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Show WINTER LANDSCAPE WITH A GIRL IN BROWN SHOES to have snow: the fundamental situation -Delmore Schwartz The bridge was frozen. The river glared momentarily like an arc-lamp through the woods, the woods were silent. Two huge black dogs lugged an invisible rope up the hill where the sun was coming to a quiet end, and everyone who slipped and fell in the street that day, fell the way a leaf falls onto the hood of a car- reluctantly, and with enormous contempt- and was part of a true story. She was little consolation in her brown shoes. There were so many things the light averted she could barely keep the sky in place-which was now a hemisphere- and she could not identify any feeling she had that wasn't love. Love: because the horizon had never appeared so much like a shore, because snow was just beginning to occupy the landscape which was sinking, inexplicably, like an unending page, like too many waterfalls. Then, too, the disarming wreaths gathered around the streetlamps did, in some way, apply to her. In the same way that I am doing here. And eventually the great shadow of the woods fell across the upland pastures like a scarf-- if she had seen it-the blue scarf that came unloose from her throat that morning, and fell across the white field of her pillow. The most beautiful moments are beyond our reach. And nothing is more ordinary than a girl in brown shoes walking down the street as it begins to snow. Or love, which comes mysteriously back to us. And yet, as is always the case, it was |