The Overstory

by Richard Powers

First there was nothing. Then there was everything.

the air is raining messages.

And down in cool riparian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize—the plan that now uses him, although he thinks it’s his.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

She cues up the trance playlist, sits in her beloved window seat, opens the sash to the frigid night, and blows puffs of smoke onto the death-trap fire escape. The phone rings, but she doesn’t pick up. It’s one of three men whose beliefs about her logistics she can no longer keep straight. The phone rings on. She has no answering machine. Who would use a device that leaves you responsible for calling someone back? She counts the rings, a kind of meditation. A dozen summons, while she blows two fat puffs of hash cloud into the frozen outdoors. The crazed persistence narrows down the caller, until she knows.

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

He reads the encyclopedia article on mental disorders. The section on diagnosing schizophrenia contains this sentence: Beliefs should not be considered delusional if they are in keeping with societal norms.

Her eyebrows draw together as she does the yield-stress calculation.

But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

genes. To solve the future, we must save the past.

The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing—nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.

The law is simply human will, written down.

But people aren’t alone, and they never have been.

But, of course, it’s not the world that needs saving. Only the thing that people call by the same name.

The air is spiced with bay laurel and lemon eucalyptus and pepper trees. The scent retrieves all kinds of things he once knew and reminds him of all those things he never will. He breathes in for a long time. Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.

That’s the scary thing about men: get a few together with some simple machines, and they’ll move the world.

The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true.