G.C. Waldrep
Apologia Pro Vita Tua

Walking through the forest at evening I do not stop for the ladyslippers in bloom, because I know that in looking I will be consumed.

There is also the fact of the setting sun.

Insects drawn by its heat circle the stocky sun of my body, which is also setting, only more slowly.

To view the forest as a garden is to commit, at best, a nearly unforgivable act of nostalgia.

In the best paintings some key figure is always missing. This is the magic behind both Vermeer and Delacroix.

In the forest, the key figure is never missing, only hiding. This explains most of Western literature, and Robin Hood.

To feel sure that the person you need most is nearby, even if you can’t see him or her, is the besetting fallacy of the forest. It is also comforting.

Christianity’s innovation was to preserve the figure while abolishing pretty much everything else.

The reason why the Bible doesn’t spend much time cataloguing the sins of the eye (which are myriad) is that the eye is a double agent. The forest, on the other hand, is working for itself.

Darkness replacing the forest—now, for instance—is just another expression of metonymy, inside which various plants & animals travel.

I imagine that the figure hiding in the forest is a pilgrim, and that he carries a candle. Or, I think the figure hiding in the forest is a hunter. I imagine that he carries a gun.

There exists an eclipse of the body which is not the body. The ladyslippers in the moonlight have become bladders of ash.
I look down and see the flickering gun in my bare hands