The Overstory

by Richard Powers

crypto-normativity: How reason is just another weapon of control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect.

When a person makes a choice, so much happens by night, underground, or just out of sight that the chooser is the last to know.

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

“I know you didn’t do any of this, Adam. You wouldn’t be capable.” But her eyes duck—the old mammalian tell, tens of millions of years in the making. She knows nothing, least of all about the man she has lived with for years, her lawfully wedded husband, her son’s father. A con man at the very least and, for all she knows, accessory to murder.

And that’s all we want: to eat and sleep, to stay dry and be loved, and acquire just a little bit more.”

Flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers. Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete for the berries. A thorn acacia makes sugary protein treats to feed and enslave the ants who guard it. Fruit-bearing plants trick us into distributing their seeds, and ripening fruit led to color vision. In teaching us how to find their bait, trees taught us to see that the sky is blue.

His years of enforced tranquility, the patience of his slowed mind, the expansion of his blinkered senses. He can watch the dozen bare trees in the backyard for hours and see something intricate and surprising, sufficient to his desires, while she—she is still trapped in a hunger that rushes past everything.

She remembers the secret from her days onstage: Mobilize your inner will. Summon all the memory of a life lived. Hold it in your head: Right and wrong. The truth, self-evident. Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory.

The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

Across the horizon, stands of building cranes break and remake the skyline. All the spreading, urging, testing, splitting, and regenerating course of history, the rings within rings, paid for at every step with fuel and shade and fruit, oxygen and wood. . . . Nothing in this city is older than a century. In seventy plus seventy years, San Francisco will be saintly at last, or gone.

Futures where humanity goes to its mass grave swearing it’s the only thing in creation that can talk.

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.

A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

It strikes Nick as strange, how few languages he understands. One and a half human ones. Not a single word of all the other living, speaking things.

the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.