"Theodore Sturgeon - Slow Sculpture" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

"I must be out of my mind," she said, joining him on
a garden path.
She said it to herself. He must have known because he
did not answer. The garden was alive with defiant chrys-
anthemums and a pond in which she saw the flicker of a
pair of redcap imperials--silver, not gold fish--the largest
she had ever seen. Then--the house.
First it was part of the garden with its colonnaded
Terrace--and then, with its rock walls (too massive to be
called fieldstone) part of the mountain. It was on and in
the hillside. Its roof paralleled the skylines, front and
sides, and part of it was backed against an out-jutting
cliff face. The door, beamed and studded and featuring
two archers' slits, was opened for them (but there was no
one there) and when it closed it was silent, a far more
solid exclusion of things outside than any click or clang
of latch or bolt.
She stood with her back against it watching him cross
what seemed to be the central well of the house, or at
least this part of it. It was a kind of small court in the
center of which was an atrium, glazed on all of its five
sides and open to the sky at the top. In it was a tree,
a cypress or juniper, gnarled and twisted and with the
turnedback, paralleled, sculptured appearance of what the
Japanese call bonsai.
"Aren't you coming?" he called, holding open a door
behind the atrium.
"Bonsai just aren't fifteen feet .tail," she said.
"This one is."


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She walked past it slowly, looking.
"How long have you had it?"
His tone of voice said he was immensely pleased. It
is a clumsiness to ask the owner of a bonsai how old it
is--you are then demanding to know if it is his work or
if he has acquired and continued the concept of another;
you are tempting him to claim for his own the concept
and the meticulous labor of someone else and it becomes
rude to tell a man he is being tested. Hence, How long
have you had it? is polite, forbearing, profoundly cour-
teous.
He answered, "Half my life."
She looked at the tree. Trees can be found, sometimes,
not quite discarded, not quite forgotten, potted in rusty
gallon cans in not quite successful nurseries, unsold be-
cause they are shaped oddly or have dead branches here