Poor Will's Almanck: July 30 - August 5, 2019

In his book, Mountains of the Mind, Robert Macfarlane writes about the role of imagination in a person’s approach to space and place. The mountains that people climb, he writes, must first exist and be conquered in their minds. When he actually climbed mountains, Macfarlane discovered “that the mountains one gazes at, reads about, dreams of and desires are not the mountains one climbs.” The real mountains are “matters of hard, steep rock and freezing snow…of vertigo…of hypertension, nausea and frostbite.” But is it true that in order to experience something… like summer… I have to imagine it first? At the beginning of August, the question seems absurd. Why should I try to imagine what is right here all around me? In the gray and cold of February, the question is less frivolous. Then, my anticipation creates a different Summer Mountain in which the weather is perfect, the heat and humidity are not oppressive, in which the garden is always beautiful and productive, and all the good