"Mrs Taylor was the one who vastly increased my dominion over the earth and its creatures by teaching me the art of naming them. It wasn't until years later that I learned what a fatal art that is. Because if on the one hand to name a thing is to be able to address it, to appropriate it, to have a way of understanding it, it is on the other hand to erect a barrier between yourself and it that only on the rarest, most inspired occasions, you are able to surmount again.
Now that thanks to Mrs Taylor I can name a tree as a tree, what I see when I look at it is less than it actually is, than simply, the name I name it by.
When I was a child, what I saw when I looked at a tree was something as naked in its mystery as I was naked in mine. Yet I thank her anyway, if she hadn't taught me the name, somebody else would have, and probably not half so well."
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