Because what’s the point of even having a world if you’re not going to pass it on to the next generation?
Clipping
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books > Project Hail Mary (Weir, Andy)
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books > One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez)
Since the beginning of adolescence, when he had begun to be aware of his premonitions, he thought that death would be announced with a definite, unequivocal, irrevocable signal, but there were only a few hours left before he would die and the signal had not come.
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books > The Overstory: A Novel (Richard Powers)
Her cheeks tense up. She wants to shout, Who are you? Why won’t you stop? No one has ever looked at me like this, except to judge, rob, or rape me. In my whole life, my whole life, never… . Her face reddens. With slow, heavy, disbelieving swings of her head, she starts to cry. The tears do whatever they want. Call it sobbing. The therapist is crying, too. Why? Why am I sick? What’s wrong with me? Loneliness. But not for people. You’re mourning a thing you never even knew. What thing? A great, spoked, wild, woven-together place beyond replacing. One you didn’t even know was yours to lose. Where did it go? Into making us. But it still wants something.
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books > The Overstory: A Novel (Richard Powers)
No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible.
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books > The Overstory: A Novel (Richard Powers)
Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near… . When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.
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books > The Overstory: A Novel (Richard Powers)
What did the dead Joan of Arc hear? Insight or delusion? Next week he’ll tell his undergrads about Durkheim, Foucault, crypto-normativity: How reason is just another weapon of control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect.
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books > The Overstory: A Novel (Richard Powers)
Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory.
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books > The Overstory: A Novel (Richard Powers)
Nothing else has more power now to get him through the hours before lunch. He hangs on the most ridiculous plot crumb, as if the future of humanity hinges on it. The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive—character—is all that matters in the end. It’s a child’s creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people. But Ray needs fiction now as much as anyone. The heroes, villains, and walk-ons his wife gives him this morning are better than truth. Though I am fake, they say, and nothing I do makes the least difference, still, I cross all distances to sit next to you in your mechanical bed, keep you company, and change your mind.
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books > The Overstory: A Novel (Richard Powers)
We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you’re by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.
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books > The Overstory: A Novel (Richard Powers)
Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world.