The leaves flailed in the gusty north wind. Smell of dust. A haze of brown light, the western sky brassy. The branches rose to twice or three times his height; the underbranches drooped down where they could brush his face. Human scale. The Mediterranean tree, the tree of the Greeks, who had seen so many things so clearly, seen things in their proper proportion, everything in a gauge symmetry to the human scale—the trees, the towns, their whole physical world, the rocky islands in the Aegean, the rocky hills of the Peloponnese—a universe you could walk across in a few days. Perhaps home was
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