Paradoxical is with Nick and me at the Blanchard-Wrights’. We drove — he drove — around in the evening, over the Tacoma Narrows bridge, with cathedral clouds and a little fog on the water.

Looking across a long bay at dusk to a forested shoulder with a radio tower at the highpoint and four or five mixed lights over on the water? I could have counted a dozen kinds of off-black, and all of them would have implied the whole hundred cubic miles. This land is generous to our human ambitions; it acquiesces to assumptions and reservations. From across a fjord, it’s a lot of green-gray; while driving through it, there is nothing but forest; three feet in, it’s heavy liquid textures flowing a little out of reach.

Imagine a city on a hillside, a half-terraced multi-story city leavened with green-gray trees, and in a large room with a downhill view over the city and to the water — a tall, bare room painted in flat olives and stucco blues — a really great orchid or something, maybe a bird of paradise, hanging just within reach, but you cannot touch it because you wouldn’t believe it while you did. There isn’t too much beauty, but there’s too much other beauty. Stop imagining and step onto the porch in the dawn. Are you sure you stopped?

We’re really quite stuck with it all, even the aloof and slippery bits: not even their patterns, but them. The world is completely perfect — let’s go get ice cream! suggests some kind of dynamic perfection or perfection-in-silhouette, and traditionally we are to regard the trick not at coming unstuck but as sticking to the world instead of to our stickiness. And I just don’t know, but something in my æsthetic-emotional magnetism to those views over Salish Sea bays is enough to sit and watch by its own warmth.