Saturday, December 25, 2010

Burroughs on Naming Slabsides

" ... I was offered a tract of wild land, barely a mile from home, that contained a secluded nook and a few acres of level, fertile land shut off from the vain and noisy world by a wooded precipitous mountain... and built me a rustic house there, which I call it 'Slabsides' because its outer walls are covered with slabs. I might have given it a prettier name, but not one more fit, of more in keeping with the mood that brought me thither.  A slab is the first cut from the log...I wanted to take a fresh cut of life-- something that had the bark on... Life has a different flavor here. It is reduced to simpler terms; its complex equations all disappear."

-from Far and Near by John Burroughs

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