“Today I harvested honey,” a reader has written apropos of last week’s post, and naturally I envied him the instant I read it. As an adult I always lived in and was drawn to cities, as this chimed in with my nostalgia for civilization on the wane, but the bucolic, which I had richly experienced as a child, ever beckoned the prodigal to return.  Civilization is temporal, like our life itself.  Nature is like our afterlife, eternally kind to some and eternally brutal to others.

The gentle reader is no doubt familiar with the genre of mind game wherein a wholly hypothetical situation, such as being marooned on a desert island, is combined with a highly specific dilemma, such as which book or recording one would take there if one could. The field of speculation is almost limitless.