This is a landscape so dynamic that its very changeability leads to innumerable moments of recognition. I captured some of these in my notes from that time, as, for example, in these lines, written in May 2002: “I do believe it to be true that the land here is demonstrably alive; that it does not exist solely, or even incidentally, as a stage for the enactment of human history; that it is [itself] a protagonist.” Elsewhere, in another note, I wrote, “Here even a child will begin a story about his grandmother with the words: ‘in those days the river wasn’t here and the village was not where it
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