“The Elbe in the vicinity of Hamburgh is so divided, and spread out, that the country looks more like a plain overflowed by heavy rain than the bed of a great river.”

I walked with William along the sandy roads beyond Altona, where the causeway felt dry under our boots though the air was thick with moisture. The water did not hold itself in a single channel but lay scattered across the land, turning the familiar shape of a river into something flat and sudden, like a flood that had stopped moving but left its mark everywhere. Brick houses stood warm against this wetness, their gardens twisted with gravel walks and bending poplars that seemed to lean toward the spreading gray.

I ask you to look at what is before you without naming it first. Do not call a thing by a word until you have seen how it holds the light or breaks the wind. Let the sight come before the name, so that when you speak of the river or the rain, you are speaking from what you saw and not from what you know already.