Scarcely told was this folly of a common man whose origin I am unable to recall. Still from now and then the story of him would hastily reemerge in my mind, as if to suggest any relevance. Through much iterations have such a tale been passed, forgotten and retold, adorned and altered through the fate of time, yet so terribly able to find itself amidst the incessant flows of history to remain, however infinitesimally, with a degree of graceful persistence. The man, who attained a greater fortune in his earlier times, has seen the unpleasant resolutions of his willful ignorance, perchance of the more fundamental scope of things. Having thoroughly depleted any potentiality for a glamorous life of luxury, Mr. Nemus displayed in the most obscure of hobbies an affinity for metaphorical ostentation. A recluse of passive sociality, the humble cabin of his housed an impressive quantity of provisionally bound parchments, documenting his vast yet shallow knowledge of the essences of living creatures.

It was some hours after midnight did Mr. Nemus arose from his abruptly interrupted slumber. Unable to recollect the feverish visions, he had nonetheless found himself amused with an unwarranted want to cover the clearing aside of the cottage with an arboreal ornament. Trees of wisdom it ought, he thought. A structurally sound, spiritually potent, tropical ebony came to mind. “I wish it can be a tree so tall it extends forever so long as my eyes can see,” the old man proclaimed with childish excitement. He gave a few breathless chuckles at the thought, and before he became fully aware he had relapsed once again into a state of dreary sleep.

The following day he, with an untraceable passion to create, rushed out of his dwellings carrying an assortment of shoveling instruments. Settling upon a site of appreciable heat and exposure to sunlight, he embedded the seed deep into the soil. With a facade of seeming wisdom, he covered the surroundings with a ritualistic degree of tenderness. Day after day he would follow the itinerary, arriving at dawn, and departing at dusk. Little did he know how impossible such seeds can sprout in the conditions he had chosen, let alone his preposterous mistaking of a common seed with the noble ebony! But seldom did he give any more thought to this unlikely mission he had arbitrarily stepped into. As the heart desires its improbable ascension, so does it soon risk to face its demise.

Upon a day when the sun had ascended to the middle of the visible sky, Mr. Nemus entrenched in his thought, staring into an empty field, an act almost a decade long, did he finally collapse onto the ground after too many years of a sort of frugal consumption. Upon returning to consciousness the much older man realized his irreversible physical frailty. Yet all the dreams, the visions from that fateful night, a life devoted to these audacious episodes of venturing into the world’s miracles! Are they all to waste? About to return to his house, never to come back, a sudden jolt beneath the ground prompted him to take a glimpse behind him. In an almost spectral appearance a beam of darkened green shimmered from beneath the soil. Accompanied by a deafening surge of structure, a mighty trunk ruptured itself from a singular bud as if undergoing an eldritch mutation. There it stood, within minutes, the most stunning grandeur the man could ever wish to see, the darkish flesh of the tree so tall, the end of which was nowhere to be seen. How joyous Mr. Nemus must have been, to see so tangibly before him the fruition of his entire life coalesced into an infinite form, an inanimate yet living object embodying him in both body and spirit!

The man rushed back to his cottage to awaken himself from an ecstatic state of shock, returning with ropes and screws in the hope of ascending the stairs to heaven. Yet all too old! He had forgotten the paths to his creation, a route so long, but so short for his earlier self, blinded with a fiery passion. Infused with a weak irritation, he kept on his search for the place that has never been. He found himself trapped in the middle of the forest, and in a sudden twist of fate he had crippled his fatigued soul into a sort of eternal slumber. It is at this moment does humanity reflect upon its vulnerable absurdity, why such characters lived the most pathetic and dignified life of all!