Laudator Temporis Acti

The practical consequence of my passions was an extensive vocabulary for the plants, animals, and birds of my native, northern land. My emigration frm Europe, however, occurred when my attachments to names had long since forsake me, and recognizing the kinship of American species with these other, European ones only made me think of my own life—its migration away from obdurate divisions and definitions to a harmony with the fluid and the undefined. But the truth is that I am always annoyed by that sort of musical motif played with new variations. I had known only one sort of pine, a pine tree was a pine tree, but here suddenly there was the sugar pine, the ponderosa pine, the Monterey pine, and so on—seventeen species, all told. Five species of spruce, six of fir—the largest, a rival in size to the sequoias, was not entirely a fir and, thus, its Latin name was neither Picea nor Abies, but Pseudotsuga. Several species each of cedar, larch, juniper. The oak, which I had believed to be simply an oak, always and everywhere eternal and indivisible in its oakness, had in America multiplied into something like sixteen species, ranging from those whose oakness was beyond question to others where it was so hazy that it was hard to tell right off whether they were laurels or oaks. Similar but dissimilar, the same but not identical, all this only leads to nonsensical thoughts, but why not acknowledge them? For example, what force is at work here, what origin—a universal law, the essence of tree? And does it contain the principle, the essence of pine, oak? Oh, classifications! Do they exist only in the mind or, in spite of everything, outside the mind as well?