《The Billionaire’s Regret Clause;One Year Together. One Love 》全部章節：第 231 章 - 第 240 章

Don interviewed Thomas across the summer of the twelfth year.Not the formal sit-down interviews of the estate piece research — those had been at the kitchen table, Thomas with his programme, Don with his notebook, the oral history form that Ernest had designed in the fourth year and that Don had adapted for his own purposes. The oral history interviews had produced thirty-seven pages of transcribed material, organized by topic and year and theme, the kind of material that becomes footnotes in a longer argument or context for a quotation. Those interviews had been important. They had given Don the factual structure of Thomas's working life, the chronology of the estate's gardens across five decades, the names of the head gardeners Thomas had worked under and the apprentices he had trained and the plants he had introduced and removed and reintroduced.But the ground-knowledge interviews were different.They happened in the garden, during work. Don would come to where Thomas was — not a

December of the twelfth year had a quality that Ernest tried to describe and found required the full journal entry rather than the accurate sentence.He had been trying to write an accurate sentence for twenty minutes. The sentence would not come. The sentence was too small, too contained, too neat for the thing he was trying to describe. The quality of December was not a quality that could be captured in a single sentence, no matter how accurate. The quality of December was the quality of the accumulated twelve, the quality of the ordinary days that had built something that could no longer be described as a collection of ordinary days but had become something else, something larger, something that required the full spaciousness of the journal entry to even approach.He had been writing the journal for twelve years. The first December entry had been the month of the first year's end — the accounting of the managed distance and the viable arrangement and the careful positions that he a

January of the thirteenth year had the quality of a January that contained Japan.Ernest found this formulation and examined it and found it was not quite right in the way that the earlier formulations of this kind had not been quite right. The formulation was trying to capture something that was real — the specific quality of the January that was the preparation for the trip, the way that the trip's future presence shaped the present experience, the way that the anticipation of the cherry blossom season infused the bare January landscape with something that was not yet present but was already operating.But January did not contain Japan. Japan was in April or May of the year, four months ahead, four months of winter and early spring, four months of the estate's dormancy and gradual awakening. What January contained was the preparation for Japan: the container research in its final stages, Don's Japanese vocabulary at the specific level he had aimed for, the specific form of the forwa

They arrived at the garden on the third day. The two days in Osaka had been what Ernest had designed them to be: the adjustment, the bodily accommodation to the time difference and the scale of the city, the beginning of the Japanese quality of being in a place where the ordinary surface was already different from everything they had previously encountered. Not the dramatic difference of the foreign city's famous monuments. The specific difference of the ordinary: the street food stalls and the city's specific noise and the quality of the morning light and the way the city moved. Osaka had given them what Ernest had intended: the emptying before the filling. They had walked the city without purpose on the first day, Don without the notebook, Ernest with only the journal for the evening recording. They had eaten from the street stalls — takoyaki and okonomiyaki, the specific foods of Osaka that the guidebooks said were the city's contribution to Japanese cuisine — and they had not d

They had eight days in Japan.The remaining days after the three mornings at the garden had the quality of the remaining days after the central thing had been found: the extension of the territory, the further encounters that populated the argument without being its center. Don had told Ernest on the fourth morning, as they planned the remaining days, that he did not want to leave Japan without seeing the public gardens — not because the public gardens would teach him something the private garden had not taught, but because the argument of the book required the full spectrum of the garden's expression. The hereditary garden was the argument's center. The public gardens were the argument's context.The public gardens of Kyoto on the fourth day — the great Zen gardens, the raked gravel of Ryoanji, the specific quality of the stones in the gravel, which had been placed in a configuration that had been read and re-read for five hundred years and had produced no final reading. Don stood at