In love with a tree

texture · UNDATED (Schtitt's youth, B.S. era, a West German town)

• When: UNDATED (when Schtitt was "Mario's age—or maybe more like Hal's age")
• What: Schtitt tells Mario that as a boy/youth he once fell in love with a willow "that from a certain humid twilit perspective had looked like a mysterious woman aswirl with gauze," in the public Platz of a West German town whose name "sounded to Mario like the sound of somebody strangling." He visited daily. The anecdote surfaces amid Mario's struggle to reconcile the surrender-the-self doctrine with a one-on-one sport — a rare window on Schtitt's aesthetic/romantic side (cf. the born-listener Mario as the one confidant who draws such reveries out).