In a book about war, tyranny, oppression, political insanity and corruption,
in a prison camp, in a discussion in which some inmates are trying to contend
with a vision of a world devoid of real significance, of existence being no more
than brute violence, of the human propensity to destroy itself and everything else,

someone, an old man, presumably wise, tells of having once gone to live in a forest, far in the North, pristine, populated by no one but poor woodsmen and hermits;
he went there, he says, because he thought in that mute, placid domain of the trees,
he might find beyond the predations of animals and men something like the good.…
 

Ontario Review #59