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

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.

There’s a line by the anthropologist Mary Douglas to the effect that just as everything symbolizes the body, so the body symbolizes everything else. The same could be said of roses in the western world. As images, they’re so ubiquitous they’re literally wallpaper and are routinely depicted on everything from lingerie to tombstones. Actual roses are

Even as ornament, flowers represent life itself, as fertility, mortality, transience, extravagance, and as such they enter our art, rites, and language.

(There’s a whole history to be written about bohemian aunts and queer uncles, about those family members who swoop down to encourage misfit children in ways their parents won’t or can’t.)

There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish

The trees made the past seem within reach in a way nothing else could: here were living things that had been planted and tended by a living being who was gone, but the trees that had been alive in her lifetime were in ours and might be after we were gone. They changed the shape of time.

“They were the kind of people who . . . tack a ‘fucking’ on to every noun,” he wrote in his diary of the experience, “yet I have never seen anything that exceeded their kindness.”

Sometimes the shadow of death frightens or depresses people, sometimes it makes them live more vividly and take life less for granted, and Orwell seems to be among the latter. He had an austere and martial disposition in many respects, didn’t flee physical discomfort, and pushed himself through his bodily limitations until he was bedridden, then