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

by Michael Pollan

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...