Caveat: Tree #1599 “A stroll”

This tree witnessed a small family out for a morning stroll.

picture

Unrelated, here is a quote that I found amusing:

“Never underestimate your fellow man’s lack of initiative.” – Bryan Caplan

To be clear, I take some issue with the author’s use of the gendered “fellow man” – it’s archaic, at this point, and there are plenty of more universalist alternatives that are utterly painless, e.g. simply “fellow human being’s” or even simply “other people’s” as opposed to “your fellow man’s”. That said, and given Caplan’s problematic relation (opposition) to feminism, perhaps we can take him at face value, and understand that he does, indeed, mean only men, here. In fact that might make the quote more amusing.

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Caveat: suddenly what the trees try

Some Trees

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

- John Ashbery (American poet, 1927-2017)

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