Our woods and lake were both home and my first place of exile. The woods and lake, like my books, were my constant companions, and I found myself compelled to give them names, or learn their names: the wildflowers and trees,
the woodland creatures and their favorite haunts, as if by bestowing names—especially to birdsongs—I might discover added dimensions to the places I loved, as the gods did for the early Greeks. That sylvan landscape peopled with nymphs and dyads, I suppose, was the first book—the book of the gods. I cannot remember reading children’s books, only the books in my grandfather’s library, the naturalist philosophers like Emerson and Thoreau, but mostly histories of the classical world, Plutarch, Herodotus, and Thucydides, then Homer later, and then Civil War memoirs. My mother did not believe in children’s books. In my child ’s mind, there was Greece and Rome, and then the American Civil War . . . and the abiding earth.
—excerpt from John Alden’s Pankrác Prison diary