It has been a while, folks. My last post here was early February, 2024. A lot has happened since then. We sold the big house and drastically downsized into a condo. Both kids have moved out into their own apartments, positioning us as empty nesters. The condo is a nine-minute walk to the Central Library. It’s a six-minute walk down to a swimming hole at the river. Pretty groovy.
Big changes, but good ones. The sale of the big house allowed us to pay off our property on the coast and pay off some other debts while still putting us in a position to have the condo paid off in roughly two years. Big sighs of relief to have that financial stress off our shoulders.
After making it through the stress of selling/buying/moving, that means I need to get back to doing some reading and keeping some notes to self here. So here we go.
Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Overstory is a tale of layering, braiding, leafing, branching and intertwining tales of North America trees and some of the humans who inhabit that world. The protagonist here isn’t a person, but rather how trees of various ages and species and location manage to tie an amalgamation of humans together. It’s a pretty neat literary trick that Powers has pulled off here.
A couple lines/points that have stuck with me since I finished the book earlier this summer:
- Trees sprang into being here on Earth about 400 million years ago. That’s 400,000,000 years. Four hundred million years, if you want to spell it with letters. Every tree we see is a successful experiment that has been running for a very long time.
- Humans are not the important part of the this book. If all trends continue on our current path, I’m guessing we’ll be realizing we’re not the important part of the story of life either.
- Human civilization, in its current form, would most likely not exist without trees. Take look around at our built environment and chances are, trees form the basic building blocks of what you see. Not just the structures of our homes and cities, our earlier forms of transportation and early weaponry, but they also form a significant chunk of our current food supply.
- I should have bookmarked this passage when I read it so that I could easily quote it verbatim, but it went something like this: In the DSM 5 discussion of delusional behavior, delusion is described purely as an individualistic affliction. If the broader culture around you doesn’t view something as delusional (such as destroying the structure that supports life, worshiping the great flying spaghetti monster, etc.), then it isn’t delusional. If you find yourself fighting against something that is largely culturally agreed upon (that earth was created for the enjoyment and utility of humans), you may then be deemed delusional.
- One quibble with the book (and a possible spoiler alert): Powers floats the possibility that the salvation of the world will come through the rapid deployment of AI as that will allow for inter-species communication. That would be cool I guess but I also have to remember that when Europeans encountered beings in the New World, there was discussion of whether the indigenous peoples were actually human. Eventually being deemed human didn’t seem to afford much protection to Native Americans so…. yeaaaaah.
Since these past few months have been a bit of a blur, I didn’t keep any notes as I was reading this but I will say this: if you’re looking for a well-written, poetic, sad and — at times — angry ode to the trees, this is your book. A+.
ReMarkable 