Amid all the sameness, however, one change became evident. A good change. Tengo was aware that, as he went on writing his novel, a new wellspring was forming inside him. Not that its water was gushing forth: it was more like a tiny spring among the rocks. The flow may have been limited, but it was continuous, welling up drop by drop. He was in no hurry. He felt no pressure. All he had to do was wait patiently for the water to collect in the rocky basin until he could scoop it up. Then he would sit at his desk, turning what he had scooped into words, and the story would advance quite naturally.

This ideal model—to say it in her words—is the author who produces books "as a pumpkin vine produces pumpkins." She also used other metaphors of natural processes that follow their course unperturbed—the wind that shapes the mountain, the wrack of the tides, the annual circles in the bole of the trees—but these were metaphors of literary creation in general, whereas the image of the pumpkin referred directly to me.

... For my part, I've worked harder this summer than in my entire life and I can say that I've worked for my entire life. I've laid the foundations of a magnificent work... I have died and been born again with the gem-encrusted key to my final spiritual casket. It's up to me now to open it in the absence of all extraneous impressions and its mysteries will emerge into a very beautiful sky. I'll need twenty years during which I'll remain cloistered within myself, renouncing all publicity other than reading to friends. I'm working on everything at once, or rather I mean that everything is so well ordered in my mind that, as a sensation reaches me now, it is transformed and automatically places itself in the right book or the right poem. When a poem is ripe, it will drop free. You can see that I'm imitating the laws of nature.

There's a state you can get into where finding a song is just cracking the surface. It's like picking a potato—it was already growing there. You can just pull it out. I don't know if it's a different form of songwriting, but I know when I hear it. Townes would definitely be one of those people. People always call his music otherworldly, and that's why. It's not bizarre; it's very familiar to you.

If ... we let the expression of the object grow from its complex relationship to its environment, and to the job it has to do for human beings, something remarkable happens: it takes on a kind of "classic" quality. The design seems almost to have "grown" that way, or to be inevitable — and then we say: "it's a classic." It is timeless. It will be valued by future generations just as we value (or ought to value) the greatest design achievements of previous generations.

Autonomous and purely physical processes of this class created organic life on Earth in the pre-human era. Similar, but human-inspired processes created the beauty of traditional towns and villages in the first human era. Similar, but more conscious processes can now be used to make buildings, rooms, streets, gardens, public squares, neighborhoods, landscape, and world. That, I believe, is what will come to pass in the second human era which is now just beginning.