The furry brown leaves aren't leaves at all but something else, animals from the understory working to a set of instructions known to no human though Leonardo Da Vinci did manage to glimpse them briefly. He tried to write about what he saw, to paint it, to get it into some fixed form but it just wriggled away. And then outside the water-seller started up with his salty and disastrously memorable song.

What happens in the silence stays in the silence. The lady with the sword sleeps under the water. A hedgehog ambles towards a stream, a cloud contemplates the songs of the lemon trees. Somewhere in the desert a lost pocketwatch begins to rust.

Does science kill what it loves? Does the biologist ask the sparrow's permission before placing a microchip on its shoulder? What world is this we live in?