My in-laws have a house in Florida, in a gated community that is home, or second-home, they told me, to 3,200 families. It is a colonial outpost in the midst of a colonial outpost in the midst of a colonial outpost and as such, is not only garrisoned, but protected within, from the individually destructive tendencies of its inhabitants, by a comprehensive series of rules governing the appearance of every house and person on its grounds.

So much of the earth is under our control here. Not the clouds, which pass, unpleasantly, before the sun, nor the fire ants, which hide and wait in the ground, nor death’s harbinger, incontinence, which is precisely a lack of control and should not, signs beg us, happen in the pools. Everything else has been, within the gates, manufactured or altered to exact specifications. Plant height and placement, water temperature, the grade of the paths, the ducks on the pond, which are fakes, the warm towels, hair salon, nail salon, massage palace, places to drink, places to eat, the outside impermanent movie theater and some wandering drinks bringers, not to mention the four golf courses and thirty tennis courts, built in a crescendo of control over the elements, and maintained in this ecstasy, are there for us, when we want them.

Since I was there last, my father-in-law tells me, twenty-six million dollars have been spent improving the facilities, a project that has just been concluded. For the most part I couldn’t tell, without him pointing it out to me, what had changed. Poverty could destroy this place, or a natural disaster, and individuals will of course pass on from it, individually. It is possible to imagine, though, that the members of this community, united in the interests of pleasure, comfort, and financial well-being, have created an example of human achievement that will last almost as long as a poem lasts, or a book.

I was married in the backyard of my parents’ home, beyond which stretches a small wood. The wood was big enough, when I was younger, to imagine it endless, but small enough that I could find, easily, within it, the man-made ponds a neighbor had put in, to drain, I now presume, his land dry. The ponds were very close to each other and one wasn’t much more than the a muddy hole. The other, however, was a small circle of unnaturally bright blue, the very beautiful blue, tinged with green, that water is colored in children’s picture books. This pond was my thing, the thing I found in the wood, and the appearance, at one of my appearances there, of the owner of the pond, wearing elegant, alien jodhpurs, only served to reinforce the idea that this place was special, that meaning was attached to it, that things would happen around it. He told me I could come back whenever I wanted to.

All the great fairy tales take place in the wood. Our breakfast table sat beside a large picture window, through which you could watch deer move in and out of the brown depths and where I once saw, after a snow, a fox slide by. In the summer, the smooth mowed green of the lawn was set off by the wilder bushes, then the trees behind them. The tops of the trees were very high, and seemed to me years later, as I lay on my back in the yard, sunning myself, to form some kind of fence. But when I was younger, when I regularly read fairy tales, I looked into, rather than up at the trees.

What I wanted from the wood was a place to locate my imaginary activities. The wood should have been perfect for this: it was too small to be a real wood, and I couldn’t get lost in it. Even so, it was more real than I imagined. The deer, whose appearance in the backyard seemed romantic to me, and who were symbolic, although I didn’t know this, of the unseen existence of other things, were also real deer, and there were too many of them. They were stripping all the plants and still starving in the winter. Archers were allowed to hunt them during the season—I knew this too, I saw the trucks parked by the side of the road. Still, I was startled on a walk one fall, by hunters I couldn’t see. Do you want to get your dog shot? someone shouted, from his blind. They warned me to go home.

My parents still live at the same house, and the wood is still there, largely unchanged and undeveloped. The house, though, has grown, and extended its influence. Just before I went to college, my parents took out the apple trees and put a pool in—another man-made pond, a different blue-green. Then they had to install fencing around the property to keep people out of the pool. Later they put in higher fencing and even a gate at the bottom of the driveway, to keep out the deer, who, despite the hunters, multiplied, and ate all their plants. When I drive up with the David and the boys, a sign tells us to wait at the bottom of the drive for the gate to open out. I know some people miss the innocence of their youth, the crazy things they did, or the promise they felt that life held for them then. If I miss anything, I miss the porousness, the lack of definition, the bleeding edge between what existed in my imagination, and what was real.

The very crappiness of the sandwich comprises its appeal: the soft and pillowy bread, tasting only of sugar and air; the pink, slippery meats, flesh compressed; the pale, sweating cheese, soft and fatty; the pale pink tomatoes, oozing water; the lettuce shredded, so that it has lost all its juiciness and bounce. Imagining the sandwich there, in front of me, I sniff the scent of fleshly happiness, and, more faintly, a belch. When something is an object of lust all that is disgusting about it, all that is second-rate, vulgar, and careless, becomes part of its potent charm. In this way lust, whose interest is wide-ranging, seems to enjoy an advantage over love, which is attracted only to what is beautiful, and good.