I think human greatness is the ability to sit under a tree and imagine the world as it really isn't. I take great solace from trees and their silence. I, like them, have nothing to say and merely smile-the smile of a wise mad man-at everyone and everything that passes me by. I have become old within the span of a week. Sun and shadows riddle my face. To think is a kind of disease.
Nothing is much more beautiful than to release every thought back into the silence and to feel the dark intensity of evening cover your face, to sit in in-between places, oblivious of time, daydreaming as the light filters down. To be sane in our times is to sleep well and not care if the world goes to hell in a handcart. None of this matters. Drink well! How wise you were, Khayyam!
There are trees whose nature-or so you think-it is to choose 'verticality'; there are others that always grow at an angle to the level surface, as if gently reclining in an angle of repose, dreaminess, casualness. Is that angle there from the beginning, in the seed itself? Do the degrees of inclination work themselves out for every tree of this species? There is something wonderful in the thought that for tens of millions of years, a time when moons have passed from youth to adolescence,all such trees have found themselves leaning into the light like old men. These millions of years of shade and solitude, incalculable pleasure, of being at home. Stone. Lizard. Wind. Stars. Then a human being emerges and the tree becomes a poem. Love is found and lost. More time swings through the seas. The last tree is still there: a word, a shelter, all that stands for rootedness. Still more ruins are heaped up. The skeleton of a fish gasps for breath. An individual tree, even now, is not so very different from the first tree.
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