The man is amazing:
The tree looks, well, truncated, but unbowed. That’ll end soon, and there will be a brand new hole in the sky where once there were leaves. The Triangle had two old elms; the first fell a few years ago, and a spindly newcomer fills the spot now. It will grow quickly, and the replacement for the old tree will lag behind. The newcomer will be felled forty years hence, the replacement twenty years after that. It’s like a two-stroke engine, pistons rising and falling, the great chug of time pushing the earth around the star.
What a writer.
It should actually read “like a two cylinder engine”, but I feel almost ashamed to correct it.
No, I think he meant two-cycle (as opposed to four). The number of trees aren’t really the issue.
I guess I imagine it as the trees rising and falling alternately over decades like pistons in a parallel twin. Mechanical pedantics aside, that’s really the wizardry of his writing, that such a picture could be painted in one’s mind with a few words.
I was going to comment yesterday the same as Chuck but deleted it because I thought to myself, the particulars do not matter…it is the feelings we get when reading those lines that matter.
The other thing that got to me in that bleat was the retirement picture and how everything has changed since then. I ask myself why but only get the thousand yard stare in response.
A true word wizard. I like what Gagdad Bob wrote about him the other day:
It’s called art — a little like Joyce’s Ulysses, only intelligible.