More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
August 19, 2025
The current record holder, in Oregon, weighs hundreds of tonnes, spills across 10 square kilometres, and is somewhere between 2,000 and 8,000 years old.
These organisms make questions of our categories and thinking about them makes the world look different.
By attrition, coin tricks loosen the grip of our expectations about the way hands and coins work. Eventually, they loosen the grip of our expectations on our perceptions more generally. On leaving the restaurant, the sky looked different because the diners saw the sky as it was there and then, rather than as they expected it to be. Tricked out of our expectations, we fall back on our senses.
What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find, and what we find when we actually look.
let these organisms lure me out of my well-worn patterns of thought, to imagine the possibilities they face, to let them press against the limits of my understanding, to give myself permission to be amazed – and confused – by their entangled lives.
My hope is that this book loosens some of your certainties, as fungi have loosened mine.
Mustard smells mustardy because of bonds between nitrogen, carbon and sulphur. Fish smell fishy because of bonds between nitrogen and hydrogen. Bonds between carbon and nitrogen smell metallic and oily.3
Piedmont white truffles and other prized mycorrhizal fungi, such as porcini, chanterelle and matsutake, have never been domesticated, in part because of the fluidity of their relationships with plants, and in part because of the intricacies of their sex lives.
The ‘you’ of five years ago was made from different stuff than the ‘you’ of today. Nature is an event that never stops.
As William Bateson, who coined the word ‘genetics’, observed, ‘We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.’ When we see an organism, from a fungus to a pine tree, we catch a single moment in its continual development.16
The problem was that we did not know whom we meant when we said ‘we.’
Lichens mine minerals from rock in a two-fold process known as ‘weathering’. First, they physically break up surfaces by the force of their growth. Second, they deploy an arsenal of powerful acids and mineral-binding compounds to digest the rock.
When lichens die and decompose, they give rise to the first soils in new ecosystems. Lichens are how the inanimate mineral mass within rocks is able to cross over into the metabolic cycles of the living.
In this view, lichens are dynamic systems, rather than a catalogue of interacting components.
No wonder I was baffled. LSD and psilocybin are fungal molecules that have found themselves entangled within human life in complicated ways exactly because they confound our concepts and structures, including the most fundamental concept of all: that of our selves.
