Thin, Lucent Clouds

Well, you know, we've given some attention recently to writers trying to get into the heads of dogs, literarily speaking. So it is only fair I should tell you that in THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES, translated by Sophie Wilkins, Robert Musil kind of skates around writing from the POV of some horses. He admits: "It was hard to comprehend what was going on inside the animals," though he ventures to suspect they "knew nothing of love as a tangible desire, but only as a breath and a haze that sometimes veiled their vision of the world with thin, lucent clouds." You know, this reminds me of some years ago when I watched the 7-hour Soviet movie version of WAR AND PEACE and I sort of perked up when a tree started talking. I was like, "Can this really be in Tolstoy?" And to my recollection, I looked it up somewhere, and yes, that tree had some things to say, and I wrote about it extensively somewhere, but I've searched my "blog" and my files and all my many unpublished novels and my emails to McNeil, and I can't find anything I wrote about the talking tree. We might even say I'm not convinced the talking tree exists, but I don't care about things anymore, so I'm not going to make an effort to find out.