The Baron in the Trees

I have been reading a number of what I guess I would call "nature books." They range in topic from ancient walks, surviving in remote islands, swimming through public waterways across a country, climbing mountains, etc. You get the picture. I am hoping to write about some of them here. 

But one of my favorites was actually a novella, "The Baron in the Trees", by Italo Calvino. I was keeping a notebook at the time, to keep track of my reading lists, and I was so moved by the elegant writing that I wrote down the end passage, which inspired my name for this blog. 

"Ombrosa no longer exists. Looking at the empty sky, I ask myself if it ever did exist. That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit's tread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots, and gaps, bursting at times into dear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends." 

Italy Calvino