By: Richard Powers
Intro:
In addition to being one of the best written novels I’ve ever read, The Overstory is an invitation to reconnect to something huge we lost long ago. While told through the tales of humans, the real, overarching story is that of trees, ecosystems, and life itself on planet Earth.
As a novel, I found it an astonishing complex, brilliant weave of the lives of human characters touched and forever altered, by trees. A captivating read rife with wisdom and deep in philosophy. What really mattered to me, though, was that it felt like a five hundred page homage to the hard-to-see-today truth my favorite Ed Abbey quote points to:
“A weird lovely fantastic object out of nature, like Delicate Arch, has the curious ability to remind us — like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness — that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as a child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.”
The Overstory is an invitation overboard the “little world of men” into “different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours,” a world we all come from, and I believe, all deeply, unconsciously miss — a connection with the whole of life we lost many generations ago.
My 10 Favorite Index Cards:
“But it’s Idaho, and when you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you’d be well advised not to take at face value.”
“Time stops. He lies on his shattered back, looking upward. The dome above him hovers, a cracked shell about to fall in shards all around him. A thousand — a thousand thousand — green-tipped, splitting fingerlings fold over him, praying and threatening. Bark disintegrates; wood clarifies. The trunk turns into stacks of spreading metropolis, networks of conjoined cells pulsing with energy and liquid sun, water rising through long thin reeds, rings of them bonded together into pipes that draw dissolved minerals up through their waving tips while sun-made sustenance drops down in tubes just inside them. A colossal, rising, reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility out from nothing: the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see. Then his eyes close in shock and Neely shuts down.”
“What frightens people most will one day turn to wonder.”
“The branch wants only to go on branching. The point of the game is to keep playing.”
“… they’re all imprisoned in a shoe box, and they have no idea. I just want to shake them and yell, Get out of yourselves, damn it! Look around! But they can’t Nicky. Everything alive is just outside of their field of view.”
“But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is just one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”
“The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they share a core so obvious it passes for a 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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It strikes her that she envies him. His years of enforced tranquility, the patience of his slowed mind, the expansion of his blinkered senses. He can watch the dozen bare trees in the backyard for hours and see something intricate and surprising, sufficient to his desires, while she — she is still trapped in a hunger that rushes past everything.”