Leaves by John Updike

The grape leaves outside my window are curiously beautiful.  "Curiously" because it comes upon me as strange, after the long darkness of self-absorption and fear and shame in which I have been living, that things are beautiful, that independent of our catastrophes they continue to maintain the casual precision, the effortless abundance of inventive "effect," which are the hallmark and the specialty of Nature.  Nature: this morning it seems to me very clear that Nature may be defined as that which exists without guilt.  Our bodies are in Nature; our shoes, their laces, the little plastic tips of the laces--everything around us and about us is in Nature, and yet something holds us away from it, like the upward push of water that keeps us from touching the sandy bottom, ribbed and glimmering with crescental fragments of oyster shell, so clear to the eyes.