Orwell's Roses

love how my garden is very productive outside of the logic of productivity—it makes a lot of stuff that’s edible and nourishing and all that, but it’s also ‘productive’ in ways you wouldn’t think necessarily to measure.” Most of writing is thinking, not typing, and thinking is sometimes best done while doing something else that engages part of you.

“Joy remakes people through combat with forces of subjection [i.e., subjugation]. Joy is a desubjectifying process, an unfixing, an intensification of life itself. It is a process of coming alive and coming apart. Whereas happiness is used as a numbing anesthetic that induces dependence, joy is the growth of people’s capacity to do and feel new thi

In his writing the hideous and the exquisite often coexist.

Plants are anything but passive. They made the world.

Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.

preparing a garden and with it a life.

(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.)

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

“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.”