Birnam Wood

by Eleanor Catton

in a way that seemed exaggerated for his benefit, as though to make a point of all the many intimacies he had missed.

a bitter yearning that punishment, for once, should be made to fit the crime.

He could not accept a worldview whose terms he was not allowed to question, and he resented the caricature of power and entitlement that he was forever being told that he embodied, automatically and absolutely, no matter what his intentions were, and no matter what he felt or thought, or even did;

when exactly she had become so technologically dependent that her first instinct in every unpredicted circumstance was to outsource her imagination to her phone.

When she made things grow, she experienced a kind of manifest forgiveness, an abiding moving-on and making-new that she found impossible in almost every other sphere of life.

In a garden, expertise was personal and anecdotal – it was allegorical – it was ancient – it had been handed down; one felt that gardeners across the generations were united in a kind of guild, and that every counsel had the quality of wisdom, gentle, patient, and holistic – and yet unwavering, for there was no quarrelling with the laws and tendencies of nature, no room for judgment, no dispute: the proof lay only in the plants themselves, and in the soil, and in the air, and in the harvest.

isn’t a thought experiment where you can just take my position to its logical extreme, and that’s the point of the tutorial. This isn’t a philosophy class. This is a real, practical choice that we face as a group, about the problem of how to sustain ourselves moving forward—’

thinking ahead to the long drive home over the ranges had become one of the great joys of his late middle age, suffusing him with a deep sense of presence and arrival; perhaps because of this, the closure of the pass had felt strangely personal to him, and strangely debilitating, as if a crucial pathway in his mind had been peremptorily shut off.

chiming and trilling and cheeping and fluting and crying in a shifting, enveloping cloak of sound – magnified, he thought, by the heavy skies, which hung low and overcast over the treetops, filling the valley and shearing off the peaks on either side.

there was a certain satisfaction to be found in hopelessness, a certain piety, a touch of martyrdom, in feeling oneself and one’s entire generation to have been wronged by those in power, and deceived, and discouraged from civic participation, and robbed, and made fun of, and maligned;

but so long as there was a phone in everybody’s pocket, so long as there was a screen in front of every face, so long as there were batteries and satellites and cameras and GPS, so long as there was avarice, so long as there was loneliness and envy and ambition and boredom and addiction, he, Lemoine, would be untouchable.