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

by Michael Pollan

In nature, at least, the expense of beauty is usually paid for by sex.

“the poetry of Nature to which vulgar utilitarianism is foreign.”

“Beauty always takes place in the particular,” the critic Elaine Scarry has written, “and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down.”

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

But the birth of beauty goes back further still, to a time before Apollo and Dionysus, before human desire, when the world was mostly leaf and the first flower opened.

With the advent of the flower, whole new levels of complexity come into the world: more interdependence, more information, more communication, more experimentation.

The desires of other creatures became paramount in the evolution of plants, for the simple reason that the plants that succeeded at gratifying those desires wound up with more offspring.

Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.

Most of the ingenuity of plants—that is, most of the work of a billion years of evolutionary trial and error—has been applied to learning (or rather, inventing) the arts of biochemistry, at which plants excel beyond all human imagining.

it is common for animals deliberately to experiment with plant toxins; when an intoxicant is found, the animal will return to the source repeatedly, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Cattle will develop a taste for locoweed that can prove fatal; bighorn sheep will grind their teeth to useless nubs scraping a hallucinogenic lichen off ledge rock.

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.

Our desire for some form of transcendence of ordinary experience expresses itself not only in religion but in other endeavors as well, and these too have probably been more deeply influenced by psychoactive plants than we like to think. Who knows, we may need a natural history of literature and philosophy, or of discovery and invention, to go on the shelf with our natural history of religion. Or maybe what we need is just a single volume: a natural history of the imagination.

A meme is simply a unit of memorable cultural information.

Memes are a culture’s building blocks, passed down from brain to brain in a Darwinian process that leads, by trial and error, to cultural innovation and progress.

The memes that prove themselves best adapted to their “environment”—that is, the ones that are most helpful for people to keep in their brains—are the ones most likely to survive and replicate and become widely regarded as good, true, or beautiful. Culture at any given moment is the “meme pool” in which we all swim—or rather, that swims through us.

it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.

Like the American transcendentalists, Nietzsche believes that our personal and collective inheritance stands in the way of our enjoyment of life and accomplishment of anything original.

Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.

It is by temporarily mislaying much of what we already know (or think we know) that cannabis restores a kind of innocence to our perceptions of the world, and innocence in adults will always flirt with embarrassment.

The cannabinoids are molecules with the power to make romantics and transc...