The Overstory

by Richard Powers

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen.

A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.

If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity. . . .

The work is brutal, but theirs. Better than building ships for any country’s navy.

Back in Brooklyn, a poet-nurse to the Union dying writes: A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. Jørgen never reads these words. Words strike him as a ruse. His maize and beans and squash—all growing things alone disclose the wordless mind of God.

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.

But farmers are patient men tried by brutal seasons, and if they weren’t plagued by dreams of generation, few would keep plowing, spring after spring. John Hoel is out on his rise again on March 21, 1904, as if he, too, might have another hundred years or two to document what time hides forever in plain sight.

Loggers race through a dozen states to cut down whatever the fungus hasn’t reached. The nascent Forest Service encourages them. Use the wood, at least, before it’s ruined. And in that salvage mission, men kill any tree that might contain the secret of resistance.

The thoughts can mean nothing to a man with no real independent desire, born under the thing he is chained to and fated to die under it, too. He thinks:

Three-quarters of a century runs by in the time it takes to say grace.

At school in Chicago, he learned many things: 1. Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger. 2. Art was nothing he thought it was. 3. People would make just about anything you can think to make. Intricate scrimshawed portraits on the tips of pencil leads. Polyurethane-coated dog shit. Earthworks that could pass for small nations. 4. Makes you think different about things, don’t it?

Nick sits at the rolltop, flipping once more through the book. Last year he won the Stern Prize for Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute. This year, he’s a stock boy for a famous Chicago department store that has been dying a slow death for a quarter of a century. Granted, he has earned a degree that licenses him to make peculiar artifacts capable of embarrassing his friends and angering strangers. There’s a U-Stor-It in Oak Park crammed with papier-mâché costumes for street masques and surreal sets for a show that ran in a little theater near Andersonville and closed three nights later. But at twenty-five, the scion of a long line of farmers wants to believe that his best work might still be ahead of him.

They pause outside in the Nanjing Road, thronged with people doing business, despite the looming end of the world.

“You can’t come back to something that is gone.”

Sih Hsuin knows nothing about Chinese Buddhism. He has only a rough estimate of English. Now he’s supposed to explain Enlightenment to this American woman official. “The True Thing mean: human beings, so small. And life, so very big.” The agent snorts. “They’ve just worked this out?” Sih Hsuin nods. “And this makes them happy?” She shakes her head and waves him through. “Lotsa luck in Pittsburgh.”

At that click, a teenage Mimi lifted from her own nine-year-old shoulders to gaze at the arhats from high up and years away. Out of the gazing teen rose another, even older woman. Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life. “Look the color,” Winston said, and all her later selves collapsed around Mimi.

They forget to pack books. Two thousand miles with nothing to read. The two older girls stare at their little sister for dozens of Nebraska miles until Amelia breaks down and cries. It passes the time.

“Weren’t you afraid?” He laughs, embarrassed. “Not my time yet. Not my story.” The words chill her. How can he know his story, ahead of time? But she doesn’t ask him that. Instead, she says, “What did you say to it?” His brow crumples. He shrugs. What else is there to say, to a bear? “Apologize! I tell him, people very stupid. They forget everything—where they come from, where they go. I say: Don’t worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.”

Truth comes over her like a revelation: The only thing worth believing in is measurement. She must become an engineer, like her daddy before her. It’s not even a choice. She’s an engineer already, and always has been.

She sits in the eucalyptus grove, the trees that explode in the dry heat, solving problem sets and watching the protesters with their placards full of all-caps slogans. The better the weather, the more irate the demands.

Before the people at the customer service desk even hand her the phone, she knows. And all the way home to Illinois she thinks: How do I recognize this already? Why does this all feel so much like remembering?

The things of this world mean nothing, except for this ring and the priceless ancient scroll in her carry-on. She wants only peace. But this is where she must live now: In the shadow of the bent mulberry. The inexplicable poem. The fisherman’s song.

Every hug is a small, soft jail.

Adam knows the real reason. They think he stole. They can’t believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.

the book shows how so-called Homo sapiens fail at even the simplest logic problems. But they’re fast and fantastic at figuring out who’s in and who’s out, who’s up and who’s down, who should be heaped with praise and who must be punished without mercy. Ability to execute simple acts of reason? Feeble. Skill at herding each other? Utterly, endlessly brilliant.

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

“Kindness may look for something in return, but that doesn’t make it any less kind.”

If you want a person to help you, convince them that they’ve already helped you beyond saying. People will work hard to protect their legacy.

I can’t get married. I’m supposed to . . . I don’t know! Go backpacking in South America for two years. Move to the Village and take drugs. Get involved with a light plane pilot who moonlights for the CIA.”

The secret is not to care what the words mean. Paying attention decimates your speed.

But I can learn, as I’ve had to re-learn everything—myself, my likes and dislikes, the width and height and depth of where I live—again, alongside you.

They mean to hit his pride, but Douglas preempts them by having none.

In fact, it’s Douggie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth. Single biggest influence 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.

The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of.

But savagery is a slippery slope, as he has often read to the horses.

Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

But each weedy stem he puts into the dirt is a magic trick eons in the making.

Watching the man, hard-of-hearing, hard-of-speech Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze.

People, God love ’em, must write all over beeches.

She’s not of the herd. She doesn’t always hear them well, and when she does, their words don’t always make sense. And yet her frantic fellow mammals do make her smile: miracles on all sides, and still they need compliments to keep them happy.

She never exactly becomes a swan. Yet the senior who emerges out of freshman ugly ducklinghood knows what she loves and how she intends to spend her life, and that’s a novelty among the youth of any year.

To her astonishment, she even has suitors. Something about her perks boys up. Not her looks, of course, but an ever-so-slightly head-turning quality to her walk that they can’t quite place. Independent thought—a power of attraction all its own.

Desire, she scribbles into her field notebooks, turns out to be infinitely varied, the sweetest of evolution’s tricks. And in the pollen storms of spring, even she turns out to be a more than adequate flower.

He’s waiting for something to come and redeem his aimless life.

“Your dissertation. Your time to waste.” She wastes it with the most intense pleasure. The work isn’t glamorous. It consists of taping numbered plastic bags over the ends of branches, then collecting them at measured intervals. She does this over and over, dumbly and mutely, hour by hour, while the world around her rages with assassination, race riot, and jungle warfare. She works all day in the woods, her back crawling with chiggers, her scalp with ticks, her mouth filled with leaf duff, her eyes with pollen, cobwebs like scarves around her face, bracelets of poison ivy, her knees gouged by cinders, her nose lined with spores, the backs of her thighs bitten Braille by wasps, and her heart as happy as the day is generous.

. In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

She makes almost nothing, but life requires little. Her budget is blessedly free of those two core expenses, entertainment and status. And the woods teem with free food.

Without a lab to use, she can’t vindicate herself. At thirty-two, she starts substitute teaching in high schools. Friends in the field murmur in sympathy, but none goes public to defend her. Meaning drains from her like green from a maple in fall.

She listens to the forest, to the chatter that has always sustained her. But all she can hear is the deafening wisdom of crowds.