The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Next week he’ll tell his undergrads about Durkheim, Foucault, 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.

“Trees used to talk to people all the time. Sane people used to hear them.” The only question is whether they’ll talk again, before the end.

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

Nothing in this city is older than a century. In seventy plus seventy years, San Francisco will be saintly at last, or gone.