What do people say about love?
Is it like math, which comes with prerequisites? Should a person learn how to care for a cat or dog before you presume to care for a person?
Is love systematic? Is there a science to it?
A friend and I have been exchanging notes on Carson McCuller’s story “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.”
The story is about love. It’s also about the kinds of things we say in public, and whether people think we’re drunk or crazy when we say things that are important to us.
The conversation started because The New York Times published a story about a class at Harvard where students choose a tree at the university’s arboretum for a semester. McCullers’s story is on the syllabus.
Can you learn to love a tree?
It’s an interesting question if you’re prone to thinking about place — and how a place becomes a place.
• Sources: Carson McCullers’s story was published in 1942. It was one of six stories collected with the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café in 1951. A copy is here:
https://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/A_Tree.pdf
Margaret Roach, “Starting at Harvard and Falling for Your First Tree”; The New York Times, Feb. 10, 2026. It’s here:
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