Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you're looking at more clearly. Did you know that?"
I said nothing.
"What colour's a blackbird?" she said.
"Black"
"Typical!

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

Look at all the life in this," she said. "Every pip could become a tree, and every tree could bear another hundred fruits and every fruit could bear another hundred trees. And so on to infinity."
I picked the picks from my tongue with my fingers.
"Just imagine," she said. "If every seed grew, there'd be no room in the world for anything but pomegranate trees.

It was great to see the owls," I said.
She smiled.
"Yes. They're wild things, of course. Killers, savages. They're wonderful.

Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people 'must' behave.

Clearly John is observing, but rather than observation of nature, his world is personal, pondering and deliberating the world around him.