The summer of 1835 in Gillileje

A circle is both sweet and bittersweet.

It's like when you get to the place where nothing is interesting and it's good that way, a definite form of enlightenment, you learn things about yourself and others you never knew, though it seems regressive.

How lush everything looks then, like it looked to the first American poets of the modern age--Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams come to mind--instead of the way it looked to a later generation of poets when a poet like John Berryman provided one perfect example after another of the environmental despoliation of the continent.

People, like poets, need to be understood environmentally; by this I mean by how their environment influences them. It's one thing to walk around in the countryside and feel perpetually refreshed, like you've just stepped out of a cool shower in the summertime, and another to walk around feeling you should be dressed in a hazmat suit.

The use of the word, 'whatever' is a big turning point in this little history; that it means so little and so much. The word whatever allows you to be two places at once, just like a circle.