The Overstory

by Richard Powers

It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

“There’s a Chinese saying. ‘When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.’ ” The Chinese engineer smiles. “Good one.” “ ‘When is the next best time? Now.’ ” “Ah! Okay!” The smile turns real. Until today, he has never planted anything. But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.

He wants to keep heading west. Trouble is, the only strip still west of him feels like going east again.

Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it.

The words are a dam-break as she speaks them. They leave her happy to be alive, alive to study life. She feels grateful for no reason at all, except in remembering all that she has been able to discover about other things.

“CAN YOU FEEL IT?” she asks, under the mayhem in the western sky early one evening, or perhaps the next.

The reporters ask why her group, unlike every other NGO seed bank on the planet, isn’t focusing on plants that will be useful to people, come catastrophe. She wants to say: Useful is the catastrophe.

Myth. Myth. A mispronunciation. A malaprop. Memories posted forward from people standing on the shores of the great human departure from everything else that lives. Send-off telegrams composed by skeptics of the planned escape, saying, Remember this, thousands of years from now, when you can see nothing but yourself, everywhere you look.

Enlightenment is a shared enterprise. It needs some other voice saying, You are not wrong. . . .