North Woods
ghlights
History haunts him who does not honour it.
Placing a stone in the forks of a tree branch is a child’s charm; it should not be practiced systematically. Like all charms, it will lose its Magic when it becomes a Method.
Nothing is more likely to make me abandon something than to be told to do it… …this is the kind of straightjacket that I worry most about. It isn’t praise, it is a command. When they compliment the cook on his potatoes, it’s just an order to cook the same thing again.
Woods, from the Old English wode… also meaning “mad.”
…the sense of oneness with the world—of dissolving away. Now I wonder if this is what I seek when I paint—a disappearance into.
My sole consolation—and it is a great one—is the realization of my life’s fortune in your friendship. For it is Fortune. To think of all that had to happen so that we might meet, and all that might have happened to prevent it… Yes, I’d found, I knew, my Life’s friend. How our words tumbled upon each other! …I count from that moment a joy that I have known nowhere else.
She took on any client as long as they could pay; she was American… she made no promises unless in astral currency, redeemable in the beyond.
“It is a well-accepted fact that, even in the firmest substances, the atoms do not touch. There is ample space for other worlds.”
…the story that she had settled upon over the years was that which, frankly, enabled what seemed to be the best compromise of narrative possibility and restraint.
Just as they knew that, if one was simply patient, a friend’s true essence would emerge in time.
Man’s a product of his environment, and that’s true for the upright and the sickos alike.
She was struck by the discrepancy in meaning the belongings presented. That death meant not only the cessation of a life, but vast worlds of significance. A candle that might once have provided comfort in the winter darkness, a shawl gifted by an erstwhile suitor, a pheasant that recalled her poor lost grandfather. Old brass, old rag, old bird.
There are “amateur musicians” an “amateur artists,” but such descriptors are borne with pride and affection, for they suggest a kind of devotion unsullied by the marketplace (amateur, from the French for “one who loves”).
…he’s gone prospecting on far more tenuous leads than this one, and if most of them led nowhere, it didn’t really matter. Because they often led somewhere else. He’d be a fool not to embrace a lovely spring day, with the whole world to himself.
Witness trees, she’d tell them. An old term of trade for trees that marked invisible boundaries. Now also used for those that were present at important moments in our history. In other words: the ones that witnessed us.
Between 1970 and 2019 alone, nearly a third of all birds had disappeared from North America.
No email; along with immortality, metempsychosis, the taste of mushrooms once poisonous to life, it is one of death’s great virtues.