Someone asked me today why it is that I find the bark of trees to be interesting, worth photographing, worth studying. Rather than say again what I have said about bark in past blog writing, I said I thought maybe the reason is that tree bark is visually enigmatic, and I am challenged to find meaning in obscurity. I wasn’t certain it was a good answer, but that’s the way it is with enigmas. 

On my bicycle ride later, as I watched a big cloud moving in the direction of home, where I was going, I remembered a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and thought I could have given it as answer to the question about why I am interested in making pictures of bark.  In the play when two of Hamlet’s old friends from school show up unexpectedly, he asks them why they have come “to prison hither.”  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern want to know what he means by prison. Hamlet says Denmark is a prison. Rosencrantz asks, “Then is the world a prison?” After a bit of banter Hamlet says “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it (Denmark) is a prison.”  When I was about five minutes from home, the heavens opened (as Shakespeare would have said) and I got wet.  After I put my bike away and got into dry clothes, I read Act 2, Scene 2 of hamlet and found that it would have been a good response to the question about why I like bark.