G. Wells, and to those other trees, not so big but still giants - the
sequoia sempivirens or redwoods, which make of California forests
black-and-silver compositions of filmy fluttering light and solid bedded
shade. I am thinking also of that patch of pre-historic cypresses in
Monterey. These differ from the straight, symmetrical classic redwoods
as Rodin's "Thinker" differs from the Apollo. Monstrous, contorted
shapes - those Monterey cypresses look like creatures born underground,
who, at the price of almost unbearable torture, have torn through the
earth's crust, thrusting and twisting themselves airward. I refer even
to that astonishing detail in the general Californian sulphitism, the
seals which frequent beach rocks close to the shore, a short car ride
from the heart of a city as big as San Francisco.
- and this -
California, because of rich gold deposits, and a richer golden,
sunshine, its golden spring poppy and its golden summer verdure, seems
both literally and figuratively, a golden land golden and gay. It is a
land full of contradictions however. For those amazing memorials from a
prehistoric past give it in places a strange air of tragedy. I challenge
this grey old earth to produce a strip of country more beautiful, also
more poignant and catastrophic in natural connotation, than the one
which includes these cypresses of Monterey.
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