The garden is full of light and the trees are wondering what hit them. They look worryingly bare, lopped, but I suppose the men knew what they were doing. There is a side to people who work the land and plants and crops. They have a capacity for resentment at all the hard labour I think. So every now and then they take a swipe at their life's work which is personal and over-enthusiastic.
Don't we all. In the days when a typescript was a physical object it was wiser to have a copy made before editing the text. An unexpected outburst of revolt over usage, punctuation, argument, or persistent misspelling could lead to a chapter's worth of savage perfection being imposed - and then it would all have to be retyped when, tranquility of mind restored the following day, or even after lunch, perfection had to be toned down to pedestrian competence and polite suggestions for recasting. Not least because really high quality upgrading might have led the author to demand uniformity of such standards for all the hundreds of pages. Now you can just click on undo. And make do with a lesser text but a quieter life.
They will look at those trees on the way to Mass next Sunday and feel a bit guilty. There's no undo on a tree.
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2 comments:
No undo, but often a redo. I once killed a clematis by over-enthusiastic pruning. Men with things that cut can get over-enthusiastic it seems.
Elby, Only yesterday I was looking at the most pathetic clematis survivor. I want to send it up a cypress - flowering cypresses are much prettier than the plain green variety, but I'd trimmed it back too hard. Perhaps this summer it will reach for the skies.
How's your van restructuring going?
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