But, as always when I had such thoughts, I failed to obtain answers to the questions over which natural philosophers of old could have agonized. I thought that the earwig which I thought appeared before me at that moment, although it didn’t, and placed on my hand and watched as it stayed still, as if dead, after squirming for a while — the earwig, at that moment, represented nature — thoroughly ignored my question. So I became a little angry and wanted to mock and slander nature in any way I could, and thought that a modifier was necessary in order to do so, and said that nature was shabby, false, ashamed, squalid, squalid beyond measure, and above all, cruel beyond measure (I wanted to inflict injustice on nature through an excessive use of adjectives), but as could be easily predicted, I was the one, not nature, who was shabby, false, ashamed, squalid, squalid beyond measure, and above all, cruel beyond measure. So I harbored an ill feeling against nature, and thought that I could expose it without hesitation — I could, in this way, harbor an ill feeling against anything at all, and expose it without hesitation — but I just harbored it without exposing it.
And I looked at the scenes in the landscape, ignoring perspective with my eyes as I’d done before, as if looking at a painting in which perspective is ignored, and switching around the scenes in the landscape which had become messy in the process, I thought that nature was exposing, almost audaciously, the fact that it was perfectly indifferent to everything that happened to it, or hiding it, through its various faces. I looked around, thinking that there might be something that belonged to nature, a squirrel, for instance, that was watching me in secret as I thought that about nature, but I didn’t see anything. Still, I felt as if something were watching me in secret.
But such thoughts seemed dull, and I decided that I wouldn’t think anymore. Lying still, I looked up. But as often happens when I’m lying on the grass in a forest, thoughts that seemed trapped in a sort of endless repetition floated around in my mind, and they had a delicate but tenacious feel to them, which made me think that their roots were touching the roots of the grass on which I was lying, that they were taking root in the ground.
As I often do at such times, I tried to fix my gaze on an object so as to break away from tangled thoughts and drive my thoughts to a single point. But there was nothing that held my gaze. I looked around with vacant eyes. Branches were blocking out the sky. Some branches at the top of a tall tree were shaking almost imperceptibly, and the branches, which had nothing really special about them, gave off a very strange, indescribable feeling. It seemed that you would begin to shudder if you looked at them long enough, but I didn’t begin to shudder, no matter how long I looked at them. And yet the strange feeling was indescribable indeed, and although I had the feeling, it seemed that the feeling, in the end, couldn’t be mine.
Perhaps it was because the tremor of the branches that were shaking so faintly seemed like the waves of a quiet sea, which made it seem as if I were looking up at the surface from under the sea, and as if everything I saw were an underwater scene. At one point, it felt as if the trees were coral reefs, which was a very easy feeling to have, and a feeling that seemed okay to discard, so I discarded the feeling.
Still, in a brief space of time, I let the sun, which was very gradually passing between those branches, and then between those branches and the branches of a neighboring tree, pass very gradually while I was watching it, although it was of course passing as always at a regular interval, and at one point, it looked as if it were caught by the tip of a branch. It was nothing more than a feeling I had, that I was making things up in my mind, but I let myself stay in that state for as long as I wanted.
Peace of mind, which came to me so rarely that when it did come at an unexpected hour it made me feel somewhat awkward and uncomfortable, and led me to keep an eye on it, slightly suspicious because I wasn’t unaware that it would soon disappear, came to me like a rain cloud that comes dawdling, but although you couldn’t say that it had nothing to do with the peaceful landscape before me, it wasn’t just because of the landscape. Peace of mind always came for no good reason, and disappeared for even less of a good reason than when it came.
For quite some time I looked at the branches that gave off an indescribable feeling, and then away from the branches and at the sun which was slowly moving across the vast and boundless sky, and then suddenly leapt to my feet, unbuckled my belt, and began to wrap it around a tree trunk for some reason. I didn’t know why I was doing it, but it seemed that it was an okay thing to do. Anyway, the belt fit the tree perfectly, and I was pleased that the girth of the tree was the same as my own. At any rate, the belt was old, and I’d been grappling with the question of how to give it a proper end. (Even after a long time had passed, I thought from time to time about the tree around which I had wrapped a belt, and felt happy to think that somewhere, there was a tree wearing a belt, one of the few trees in the world wearing a belt, perhaps the only one. And it could perhaps stir up the imagination of those who found it.) And indicating that nature should go on doing whatever it was that it was doing, and hoping that nature, which was always silent and seemed impertinent as a result, would stay deeply absorbed in itself for ever after, I gently bent a branch that touched my hand and then let it go, thus bidding nature farewell.
I came out of the forest after that and was walking across the hill where animals were grazing in a herd, but I couldn’t tell if they were sheep or goats. The animals, white and gray and black, did not make crying sounds that would identify them as sheep or goats, and there are sheep that look almost like goats, and goats that look like sheep. Perhaps the herd consisted of both goats and sheep. Or there could be a hybrid of a sheep and a goat, although I wasn’t sure if such a thing existed, which would look like either a goat or a sheep depending on how you looked at it. It was also possible that some sheep and goats couldn’t easily distinguish between goats and sheep, which looked so much like themselves, and suspected that they were of the same species as themselves.
Without really thinking about it, I began to count the animals that I wasn’t sure were sheep or goats. But I kept having to start over at ten. The animals, which couldn’t possibly know that I was counting them, kept moving around, and the herd kept changing in form although it didn’t break off completely (for that was how a herd of sheep maintained its form).
Recalling that when I had trouble falling asleep I counted sheep or other animals, and that I stayed up a whole night once, letting more than five thousand sheep pass through my mind, I thought that counting the animals that were before me, which I wasn’t sure were sheep or goats, was different from counting animals when I had trouble falling asleep, but that I wasn’t sure what the difference was. Still, I thought that I certainly liked doing something that went on endlessly.