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10 Nature In the old days there were characters and settings: if you wrote snow you could see wetness and whiteness bending twigs of the cherry tree. How many robins perched on that quince in the snowstorm? Did the spill of milk make us ill? And what did that say about when the ladder fell? Everybody’s sick of naming a few familiar birds and trees whose dilemmas are just like ours. If we started out playful and restless, flooded with all at once, we ended up married to episodes. But don’t give me the Utopia of Childhood, the moody little brats, what they extract, how they suffer: I was a storehouse of lassitude. I took everything personally, I was a thumbnail sketch of the universe. The branches are smarter than we are. Their contract with stillness is limber 11 and listless.They bring us the sheen, not of sparrows, not what we’re thinking, but juniper berries, just how green they are soon after you clip them. ...

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