"The Overstory"

[fiefoe]

Richard Powers writes in the same wavelength as the "Lab Girl" author. The first section of the book, with the short stories that introduce the central cast and what do trees mean to them, is stunning.

• It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering. It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.
• The several hundred kinds of hawthorn laugh at the single name they’re forced to share. Laurels insist that even death is nothing to lose sleep over.
• A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.
• Citizenship comes with a hunger for the uncut world.
• A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. Jørgen never reads these words. Words strike him as a ruse.
• But farmers are patient men tried by brutal seasons, and if they weren’t plagued by dreams of generation, few would keep plowing, spring after spring.
• A country watches dumbstruck as New England’s priceless chestnuts melt away... every fourth tree of a forest stretching two hundred million acres from Maine down to the Gulf—is doomed... The nascent Forest Service encourages them. Use the wood, at least, before it’s ruined. And in that salvage mission, men kill any tree that might contain the secret of resistance.
• that lone tree, shrugging off the staggering emptiness that the man knows so well.
• while squirrels thumped in their hidden nests between the wall studs.  {Heh.}
• 1. Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.
• this moment, too, so insignificant, so transitory, will be written into its rings and prayed over by branches that wave their semaphores against the bluest of midwestern winter skies.
• “We Hui Moslems have taken everything this country threw at us, and packaged it for resale. This building, our mansion in Hangzhou . . . Think of what we have outlasted.
• down the hall into the bookkeeper’s cage,
• “A Moslem from the land of Confucius, going to the Christian stronghold of Pittsburgh with a handful of priceless Buddhist paintings. Who are we missing?”  {This is a bit too rich.}
• He told her of the Stranded Scholars, changed into Americans by the Displaced Persons Act.
• “Luóhàn. Arhat. Little Buddha. They solve life. They pass the final exam.” He turned her chin toward him. When he smiled, the thin gold edge of his front tooth flashed. “Chinese superhero!”
• “Shut up, and I’ll show you something.” With the perfect hearing of childhood, both sisters know: the something is worth seeing.
• AT HOLYOKE, Mimi is a LUG: lesbian until graduation. It’s the same at half of the other Seven Sisters colleges, rounded up.
• watching the protesters with their placards full of all-caps slogans. The better the weather, the more irate the demands.
• to live and I can’t stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests. The wind that waves the pines loosens my belt. The mountain moon lights me as I play my lute. You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life? The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river.  {晚年惟好静，万事不关心。    自顾无长策，空知返旧林。    松风吹解带，山月照弹琴。    君问穷通理，渔歌入浦深。}
• Her eyes sour with animal confusion. Even now, every square foot of ground is stained with fruit, fruit stained, the myths say, with the blood of a suicide for love.
• “There’s a sale on black walnut,” he says, and democracy is over. By chance, nothing in the American arboretum could better suit what baby Charles will grow into: a towering, straight-grained thing whose nuts are so hard you have to smash them with a hammer.
• Each child’s tree has its own excellence: the ash’s diamond-shaped bark, the walnut’s long compound leaves, the maple’s shower of helicopters, the vase-like spread of the elm, the ironwood’s fluted muscle.
• The Golden Guide to Pond Life, The Golden Guide to Stars, to Rocks and Minerals, to Reptiles and Amphibians: humans are almost beside the point.
• That’s when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.
• watches the precarious boy, fascinated. A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel—root and stem—in great U-turns until it rights itself. But a human child can know it’s pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.
• Ability to execute simple acts of reason? Feeble. Skill at herding each other? Utterly, endlessly brilliant. Whole new rooms open up in Adam’s brain, ready to be furnished.
• Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.
• Appassionata Sonata, slewing out of her miming fingers. She catches him gazing, and dares him, with a glance, to own up. He does. It’s easier than dying from acute distant admiration.
• But they screw their courage to the sticking-place, and both end up squeezing a blackly masochistic, white-knuckle fun out of the evening.
• Just come back, and we’ll live together in sin with two separate cars, two separate bank accounts, two separate houses, two separate wills.
• You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It’s like I had the word “book,” and you put one in my hands. I had the word “game,” and you taught me how to play. I had the word “life,” and then you came along and said, “Oh! You mean this.”
• MILES BELOW and three centuries earlier, a pollen-coated wasp crawled down the hole at the tip of a certain green fig and laid eggs all over the involute garden of flowers hidden inside. Each of the world’s seven hundred and fifty species of Ficus has its own unique wasp tailored to fertilize it.
• the banyan, that one-tree forest that has grown up over the course of three hundred years just in time to break his fall.
• LIFE COUNTS DOWN. Nine years, six jobs, two aborted love affairs, three state license plates, two and a half tons of adequate beer, and one recurring nightmare.
• when you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume
• the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.
• The route looks like forest, mile after emerald mile. But Douggie sees through the illusion now. He’s driving through the thinnest artery of pretend life, a scrim hiding a bomb crater as big as a sovereign state.
• He has no capital. No political savvy. No golden tongue. No economic sophistication or social wherewithal. All he has is a clear-cut in front of him, whether his eyes are open or closed, haunting him all the way to the horizon.
• A great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.
• Neelay’s father hooks up a cassette tape player, for easy reloading of their hours of work in mere minutes. But the volume button must be set just right, or everything explodes with a read error.
• But every component, however outdated, is a marvel of mind-boggling complexity created by a team of heroic engineers. Neither father nor son can throw even these obsolete miracles away. The snail’s pace of Moore’s time in which to really see them, before these things that never were turn into things that have always been.
• People are in for it. Once, the fate of the human race might have been in the hands of the well-adjusted, the social ones, the masters of emotion. Now all that is getting upgraded.
• mind-bending epics that reveal the true scandals of time and matter.
• They smile like they’re doing calisthenics. Their comfort scares the crap out of him.
• all the oblique miracles that green can devise.
• “The beech told the farmer where to plow. Limestone underneath, covered in the best, darkest loam a field could want.”
• As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.
• He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language.
• Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.
• Night falls early, signaling the trees to drop their sugar-making project, shed all vulnerable parts, and harden up. Sap falls. Cells become permeable. Water flows out of the trunks and concentrates into anti-freeze. The dormant life just below the bark is lined with water so pure that nothing is left to help it crystallize.
• make her smile: miracles on all sides, and still they need compliments to keep them happy.
• this keen, homely, forthright girl who has escaped the stoop of constant social compliance.
• She wants to raise her hand and say, like Ovid, how all life is turning into other things.
• We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.
• They filter the dry light and fill it with expectation. Trunks run straight and bare, roughed with age at the bottom, then smooth and whitening up to the first branches. Circles of pale green lichen palette-spatter them. She stands inside this white-gray room, a pillared foyer to the afterlife.
• millennia. Underground, the eighty-year-old trunks are a hundred thousand, if they’re a day. She wouldn’t be surprised if this great, joined, single clonal creature that looks like a forest has been around for the better part of a million years. That’s why she has stopped: to see one of the oldest, largest living things on earth. All around her spreads one single male whose genetically identical trunks cover more than a hundred acres.
• Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it.
• The sheer mass of ever-dying life packed into each single cubic foot, woven together with fungal filaments and dew-betrayed spiderweb leaves her woozy.
• He’s so tall, so near the upper limits imposed by gravity, that it takes a day and a half for him to lift water from his roots to the highest of his sixty-five million needles.
• But she likes Dennis, too. In his spare motions and abundant silence, he blurs the line between those nearly identical molecules, chlorophyll and hemoglobin.
• There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.