July 20th, 2010

Contrast

I quite like our little neighborhood.  It’s definitely in the city, it only takes me about 10 minutes by Metro to get to work and yet, it’s quite green.  At the edge of our balcony, a tall bush meets the lower branches of an evergreen tree and we even sometimes see birds in there, but our view is up close enough that you can appreciate the smaller life forms, like spiders, who live there.

In front of our house (a pessimist might say in the narrow area between us and the block of flats opposite) there are many chestnut trees, which provide an amazing range of seasonal variation.  If you look out of our kitchen window, or stand in front of our building and look to the right, you see a forest covered hill rising beyond the railroad tracks.  It is a screen on which the changing of the seasons is projected.  In autumn, the leaves change colors, to red and yellow as the air cools, to brown as summer bows out, and then they fall and it’s winter when all the trees stand stark and naked and you can see things beyond them that you couldn’t see before and then the snow falls and it looks like Narnia, a landscape of crystal.  In spring, the trees are blossoming and every day brings changes and before you know it, it’s high summer and the whole hill is two or three shades of bright, bold, in your face green.

Right in the middle of it, but probably not for much longer, there is one dead tree.  It’s really quite beautiful, a biege and barkless pole standing all alone, it’s branches tangled and bare, like a splash of scarlet on a black and white page, the colorless one provides the color, by contrast.  (actually, that’s sort of a backassed analogy, but I liked the way it sounded.)

In Prague, the reconstructed buildings look so much nicer than the unreconstructed buildings but I have noticed that once a neighborhood has been entirely reconstructed, the magic is gone and you grow used to a properly painted, nice building that is not falling apart.  The new buildings need the contrast of the old ones to really look their very best.

The skeleton tree makes all the other ones look great.