long time! The sun rolls toward the north and I feel, gratefully, its brightness flaming up once more. Somewhere in the world the misery we can do nothing about yet goes on. Somewhere the words I will write down next year, and the next, are drifting into the wind, out of the ornate pods of the weeds of the Provincelands. Once I went into the woods to find an almost unfindable bird, a blue grosbeak. And I found it: a rough, deep blue, almost black, with heavy beak; it was plucking one by one the humped, pale green caterpillars from the leaves of a thick green tree. Then it vanished into the shadows of the leaves and, in the same moment, from the crown of the tree flew a western bluebird---little aqua thrush of the mountains, hundreds of miles from its home. It is a moment hard to top---but, I can. Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?

Wait until the truffles hit the dining room---absolute sex," said Scott. When the truffles arrived the paintings leaned off the walls toward them. They were the grand trumpets of winter, heralding excess against the poverty of the landscape. The black ones came first and the cooks packed them up in plastic quart containers with Arborio rice to keep them dry. They promised to make us risotto with the infused rice once the truffles were gone. The white ones came later, looking like galactic fungus. They immediately went into the safe in Chef's office. "In a safe? Really?" "The trouble we take is in direct proportion to the trouble they take. They are impossible," Simone said under her breath while Chef went over the specials. "They can't be that impossible if they are on restaurant menus all over town." I caught her eye. "I'm kidding." "You can't cultivate them. The farmers used to take female pigs out into the countryside, lead them to the oaks, and pray. They don't use pigs anymore, they use well-behaved dogs. But they still walk and hope." "What happened to the female pigs?" Simone smiled. "The scent smells like testosterone to them. It drives them wild. They destroyed the land and the truffles because they would get so frenzied." I waited at the service bar for drinks and Sasha came up beside me with a small wooden box. He opened it and there sat the blanched, malignant-looking tuber and a small razor designed specifically for it. The scent infiltrated every corner of the room, heady as opium smoke, drowsing us. Nicky picked up the truffle in his bare hand and delivered it to bar 11. He shaved it from high above the guest's plate. Freshly tilled earth, fields of manure, the forest floor after a rain. I smelled berries, upheaval, mold, sheets sweated through a thousand times. Absolute sex.

I glanced up at the trees too. Dead. Every one of them gray and white, needles rusted, leaves shriveled at the tips of branches. All the life sucked out of them. Not just the trees. All the plants, ferns, grasses and brush were shriveled, brown, barren. As if a month of winter had set down right here in my driveway and gone on a killing spree. ... "Love what you've done with the landscape," Cody said. "You could open your own business, you know." ... "The hell you talking about, Miller?" I asked Cody. "Yard care. You're poison and weed whacker all in one. You can call it Death to All Shrubbery.

She let the landscape seep through her tightly held emotions.

Nor did Yellowstone’s early managers understand what would happen to an ecosystem without predators. Once the wolves were gone, the ungulate population in the park exploded, and the quality of the range quickly began to deteriorate. Overgrazed hillsides eroded, and stream banks denuded of woody shrubs began to crumble, damaging prime trout habitat. Elk browsing at their leisure, undisturbed by predators, decimated stands of young aspen and willow. Too many animals on the landscape brought starvation and disease, and the elk population followed a boom-and-bust cycle. By the 1930s, Yellowstone officials had no choice but to do what they had done with the wolves. They started quietly culling the park’s enormous elk herds, shooting thousands of animals in an average year (usually in the winter, when few visitors were around to see the carnage). This continued until the 1960s, when hunters in areas adjacent to the park pressured their elected officials to intervene. Fewer elk in Yellowstone, they knew, meant fewer elk migrating out of the park in winter, which in turn meant fewer hunting opportunities. The elk population was once again allowed to grow untrammeled.

May 5th 2018 was one of the first nice spring days the beautiful State of Maine had seen since being captured by the long nights and cold days of winter. Ursula, my wife of nearly 60 years and I were driving north on the picturesque winding coastal route and had just enjoyed the pleasant company of Beth Leonard and Gary Lawless at their interesting book store “Gulf of Maine” in Brunswick. I loved most of the sights I had seen that morning but nothing prepared us for what we saw next as we drove across the Kennebec River on the Sagadahoc Bridge. Ursula questioned me about the most mysterious looking vessel we had ever seen. Of course she expected a definitive answer from me, since I am considered a walking encyclopedia of anything nautical by many. Although I had read about this new ship, its sudden appearance caught me off guard. “What kind of ship is that?” Ursula asked as she looked downstream, at the newest and most interesting stealth guided missile destroyer on the planet. Although my glance to the right was for only a second, I was totally awed by the sight and felt that my idea of what a ship should look like relegated me to the ashbin of history where I would join the dinosaurs and flying pterosaurs of yesteryear. Although I am not privileged to know all of the details of this class of ship, what I do know is that the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) first underwent sea trials in 2015. The USS Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001) delivered to the Navy in April 2018, was the second ship this class of guided missile destroyers and the USS Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002) now under construction, will be the third and final Zumwalt-class destroyer built for the United States Navy. It was originally expected that the cost of this class would be spread across 32 ships but as reality set in and costs overran estimates, the number was reduced to 24, then to 7 and finally to 3… bringing the cost-per-ship in at a whopping $7.5 billion. These guided missile destroyers are primarily designed to be multi-mission stealth ships with a focus on naval gunfire to support land attacks. They are however also quite capable for use in surface and anti-aircraft warfare. The three ship’s propulsion is similar and comes from two Rolls-Royce gas turbines, similar to aircraft jet engines, and Curtiss-Wright electrical generators. The twin propellers are driven by powerful electric motors. Once across the bridge the landscape once again became familiar and yet different. Over 60 years had passed since I was here as a Maine Maritime Academy cadet but some things don’t change in Maine. The scenery is still beautiful and the people are friendly, as long as you don’t step on their toes. Yes, in many ways things are still the same and most likely will stay the same for years to come. As for me I like New England especially Maine but it gets just a little too cold in the winter!

