Orwell's Roses

To go down into the earth is to travel back in time, and to excavate it is to drag the past into the present, a process mining has done on a scale so colossal it’s changed the earth all the way up to the upper atmosphere.

That invisibility or that obliviousness is one of the defining conditions of the modern world.

“One way of looking at trees is that they are captured light. Photosynthesis, after all, captures a photon, takes a little energy from it before re-emitting it at a lower wavelength, and uses that captured energy to turn air into sugars, and then sugars into the stuff that makes leaves, wood, and roots. Even the most solid of beings, the giant sequ

excavating an ancient world to burn up in the present one.

Plants are anything but passive. They made the world.

garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect.

Slashing away at others seemed to be a means of self-definition and self-enhancement that faded away as he grew more confident and more humane as a writer and a person.

In his writing the hideous and the exquisite often coexist.

The German corpse has something to tell us, and it’s about war and nationalism, and about an encounter with death. The flowers also have something to tell us in that sentence, perhaps that there’s something beyond the war, just as there’s cyclical time, the time of nature as seasons and processes imagined until recently as outside historical time.