Product Description "I haven't seen these hills change," says Nathaniel Ariss, "even if only because the city hasn't reached here yet, but I've seen me change." In fact, Nathaniel and his history change with every person who tries to make sense of the man and the meaning behind his life and work. Having gone through some mysterious tribulation in the past, Nathaniel retreated to a house in the Catskill mountains of New York that he calls the Pequod. But the city found Nathaniel in the persons of those who try, at least temporarily, to escape it by visiting the Pequod and taking the names of characters from, for the most part, great American novels. When Nathaniel decides to return to his life, however, an unexpected success and the pursuant breakdown of the reality that he has been building for himself turn his biography, A Whispering Through the Branches, into a comment on society's lust for ambiguous truths, the mutable nature of America and its history, and the relationships between reality and fiction, desire and perception, and a character and the author who created him. About the Author A Whispering Through the Branches is Justin Katz's first novel and the first movement of his Symphony Without Music. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Prelude Shall we open with the trees? Would that we could all branch outward from such serenity. To be so well centered. To be so balanced by our roots! O to have the faith in the ground on which we stand to dig as deeply inward as we reach out grasping toward the heavens! And to have such little care concerning those with whom we mix our leaves in our aspirations! The sweetly dominating Maple linking arms with the stout Oak and the molting Birch; and the Pines, all yearning to shed their innocent coats, as their cousins have, and show their naked wrinkles to the world. Yes, let's open with the trees, because the Spring is lo