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Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down. If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, and gardens.
There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone.
Perhaps when a flower is cut to adorn an altar or a table it becomes so, because it has been extracted from the plant’s life cycle and will not produce fruit or seeds or a next generation.
“How Flowers Changed the World.”
Burmese Days and the essays “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging.” He officially left because of ill health in 1927, but refused to return.
His first book, Down and Out in Paris and London,
Oxenhandler and Lusseyran suggest that you might prepare for your central mission in life by doing other things that may seem entirely unrelated, and how necessary this may be.
What is it that makes it possible to do the work that is of highest value to others and one’s central purpose in life? It may appear—to others, sometimes even to oneself—trivial, irrelevant, indulgent, pointless, distracted, or any of those other pejoratives with which the quantifiable beats down the unquantifiable.
“Death is never an ending in nature.”
“One way of looking at trees is that they are captured light. Photosynthesis, after all, captures a photon, takes a little energy from it before re-emitting it at a lower wavelength, and uses that captured energy to turn air into sugars, and then sugars into the stuff that makes leaves, wood, and roots. Even the most solid of beings, the giant sequoias, are really light and air.”
1842 report titled The Condition and Treatment of the Children Employed in the Mines and Collieries of the United Kingdom details some of this. It describes children sent down into mines to work so many hours they only saw daylight on Sundays,
In “Why I Write,” Orwell declared, “The Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”
A 2019 study in the European Heart Journal estimated that 800,000 Europeans and 8.8 million worldwide die annually from air pollution, mostly from burning fossil fuels, and a 2021 study went further to charge fossil fuel emissions with one in five deaths worldwide in 2018, and one in three in eastern Asia that year.
The writer and actor Peter Coyote once remarked that no one cries over artificial flowers, and there’s a particular kind of disappointment when you begin to admire a bouquet or a blossom at a distance and find out closer up that it’s fake. The disappointment arises in part from having been deceived, but also from encountering an object that is static, that will never die because it never lived,
declaring that women’s votes would “go toward helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice. There will be no prisons, no scaffolds, no children in factories, no girls driven on the street to earn their bread, in the day when there shall be ‘Bread for all, and Roses too.’
“Is it wicked to take a pleasure in Spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There
“The real objective of Socialism is not happiness. . . . The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood . . . a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step.”
‘Buttered toast!’—you could hear his voice echoing across the lonely valley—‘We’re just sitting down to buttered toast over here! Lovely slices of buttered toast!’ I do not doubt that, like the rest of us, he had not seen butter for weeks or months past, but in the icy night the news of buttered toast probably set many a Fascist mouth watering. It even made mine water, though I knew he was lying.”
They wrote all that before the distinction between trees and rhizomes got a little blurrier with, for example, recognition of the 106-acre quaking aspen forest in Utah whose forty thousand or so trees share a common root system, are essentially clones of one another, and constitute a single organism larger than any other on Earth and about eighty thousand years old.
“His primary liberty,” Baker said of scientists, “is freedom of inquiry. Without that he is as you would be if a dictator could control even your imaginations.
is celebrated in part because its devoted caretakers starved to death rather than devour its tons of seeds and other plant matter during the 872-day Siege of Leningrad).
“Socialism is a theory which presupposes natural equality for people, and strives to bring about social equality.
In 1928, the Soviet Union was at the start of its first five-year plan to pursue an accelerated program of industrialization that drew many people to the cities and increased bread shortages. Bad weather and Stalin’s rural policies made the shortages far worse. Better-off and less-cooperative peasants were denounced as “kulaks,” and at the outset of 1929, Stalin launched a swift and brutal “dekulakization” rampage to destroy members of this fluid category. Immense numbers of peasants, particularly in Ukraine, were executed, imprisoned, or shipped off to Siberia and other remote places. The
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In the resultant “terror famine” sometimes called the Holodomor, about five million human beings starved to death, mostly in Ukraine.
As Orwell would convey more powerfully than almost anyone before or since, one of the powers tyrants hold is to destroy and distort the truth and force others to submit to what they know is untrue.
“When the national census showed that his reign of terror was shrinking the country’s population, Stalin ordered the members of the census board shot. The new officials, not surprisingly, came up with higher figures.
Between about 1929, when Stalin had vanquished his rivals and concentrated power in his hands, and his death in 1953, most historians now estimate that he had been directly responsible for the deaths of somewhere around 20 million people.”
Orwell wrote in 1944, “The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth;
After all, authoritarianism is itself, like eugenics, a kind of elitism premised on the idea that power should be distributed unequally.
The process of enclosing the commons began in the Middle Ages in England but peaked between 1750 and 1850 with a series of parliamentary enclosure acts. These acts gave to powerful individuals land that had long been collectively farmed, grazed, and administered, erasing villages and villagers and their self-determination and prosperity. Historian of the commons Peter Linebaugh notes that in England and Wales, “between 1725 and 1825 nearly four thousand enclosure acts appropriated more than six million acres of land, about a quarter of cultivated acreage, to the politically dominant
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news agency reported of Australia, “More than 25.5 million acres of land—an area the size of South Korea—have been razed by the wildfires across the country in recent weeks, according to the latest data, with the southeast particularly hard hit.” Among the Australian places burned were swathes of the Gondwanaland forests, the oldest forests in the world, places that had been wet and stable for a hundred million years.
if you see the countryside as a place of rest and respite you’re probably not a farmworker.
Mary Prince was sold more times, and one owner took her to England, where she eventually achieved freedom and a voice with the publication of her account in 1831.
I don’t believe in ancestral guilt, but I do believe in inheritance,
were like the sweets you both crave and are a little sickened by even before you bite into them.
But anything I felt was nothing compared to what Jamaica Kincaid did, and wrote of with such vehement eloquence.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy begins in a public rose garden in Oakland, California.
The artist Zoe Leonard was bashful about making beautiful images during the AIDS crisis and said so to fellow artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, who replied, “Zoe, these are so beautiful, and that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go.”
by the time Nate wrote his report, the country was the world’s second largest exporter of flowers, and the industry, which employs about 130,000 Colombians, was the leading source of jobs for women in the country.
Now and again in this war, at intervals of months, you get your nose above water for a few moments and notice that the earth is still going round the sun.”
A rose worker had told Nate, “Today, a flower is not produced with sweetness but with tears. Our product is used to express beautiful feelings throughout the world, but we are treated very poorly.”
Lies gradually erode the capacity to know and to connect. In withholding or distorting knowledge or imparting falsehood, a liar deprives others of the information they need to participate in public and political life, to avoid dangers, to understand the world around them, to act on principle, to know themselves and others and the situation, to make good choices, and ultimately to be free.
Knowledge is power, and the equitable distribution of knowledge is inseparable from other forms of equality. Without equal access to the facts, equal capacity in decision-making is impossible.
Authoritarians see truth and fact and history as a rival system they must defeat.
The powerful become unaccountable because their actions are concealed and misrepresented, while ordinary people are deprived of privacy through surveillance and encouraged to inform on one another to the authorities. Such betrayals violate not only literal privacy but loyalty to private relationships over the state.
Hannah Arendt famously wrote, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
In the novel’s appendix about Newspeak, Orwell describes how the word free was shrunk to mean only free from, as in “this dog is free from lice.” “It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free,’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.”
He thinks of his mother: “It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
“It struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?”
