Surrender and Catch

Abstract

When I drove out of the city I was slowly becoming surprised and frightened. I feit I was no longer in streets, with their familiar smells (familiar now — by what hindsight?), their dirt, their conniving, converging people (lingering after them, I thought them converging even in their quarreis), but in the untouched — rocks, creeks, bushes: things unmastered, things staring me in the face, no matter how I traveled, what way, in what effort. What was catching me, had already caught me perhaps? It was the undefined: I had left the defined womb, the city in which I lived — yet that is not what the city had been while I was in it; it had so changed in my longing. The rocks now — how glibly they were called picturesque, how much were they given to the landscape architect (I was traveling on a parkway), while I was shocked to realize that I knew not a thing about them and that even the architect didn’t: the rocks were merely pieces in his scheme (though thus also of his own making).