a tree too huge to see at once

I can remember only one of its exhibits, which I loved: a large wall of little doors, arrayed from floor to ceiling, each with a tiny handle. Some I could reach for myself, while my father would have to lift me to others. I must have worn him out with my desire to open and then close every single one of them. What was behind each door was a pane of glass, a window which gave onto a great – real? – tree, and each aperture revealed some different aspect of its life: nests, squirrels, spiders, stuffed birds whose glass eyes looked back with gleaming veracity. There was no way to ever see the entire tree at once, on the hundreds – were there? – of alternative perspectives the doors opened. This great curio cabinet, this museum of viewpoints, serves in my memory as a metaphor that resonates in many directions. The past itself seems to me like that tree, unseeable in its entirety, knowable only in its parts, each viewpoint yielding a different version of the story about what the whole might be. What is the world but a tree too huge to see at once, known only through the shaping character of the particular aperture through which we see?

– Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast