bogs

It was early autumn, and the bog, like the trees we could see on Lullymore, was relinquishing its green. Its colors were now khaki, beige, gold, crimson, ginger, and—where peat was exposed or water had pooled—molasses brown or oily black. Small hummocks supported species that favor drier ground: russet-stemmed bog cotton, whose fluffy white bolls would constellate the landscape in spring; gray-green heather, or ling, which in August would crown the knolls with blooms of royal purple; devil’s matchstick, with its livid pustules of scarlet fruit; and tiny, tentacled, carnivorous sundew, its glue-trap leaves primed to enfold insects. The wetter areas were dense with sphagnum moss, the bog’s dominant and formative vegetation, its stems tangling deep into the water. So absorbent is sphagnum that during the First World War it was harvested by the ton for use as a surgical dressing.

William Atkins, "Bogland"

Living

The reader must retain a head clear enough to realize that Rilke's inwarding of life depends entirely upon a detachment from it. It is not "living" life he asks for but its contemplation. "Living" paradoxically requires ignoring things, forgetting things, enshrining partiality, obeying interest, changing your situation, not simply observing it change; living is wanting; living is willful, heedless, fearful; living absorbs life; living feeds; living excretes; living is as brutal and indifferent as chewing teeth.

William Gass, Reading Rilke