The old Kabbalistic phrase is, ‘the Mystery of the splintering of the vessels.’ The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts with gills laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the vessels splinter; they splintered exceedingly fine. Intricacy, then, is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.

The air was alive and unwinding. Time itself was a scroll unraveled, curved and still quivering on a table or altar stone. The monarchs clattered in the air, burnished like throngs of pennies, here’s one, and here’s one, and more and more. They flapped and floundered; they thrust, splitting the air like the keels of canoes, quickened and fleet. It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight , and were pouring down the fallen like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, all the leaves of hardwoods from here to Hudson’s Bay. It was as if the season’s color were draining away like lifeblood, as if the year were molting and shedding. The year was rolling down, and a vital curve had been reached, the tilt that gives way to headlong rush.

Seem like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to me recently, “and don’t nobody know why.”

“the mountains are a passive mystery”

If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest?

Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain.

Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.

About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.

We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the field of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface o mystery, like the idle, curved funnels of leaf miners on the surface of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the night question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

If the landscape reveals lone certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligaciewith ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

I propose to keep here what Thoreau called, ‘a meteorological journal of the mind,’ telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead.

So I think about the valley. It is my leisure as well as my work, a game. It is a fierce game I have joined because it is being played anyway, a game of both skill and chance, played against an unseen adversary — the conditions of time — in which the payoffs, which may suddenly arrive in a blast of light at any moment, might as well come to me as anyone else.

But if I can bear the nights, the days are a pleasure. I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.

The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down he arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky and this book is the straying trail of blood.

Something pummels us, something barely sheathed. Power broods and lights. We’re played on like a pipe; our breath is not our own.

I would like to know grasses and sedges — and care. Then my least journey the the world would be a field trip, a series of happy recognitions.

These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees.

One more reason to keep my eyes open. [of the ‘green ray’]

The lover can see, and the knowledgeable.