“If you plant an acorn,” he said, “it may grow to become an oak tree. Yet there is no acorn within that wooden body. Has the acorn been reborn as a tree? Or does the acorn grow to be something else entirely? It’s my belief that the acorn and the tree are an idea, spread out over an abstraction of time. And if that new tree, when fully grown, drops one acorn or one hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand, that idea keeps progressing as this thing we call life.”
