The Overstory

by Richard Powers

The sole remaining chestnut goes on flowering. But its blooms have no more blooms to answer them. No mates exist for countless miles around, and a chestnut, though both male and female, will not serve itself. Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There’s work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same. Or as the nurse to the Union dead writes: Stand cool and composed before a million universes. As cool and composed as wood.

on what a body will or won’t believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they’ll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof. He has tried this idea out on others, without much success.

own gardens high in the air. Any one of these gangly seedlings could push out millions of cones over the course of its life, the small yellow males with their pollen that floats across entire states, the drooping females with their mouse tails sticking out from the coil of scales, a look he finds dearer than his own life. And the forest they might remake he can almost smell—resinous, fresh, thick with yearning, sap of a fruit that is no fruit, the scent of Christmases endlessly older than Christ. Douglas

cross a busy street. An ape defends himself with barrel bombs. Under those ridiculous, blocky skins, creatures from another dimension pour into Neelay’s world. And there’s only the narrowest window of time in which to really see them, before these things that never were turn into things that have always been. In a few years, a kid like him will be given cognitive behavioral therapy for his Asperger’s and SSRIs to smooth out his awkward human interactions. But he knows something certain, before almost anyone else: People are in for it. Once, the fate of the human race might have been in the hands of the well-adjusted, the social ones, the masters of emotion. Now all that is getting upgraded. He

“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 father is her water,

that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

book, in language after language. How book branched up out of beech roots, way back in the parent tongue. How beech

who has escaped the stoop of constant social compliance. To

She writes her favorite lines in the inside covers of her field notebooks and peeks at them when department politics and the cruelty of frightened humans get her down. The words withstand the full brutality of day.

Life will not answer to reason.

As if forests were waiting all these four hundred million years for us newcomers to come cure them. Science in the service of willful blindness: How could so many smart people have missed the obvious? A person has only to look, to see that dead logs are far more alive than living ones. But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine. “Well,” the man on the ground says,

could get the pension.” She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

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

first a person needs to graduate from endless self-love.

No strangeness stranger than the strangeness of living things. He chuckles, chewing on the bitter nib. “I’ve made

Dorothy needs wilder reclamations, stories free of ideas and steeped in local selves. Her salvation is close, hot, and private. It depends on a person’s ability to say nevertheless, to do one small thing that seems beyond them, and, for a moment, break the grip of time. Ray’s shelves are organized by topic; Dorothy’s,

shelves. She nods and tries to smile, reaching down inside herself for a word. She doesn’t know the word. She doesn’t even know that that’s what she’s doing. Nevertheless. The word is nevertheless.

What is this, grabbing at my heart, like it means something? What gives this pretend place so much power over me? Just this: the glimpse of someone seeing something she shouldn’t be able to see. Someone who doesn’t even know she’s been invented, staying game in the face of the inescapable plot.

After years in rural Iowa, Nick’s like a kid raised on a tinny radio hearing his first live symphony. He has landed in a druid tree cult like the ones he read about on winter nights in the Hoel family encyclopedia. Oak veneration at the oracle at Dodona, the druids’ groves in Britain and Gaul, Shinto sakaki worship, India’s bejeweled wishing trees, Mayan kapoks, Egyptian sycamores, the Chinese sacred ginkgo—all the branches of the world’s first religion. His decade of obsessive

needles. The game seems childish, at first. But all of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear. Why shouldn’t they take new names for this new work? Trees go by a dozen different labels.

She marvels again at how the planet’s supreme intelligence could discover calculus and the universal laws of gravitation before anyone knew what a flower was for.

His use is to show that the world is not made for our utility. What use are we, to trees? She remembers the

Safe and comprehensible, with no swamps of ambiguity to suck you down, no human-on-human darkness, and your own will receives its rightful land. Call it meaning. “I think a lot of people feel more at home, in there. Than they do out here.” “Maybe! A lot of guys my age, anyway.”

“The psyche’s job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we’ll behave in any situation. We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it. “So why, you may ask,

spectacle, all trying to bail out the ocean of capitalism with an acorn cap. A

the lazy lie of decency.

Its cones, small, downward sleigh bells content in constant silence. She’s

“Well, okay, then. Can we study you?” A truth bends near him, one that his discipline will never find. Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world.

Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.

The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back. Nick unpacks the next

The sight fills him with a horror inseparable from hope. Somewhere in all these boundless, compounding, swelling canyons of imprinted paper, encoded in the millions of tons of loblolly pine fiber, there must be a

words of truth, a page, a paragraph that could break the spell of fulfillment and bring back danger, need, and death. At night, he works

No one suspects how hard it is to hold another’s gaze for more than three seconds. A quarter minute and they’re in agony—introverts and extroverts, dominants and submissives alike. Scopophobia hits them all—fear of seeing and being seen. A dog will bite if you stare at it too hard. People will shoot you. And though she has looked for hours into the eyes of hundreds of people, though she has perfected