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, that didn’t form itself out of the earth, and that has a texture coarser, dryer, less inviting to the touch than a mortal flower.
