Lately, I've been up early looking and listening out my window, up and down at my corner, and through towards the Spring. The past few months at Princeton have been a revelation to me: the gardens rioting, the youth bathing out on the green like lizards, and the endless throb of humanity wrapped up in Slavic and Arabic and the tongues of man I cannot, despite myself, know.
Mostly, I see the eyes people bring here to look down at their feet, treading the still-dead land. What the earth can sustain is unknowable—will it once-more thrust forward its Aprille shoures which bathe every veyne in swich licour of which vertu engendred is the flour, or keep breeding its lilacs and stirring its dull roots and give rise from a no-man’s-land like a plastic Eden to the narcissus weed supplanted onto—into!—the fertile green breast of the New World? Or will it burn again, covering the garden with nutritious ash?
To me, all is possible: Christ is Risen! We will soon scurry on hills and moors like cette marmaille d’hommes que nous sommes, to quote a noted essayiste—like the scrapings of the pot that we are. We may live nobly in taking down our own records of experience through our own corners as seen through our own temperaments. We try to live among the supplanted Magnolia soulangeana and in the same instant tread where no shod foot has yet stepped onto the still-smoldering embers of the American continent.
