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That’s when Adam realizes: 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.
You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It’s like I had the word “book,” and you put one in my hands. I had the word “game,” and you taught me how to play. I had the word “life,” and then you came along and said, “Oh! You mean this.”
Not everything we plant will take. Not every plant will thrive. But together we can watch the ones that do fill up our garden.
Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.
Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child’s play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.
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.
And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.
Each new item is release and relief. Finding no good reason to quit now, she lets the gratitude spill out. “Thank you for the tools. The chests. The decking. The clothes closets. The paneling. I forget. . . . Thank you,” she says, following the ancient formula. “For all these gifts that you have given.” And still not knowing how to stop, she adds, “We’re sorry. We didn’t know how hard it is for you to grow back.”
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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:
There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.
Trees give it all away, don’t they?”
Like evolution, it reuses all the old, successful parts of everything that has come before. Like evolution, it just means unfolding.
You never know when you might finally get around to reading that tome you picked up five years ago.
The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us”—those who are holding rights at the time.
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
On this mountain, in such weather, Why stay here any longer? Three trees wave to me with urgent arms. I lean in to hear, but their emergency sounds just like the wind. New buds test the branches, even in winter.
We are not, one of Adam’s papers proves, wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.
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.
But liking and not liking—the rod and staff of commodity culture—mean little to him.
No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.
We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.
“Yes! And what do all good stories do?”
“They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.”
Futures where humanity goes to its mass grave swearing it’s the only thing in creation that can talk.
Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.
Mimi comes to, and speaks her very first Buddha’s words. “I’m hungry.” The answer comes from right above her head. Be hungry. “I’m thirsty.” Be thirsty. “I hurt.” Be still and feel.
Then they stand in silence and regard the design they’ve laid out across the forest floor. The shape arrests them. It reads them their rights. You have a right to be present. A right to attend. A right to be astonished.
that the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.
And yet—but still—they’ll spell out, for a while, the word life has been saying, since the beginning.
This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been
given. What we must earn. This will never end.
