Free The World Is the Home of Love and Death by Harold Brodkey Page A

rocks a small, green, wooden, three-room house with three porches and a steep, wood-shingled roof and summer-camp shutters.
    I would like to do a tree census—find out how many trees I own, how many branches, how many twigs and leaves. And bugs. A quarter of a million leaves. A million leaves … I am a millionaire of rustling leaves … of grass blades. Of molecules of air … I own the air I breathe at this minute. Cubic yards of air, invisible stones of a luminous temple.
    What are the statistics? Seventy-five maples, eighty beeches, seventeen oaks, seven junior oaks, seven hemlocks including one, uh, picturesque giant. And so on. But I am inventing that. Sitting now on a log, drinking coffee, having a death-time cigarette, sitting on my red-and-blue air mattress, I look around at the uneven ground and nearby cliff, the trees that grew against the rock and that are fastened to the rock, leafy pilasters. The scattered and decaying leaves on the ground. The trees I own are not quite singular for me; they are
trees
, a generalized mass:
my trees.
Do you suppose God is this way about souls? I haven’t named any of my trees. In the morning light, I look around—
the leaner, the life-is-a-beech, the straight-up maple near the boundary line to the east, the birch society, a crooked copse
.… Those aren’t names of long-term affection. The feelings I have toward them are half-baked, inchoate, are unlike any feeling I have had toward animals or people or things … the patient, fluttering trees … A wind is springing up, stirs my semi-named, half-nameless trees.… A blur of vegetation, branches thickened to the eye by their motion, the cinder roses of shadow move on the ground.… The terms come from a Spanish poem: the smear of vegetation … cinder roses.… Thought stops. The great invisible chain links of mountain wind lash at my woods. I listen with abrupt, incredible simplicity to the sound of that wind, the forceful and shifting exercise of the morning wind. All around me spread shivering whorls of tethered shadows, an infinity of motions of a million twigs. The world is active and stirs eccentrically and rustlingly, stirs differently in the blond, sunlit upper air and in the more constrained greenish lower air. Nature has said,
I will make the tethered trees wild.
    Dionysiac release? I suppose so. A rehearsal for the release of seeds. An invisible embrace. The motion of the mountainside.
    Clouds, too, are a smear, they move so rapidly in the wind. Capitalism has a spiritual side—a pagan spiritual side and a Christian one, one of self-examination and of values, of truths beyond truths. And it has a civilly spiritual side: a keep-your-house-pretty side, a wear-the-right-clothes side. The responsibility for the condition of the immediate world is clearly placed, whether the community uses its knowledge of such identifiable responsibility with intelligence or not. These trees will outlive me unless I become thoroughly a capitalist or a destructive dying man, rampantly assertive, and have them lumbered.
    I control the fate of the trees rustling in a morning wind, in the shudder of the air. The cinder roses of the skidding and fluttering and whirling shadows are sometimes like the splashed gray letters of a restless alphabet slipping over rocks and dead branches on the ground, over wild grass in the meadow, grass stained reddish here and there by reddish seed heads, with yellow and white wildflowers visible among the grasses. A dry stream, over moss, sedum, tansy, goutweed, bluets, wild mustard, and wild phlox, rockets in openings among the trees. Shadows and leaves in their vegetable and aerial life move over me in a profound sweetening of the moment.
    My life is a mess; yet I am fairly happy. Perhaps unfairly. I can’t say I understand happiness. In my case it always has an uncaring, what-the-hell element and is a form of dizzied satisfaction that is unfeeling at its center, freed from feeling, almost a cry