excerpts from "The Infinite Lawn" from Mr. Palomar by Italo CalvinoAround Mr. Palomar's house there is a lawn. This is not a place where a lawn should exist naturally: so the lawn is an artificial object, composed from natural objects, namely grasses. The lawn's purpose is to represent nature, and this representation occurs as the substitution, for the nature proper to the area, of a nature in itself natural but artificial for this area.
A lawn does not have precise boundaries; there is a border where the grass stops growing, but still a few scattered blades sprout farther on, then a thick green clod, then a sparser stretch: are they still part of the lawn, or not?
The lawn is a collection of grasses__this is how the problem must be formulated__that includes a subcollection of cultivated grasses and a subcollection of spontaneous grasses known as weeds; an intersection of the two subcollections is formed by the grasses that have grown spontaneously but belong to the cultivated species and are therefore indistinguishable from them. The two subcollections, in their turn, include various species, each of which is a subcollection; or, rather, it is a collection that includes the subcollection; or, rather, it is a collection that includes the subcollection of its own members, which are members also of the lawn and the subcollection of those alien to the lawn. The wind blows; seeds and pollens fly, the relations among the collections are disrupted...
[image from http://grinningreaper.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/scything-update/]
A lawn does not have precise boundaries; there is a border where the grass stops growing, but still a few scattered blades sprout farther on, then a thick green clod, then a sparser stretch: are they still part of the lawn, or not?
The lawn is a collection of grasses__this is how the problem must be formulated__that includes a subcollection of cultivated grasses and a subcollection of spontaneous grasses known as weeds; an intersection of the two subcollections is formed by the grasses that have grown spontaneously but belong to the cultivated species and are therefore indistinguishable from them. The two subcollections, in their turn, include various species, each of which is a subcollection; or, rather, it is a collection that includes the subcollection; or, rather, it is a collection that includes the subcollection of its own members, which are members also of the lawn and the subcollection of those alien to the lawn. The wind blows; seeds and pollens fly, the relations among the collections are disrupted...
[image from http://grinningreaper.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/scything-update/]
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