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Earlier that day, which would be our last together, we had visited another town, and after strolling through the provincial pedestrian precinct, past the Renaissance-style town hall and the large brick church, we entered a park and lay down on the grass in the middle of it. Except for some teenage girls sitting on a bench in the shade of a tree maybe thirty metres behind us, there wasn't a person in sight. Birdsong sounded all around us. Usually I don't notice it, now I heard nothing else. Isn't it strange that birds sing in ways that we too find pleasing? I said. It didn't have to be that way. No, it didn't, she said. In my parents’ garden there are some birds that sound awful. Just hoarse, ugly croaking. And then gulls. They're the nastiest birds I know of. The really big ones are like dinosaurs. They are dinosaurs, I said. I know, she said. But not all birds bring up that association. The birds here in the park don't. No, I said and imagined dinosaurs chirping like little birds. That would have changed our impression of them entirely. But I didn't say anything about that, instead I lit a cigarette and lay back on the grass. A few chalk-white clouds drifted across the blue sky. The leaves on the trees rustled in the wind, which blew stronger now that it was past noon. In autumn and winter the day nears its end in the afternoon, coming up against a wall of darkness, in spring it seems to become diluted, while summer afternoons deepen it and make it richer. The light becomes fuller, the blue of the sky grows more intense, and in the landscape the heat of the sun is preserved throughout the day, in some places by accumulation, as in the sweltering tarmac or the air in little glades in the forest. The sea breeze coming in across the land makes the crowns of trees sway slowly, as if waking from a sleep, while their leaves rustle with a sound like a purling brook or a drawn-out sigh of pleasure. ‘Look there,’ she said, ‘at the tree, do you see how it shimmers?’ I sat up and glanced at the tree she was nodding towards. It grew on the other side of the narrow river that ran along the edge of the park. The course it followed lay too low for us to see the water. Instead the reflection of the light, fragile-seeming and transparent, that flickered over the thick trunk seemed to be coming from the tree itself. We sat there looking at it. The light moved like water, swaying and trickling. I wondered how it is possible to walk into a school and fire wildly at everything around one, to kill everyone in sight, children and adults, when the world is so calm and beautiful, so full of sunlight and birdsong, flowing rivers and unmoving trees. It must be because what is and what happens follow two different courses: that the unchanging and constantly recurring, the immobility and eternal beauty of the world is something the other course, that of actions and emotional drives belonging primarily to humans, only brushes against in passing. If the channels are not kept clear, if they are not left open and free but instead get clogged up and darken, which happens to all of us to a greater or lesser extent, then they become predominant, then they become us. And that – to be merely a human being, not a human being in the world – is dangerous. It has always been dangerous and it always will be dangerous. That's what I was thinking as I watched the reflection of light from the water gliding back and forth over the tree trunk on that summer afternoon, and at the same time I knew I would always remember it, since I saw it with her.