The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession

by Susan Orlean

This has always been a puzzlement to me, how to have a community but remain individual—how you could manage to be separate but joined, and somehow, amazingly, not lose sight of either your separateness or your togetherness. The two conditions go up and down like a teeter-totter, first one and then the other tipping the balance back. If you set out alone and sovereign, unconnected to a family, a religion, a nationality, a tradition, a class, then pretty soon you are too lonely, too self-invented and unique, and too much aware that there is no one else like you in the world. If you submerge yourself completely in something—your town or your profession or your hobby—then pretty soon you have to struggle up to the surface because you need to be sure that even though you are a part of something big, some community, you still exist as a single unit with a single mind. It is the fundamental contradictoriness of the United States of America—the illogical but optimistic notion that you can create a union of individuals in which every man is king.