For Myself, The Creek Satisfies A Thing

It Seemed A Strange Thing To Him, When Earth Was Earth And Rain Was Rain, That Scrawny Pines Should Grow In The Scrub, While By Every Branch And Lake And River There Grew Magnolias. Dogs Were The Same Everywhere, And Oxen And Mules And Horses. But Trees Were Different In Different Places.

I Have Found That Each Of My Books Has Developed Out Of Something I Have Written In A Previous Book. Some Thought Evidently Unfinished.

Somewhere Beyond The Sink-hole, Past The Magnolia, Under The Live Oaks, A Boy And A Yearling Ran Side By Side, And Were Gone Forever.

But To Make The Intangible Tangible, To Pick The Emotion Out Of The Air And Make It True For Others, Is Both The Blessing And The Curse Of The Writer, For The Thing Between Book Covers Is Never As Beautiful As The Thing He Imagined.

Men Had Reached Into The Scrub And Along Its Boundaries, Had Snatched What They Could Get And Had Gone Away, Uneasy In That Vast Indifferent Peace; For A Man Was Nothing, Crawling Ant-like Among The Myrtle Bushes Under The Pines. Now They Were Gone, It Was As Though They Had Never Been. The Silence Of The Scrub Was Primordial. The Wood-thrush Crying Across It Might Have Been The First Bird In The World-or The Last.