looking at old entries on my first visit to the glass flowers:

"...i was at once reverent and joyful...case upon case, row upon row, five, six different kinds of plants in each, so closely pushed together, an eye-scattering mess of magnified stamens and pistules and cross sections - how can one really look?..."

"... a woman turned into the same aisle. isn't this overwhelming? she said to me. yes, i said, and i walked back with her and pointed to the red maple leaves. she said. do they move you too? she turned out to be a forester from vermont, and knew a great deal about trees, and started telling me about red maples and silver maples (i remembered this last night, when von was talking about the silver maple on athens st that exploded because of the extreme cold.)

i started telling her about mahogany seed pods outside my grandmother's house, and white passion flowers and their crimped coils, winding over fences in old punggol churchyards. would have told her about raintrees too, how fern hung from them, and how the flared filaments of the raintree flower were like small pink eruptions[...]and i think that is the uniting power of beauty - that when seized by beauty, for a few moments strangers see in the same transformed light - before moving apart again."