The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen.

But farmers are patient men tried by brutal seasons, and if they weren’t plagued by dreams of generation, few would keep plowing, spring after spring.

Dad, I would very much like to plunge off the edge of commonsense existence, at your expense, and become certifiably unemployable.

“Apologize! I tell him, people very stupid. They forget everything—where they come from, where they go. I say: Don’t worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.”

Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.

when you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you’d be well advised not to take at face value.

“We know so little about how trees grow. Almost nothing about how they bloom and branch and shed and heal themselves. We’ve learned a little about a few of them, in isolation. But nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.”

Her budget is blessedly free of those two core expenses, entertainment and status. And the woods teem with free food.

With few claims on her time and none on her soul, she turns back outside, into the woods, the green negation of all careers.

Useful is the catastrophe.

Do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, and endure as you have all the long day of life.

There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid, expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before they’ll germinate. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.