"I am a landscape," he said. "a landscape and a person walking in that landscape. There are daunting cliffs there, And plains glad in their way of brown monotony. But especially there are sinkholes, places of sudden terror, of small circumference and malevolent depths." "I know," she said. "When I set forth to walk in myself, as it might be on a fine afternoon, forgetting, sooner or later I come to where sedge and clumps of white flowers, rue perhaps, mark the bogland, and I know there are quagmires there that can pull you down, and sink you in bubbling mud." "We had an old dog," he told her, "when I was a boy, a good dog, friendly. But there was an injured spot on his head, if you happened just to touch it he'd jump up yelping and bite you. He bit a young child, they had to take him down to the vet's and destroy him." "No one knows where it is," she said, "and even by accident no one touches it. It's inside my landscape, and only I, making my way preoccupied through my life, crossing my hills, sleeping on green moss of my own woods, I myself without warning touch it, and leap up at myself -" "- or flinch back just in time." "Yes, we learn that. It's not a terror, it's pain we're talking about: those places in us, like your dog's bruised head, that are bruised forever, that time never assuages, never."