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.

you might prepare for your central mission in life by doing other things that may seem entirely unrelated, and how necessary this may be.

“Death is never an ending in nature.” And because a garden is always a place of becoming, to make and tend one is a gesture of hope, that these seeds planted will sprout and grow, this tree will bear fruit, that spring will come, and so, probably, will some kind of harvest. It’s an activity deeply invested in the future.

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 C

“Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

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.

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 go

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

To spend time frequently with these direct experiences is clarifying, a way of stepping out of the whirlpools of words and the confusion they can whip up. In an age of lies and illusions, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology, and biolog

It may be the very uselessness of cut flowers, beyond the pleasure they give, that has made them a superlative gift, embodying the generosity and anti-utilitarianism of gift-giving.