Man may change, government may change, people may change but Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.
It was magic, the oldest magic of all when day became night, gods working in tandem, and I gave it the full benefit of my witness for the singular wonder it was.
I fell over twice. It was loud. The garden was black outside our circle of light. The endless night stretched all around us, so we told each other that we had to be close together, together in the dark.
But the sky was never quite the same shade of blue again.
Do you believe in God, Martin?’
And he answered, ‘Yes, because of His trees. Don’t you?’
‘I’m not sure…’
‘Oh, my poor, blind Stephen! Look again, go on looking until you do believe.
Now you see what kind of creatures we are, Hugh. Eating things alive. That’s what we do. How can you have much respect for mankind, or any belief in the social struggle?
Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather-storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.
The air smelled like Bayou Teche when it’s spring and the fish are spawning among the water hyacinths and the frogs are throbbing in the cattails and the flooded cypress.
If he had the earth for his pasture and the sea for his pond, he would be a pauper still. He only is rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy or demon who possesses such power as that.
Mentioned in
Sixty Days and Counting, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Nature has no originality–I mean, no large ability in the matter of inventing new things, new ideas, new stage effects. She has a superb and amazing and infinitely varied equipment of old ones, but she never adds to them. She repeats–repeats–repeats–repeats. Examine your memory and your experience; you will find it is true.
