I walk toward it, my park, and, within, toward all the vast, rich safety of my childhood:

the park receives me and has become abstract: white, rigid, transparent all the way to the far countryside, glassily sparkling under the silky deep-blue sky, tinkling in the frost as if transposed into another dimension, abstracted, its own myth and legend.

And for the first time I see it, see its framework, the way it is set in the countryside: a landscape garden, a piece of idealized nature within nature (a reality within reality), fanning out into the flatly troughed and then gently rolling and rising terrain, with the first signs of formal severity showing in the now-frosty snowed-in ornamental scrolls of the flower beds, between which the beeline central path leads to the gates with the snow-capped stone greyhounds on the pillars. . .

and directly beyond, in greater freedom: a spacious English park of goodly proportions between the open lawns and the dense foliage of the summertime trees. To one side, then, toward the dell, a peasant garden full of folk mock-heraldry in the ostrich tails of the black cabbage and the halberd leaves of artichokes, along the parallel rows of fruit trees, whose rounded tops are now dusted with snow and transparent, like the seed tops of dandelions (which my mother used to call “Larousses”). And on the other side, on the rising slope, a game preserve: the small herd of fallow deer that always stood there in the coppice are standing there now, finely drawn in the snow.

Signs in the snow: it’s still alive, my park. Mystery is still stirring in it, making a frosted branch snap up so that its white fur drops off and sinks into the down of the snow bed, which receives it glitteringly, everywhere the snow bearing the fine script of life so quick and shy that it would almost not have been, but for these traces

(the most eloquent: a deathbed of powdery snow crystals, strewn with half a handful of downy feathers, three or four drops of blood, a yellowish spot . . . Chinese ideogram of a small catastrophe) . . .

It lives on unchallenged, my park. Everything in it is precisely as it always was, even twice seven years ago—except that I am no longer here.

Or rather: I am here in a dual, abstract way that can be mirrored back and forth at will: I as a child, and my own legend of myself as a child, and I now, likewise detached from myself. I gaze at both of them, first through one at the other, then through the other at the one. I gaze through my present self at the child who in his curly-haired, cherry-eyed charm, his well-bred, adorable moodiness and precociousness, was already, all too consciously, his own legend and probably deserved to be slapped. And I gaze through the child’s eyes at the lightly built young man, scrawny, pale, shot up too fast, but visibly tough as a whip, wearing his uniform like borrowed clothing, with a strange watchfulness and, if you look him square in the face, something of Aunt Selma’s enchantment in his eyes (and another, more modest garden in his mind).