There is a truth in talking of the variety of Nature;
but I think that Nature often shows her chief strangeness in
her sameness. There is a weird rhythm in this very repetition;
it is as if the earth were resolved to repeat a single shape until
the shape shall turn terrible.
Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word,
such as "dog," thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has
become a word like "snark" or "pobble." It does not become tame,
it becomes wild, by repetition. In the end a dog walks about
as startling and undecipherable as Leviathan or Croquemitaine.
It may be that this explains the repetitions in Nature, it may be
for this reason that there are so many million leaves and pebbles.
Perhaps they are not repeated so that they may grow familiar.
Perhaps they are repeated only in the hope that they may at last
grow unfamiliar. Perhaps a man is not startled at the first cat he sees,
but jumps into the air with surprise at the seventy-ninth cat.
Perhaps he has to pass through thousands of pine trees before he finds
the one that is really a pine tree. However this may be, there is
something singularly thrilling, even something urgent and intolerant,
about the endless forest repetitions; there is the hint of something
like madness in that musical monotony of the pines.
I said something like this to my friend; and he answered with
sardonic truth, "Ah, you wait till we come to a telegraph post.
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