What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

“I am sitting under tall trees, with a great wind boiling like surf about the tops of them, so that their leaves rock and roars in something that is at once exultation and agony.  

I feel, in fact, as if I were actually sitting at the bottom of the sea among mere anchors and ropes, while over my head and over the green twilight of water sounded the everlasting rush of waves and the toil and crash and shipwreck of tremendous ships.

The wind tugs at the trees as if it might pluck them root and all out of the earth like tufts of grass.

Or, to try yet another desperate figure of speech for this unspeakable energy, the trees are straining and tearing and lashing as if they were a tribe of dragons each tied by the tail.


As I look at these top-heavy giants tortured by an invisible and violent witchcraft, a phrase comes back in my mind.

I remember a little boy of my acquaintance who was once walking in Battersea Park under just such torn skies and tossing trees.  He did not like the wind at all; it blew in his face too much; it made him shut his eyes; and it blew off his hat, of which he was very proud.  

He was, as far as I remember, about four.  

After complaining repeatedly of the atmospheric unrest, he said at last to to his mother, “Well, why don’t you take away the trees, and then it wouldn’t wind.”


Nothing could be more intelligent or natural than this mistake.

Any one looking for the first time at the trees might fancy that they were indeed vast and titanic fans, which by their mere waving agitated the air around them for miles.


Nothing, I say, could be more human and excusable than the belief that it is the trees which make the wind.  

Indeed, the belief is so human and excusable that is is, as a matter of fact, the belief of about ninety-nine out of a hundred of the philosophers, reformers, sociologists, and politicians of the great age in which we live.  My small friend, was, in fact, very like the principle modern thinkers; only much nicer.”  G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

The trees are like me, and like thee.  The spirit of God, the wind.