ABSTRACT
As these and other arguments in Wolf’s four essays in Cassandra: A Novel andFour Essays (1983) suggest, Wolf’s meditations upon contemporary society and upon the prefiguration of the present social, political, and cultural problems that she perceived in the Cassandra legend led her to celebrate such everyday pleasures as the view of a particular cherry tree in a meadow-“I do not know of another one like it”—glimpsed in a “soft serene light, indescribable”—while planting “the last flower seeds for the year” to the accompanying “noise of passing armoured tanks” (255). Embodying similar ecological and ritualistic concerns, Anchises, a benign sage in Cassandra, “never had a tree chopped down without first conferring with it at length; without first removing from it a seed or a twig which he could plant in the earth to ensure its continued existence” (92).
