The Overstory

by Richard Powers

In summer, water rises through the xylem and disperses out of the million tiny mouths on the undersides of leaves, a hundred gallons a day evaporating from the tree’s airy crown into the humid Iowa air.

“You can’t come back to something that is gone.”

“There’s a Chinese saying. ‘When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.’ ”

scattered from the bear. Their mother holding Amelia

Mimi: The law doesn’t stop with death. It reaches far beyond

Home has gone wherever their father went.

Every hug is a small, soft jail.

Plans in the absence of any planner.

They can’t believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.

Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.

A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel—root and stem—in great U-turns until it rights itself. But a human child can know it’s pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

They mean to hit his pride, but Douglas preempts them by having none.

worth of fruit cocktail, in case the drifts come early. He ends up at the billiards bar, dispensing silver dollars like they’re

Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil.

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be.

Girls doing science are like bears riding bikes. Possible, but freakish.

The past always comes clearer, in the future.

Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation.

All her flowers have long since faded. But here’s the bee.

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

They had no property to speak of, and no kids except the two of them.

places remember what people forget.

She must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.

The world starts here. This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.

What’s going on is too big to fit into the phone.

“It’s amazing how crazy things become, once you start looking at them.”

Crazy is a species under no threat at all. He looks at her; her

Hunger’s good for you. People should stay hungry.”

His thoughts stretch in every direction, seeking the light.

time, in the middle of the night, is an ample resource.

Before it dies, a Douglas-fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament. We might well call these ancient benefactors giving trees.

In the clumpy, clumsy finger-paint of words,

He protects her work and needs so little.

he’s as generous and eager as weeds.

She hates the phone. Handheld schizophrenia. Unseen voices whispering to you from a distance.

she must dedicate this book to her father. And to her husband. And all the people who will, in time, turn into other things.

Ideas torture him like the Furies.

STATE Enemies shout at each other across

Nobody likes to take more gift than they need.

Eater and Graywolf got spooked by the death threats and

a square

Ease is the disease

her life has been as wild as a plum in spring.

But his legs inside their cargo pants are little more than vague suggestions.

Wealth needs fences. But fences need wood.

This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

a groan meant for no one.

“You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.”