So I send my thoughts out of the cell, miles away, to my favourite landscape. We lived in the countryside-proper, Mum and me, a place where it still floods every spring. We’d go walking in the hills when the winter thawed, high up where the waters couldn’t reach us. I never told Mickey about that. He wasn’t interested in my stories, only in his.

Why don’t you tell me where this fear comes from. Maybe talking about it will help us somehow.” I feel like this fear should have vanished already, but what she’s doing is keeping me at a steady level of heightened uneasiness, not taking my fear away completely. I try to focus on where this box comes from. “Um…okay.” Okay, just do it, just say something real. “This one is from my…fantastic childhood. Childhood punishments. The tiny closet upstairs.” Shut in the dark to think about what I did. It was better than other punishments, but sometimes I was in there for too long, desperate for fresh air. “My mother kept our winter coats in our closet,” she says, and it’s a silly thing to say after what I just told her, but I can tell she doesn’t know what else to do. “I don’t really want to talk about it anymore,” I say with a gasp. She doesn’t know what to say because no one could possibly know what to say, because my childhood pain is too pathetic for anyone else to handle--my heart rate spikes again. “Okay. Then…I can talk. Ask me something.” I lift my head. It was working before, focusing on her. Her racing heart, her body against mine. Two strong skeletons wrapped in muscle, tangled together; two Abnegation transfers working on leaving tentative flirtation behind. “Why is your heart racing, Tris?” “Well, I…I barely know you.” I can picture her scowling. “I barely know you and I’m crammed up against you in a box, Four, what do you think?” “If we were in your fear landscape…” I say. “Would I be in it?” “I’m not afraid of you.” “Of course you’re not. That’s not what I meant.” I meant not Are you afraid of me? but Am I important enough to you to feature in the landscape anyway? Probably not. She’s right, she hardly knows me. But still: Her heart is racing.

Perhaps they had tried to migrate in the past but had found either their winter habitat destroyed or the path so fragmented and fraught with danger that it made more sense—to these few birds—to ignore the tuggings of the stars and seasons and instead to try to carve out new lives, new ways of being, even in such a stark and severe landscape: or rather, in a stark and severe period—knowing that lushness and bounty were still retained with that landscape, that it was only a phase, that better days would come. That in fact (the snipe knowing these things with their blood, ten million years in the world) the austere times were the very thing, the very imbalance, that would summon the resurrection of that frozen richness within the soil—if indeed that richness, that magic, that hope, did still exist beneath the ice and snow. Spring would come like its own green fire, if only the injured ones could hold on. And

At least fractured on the ground, Fire thought, the monsters added color to the landscape. There was little color in the north of the Dells in early spring—the trees were gray and the grass that tufted between cracks in the rocks was still brown from winter. Truly, even at the height of summer the north of the Dells was not what one would call colorful, but at least in summer, gray with patches of brown turned to gray with patches of green.

But what about my house in Heaven?" I asked, my tone soft and piteous. "Whatever would I do there? It's filled with my memories of Obadiah. We built it together with our own hands. We laid the marble and carved the statues. I sewed the curtains, the bedclothes and the tapestries. I even created the flowers and the landscaping which surrounded our grand mansion beside the sea…" I begin to sob, and Arik pulls me close. I rest my cheek against his chest and close my eyes. "Wh-When we first got to Heaven--me an' Obadiah--we were all each other had. Everyone else was still down on earth, mournin' us. Our physical bodies had been destroyed by Hana's guillotines. Timothy knew that his own death was comin', and he had specifically asked for the two of us to go and make a place for him in Heaven. When we arrived, Heaven was beautiful, but empty. I was suddenly able to see again, and the colors…my heart just danced, y'know? I began to create right away: houses, flowers, animals…it was glorious. I was never happier. It filled up my heart and pushed out the anguish an' guilt that I felt about leavin' all of you behind on earth to suffer. Obadiah and I were filled with so much joy then. I had never seen him so happy. An' the horses, Arik…the horses were his…beautiful, winged creatures, completely dedicated to him, but forever free...he would never have dreamed of restraining them. We would sit on the lanai and watch them...these beautiful creatures, who had nothing in their hearts but love…" I snuggle closer as he presses my head against his chest and weeps with me.