The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

by Michael Pollan

invested their life savings in slips of paper representing future flowers.

(Flora was, of course, the Roman goddess of flowers, who was a prostitute famous for bankrupting her lovers.)

Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance, when our dreams of order and abandon come together.

Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladonna, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skins of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.

(The sensation of pain is, curiously, one of the hardest to summon from memory.) Howlett speculated that the human cannabinoid system evolved to help us endure (and selectively forget) the routine slings and arrows of life “so that we can get up in the morning and do it all over again.” It is the brain’s own drug for coping with the human condition.

I am not by nature one of the world’s great noticers. Unless I make a conscious effort, I won’t notice what color your shirt is, the song playing on the radio, or whether you put one sugar in your coffee or two. When I’m working as a reporter I have to hector myself continually to mark the details: checked shirt, two sugars, Van Morrison. Why this should be so, I have no idea, except that I am literally absentminded, prone to be thinking about something else, something past, when I am ostensibly having a fresh experience. Almost always, my attention can’t wait to beat a retreat from the here and now to the abstract, frog-jumping from the data of the senses to conclusions. Actually, it’s worse than that. Very often the conclusions or concepts come first, allowing me to dispense with the sensory data altogether or to notice in it only what fits. It’s a form of impatience with lived life, and though it might appear to be a symptom of an active mind, I suspect it’s really a form of laziness. My lawyer father, once complimented on his ability to see ahead three or four moves in a negotiation, explained that the reason he liked to jump to conclusions was so he could get there early and rest. I’m the same way in my negotiations with reality. Though I suspect that what I have is only an acute case of an attention disorder that is more or less universal. Seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, or tasting things as they “really are” is always difficult if not impossible (in part because...

And finally, to Judith, who really comes first, because without her eye, ear, wisdom, support, patience, encouragement, discernment, foresight, confidence, companionship, judgment, clarity, humor, and love, none of this would ever have gotten done.