I was wrong again about the weather. It’s the mass of the continent that keys up the elements, the lake that holds steady. Something paradoxical about water—much more imperturbable than land (and you would think, what’s more stoic than a rock?), and yet so much of the climate is bound up with its moods. In any case I managed to get the whole continent wrong. And someone who might have set me straight sooner is gone.

Did he also, in leaving, answer this question of Darwin’s: “Why is life short, why such high object—”?

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