When you walk through it on a summer afternoon, it's swarming with tourists, cameras round their necks and crumpled maps in their back pockets. They get out of the bus, push each other down the few paved paths through the park, and approve of the general neatness of things. Tired guides repeat the same stories ten times a day. At last, the tourists are taken away to the next attraction.
This park is the most boring thing you can imagine. It gets locked up at night. You aren't allowed to step on the lawn. Dozens of people are employed to plant all the flowers in exactly the same order year by year. No blade of grass is allowed to grow out of line.
As I see it, if you can't get lost, it's probably not worth taking a walk. Beauty is nowhere but in freedom, the freedom of things to grow any way they please, be difficult, frightening, ugly – or pleasant and decorative, if they absolutely have to. If you know you can drown at any time, how is a pool better than the sea?
This is how I think, and sometimes I feel superior because of it. But then, I look at my life and I realise that every single day I cling to the few paved paths like all those damn tourists.
