Speaking of trees, Iāve been reading The Overstory and itās such an astoundingly stunning book, but the thing that made me know it was special came just a few lines into the first page.
āA good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.ā Lodged into my brain the second I read it and hasnāt left me. Itās gonna be with me as a guide for the rest of my life, I think.
Finished thisācracked me open a little in many parts. Thereās a quote in it thatās, āWhat do all good stories do?[ā¦] They kill you a little. They turn you into something you werenāt."
This book has the stuff of that, for me.
Or this bitā¦
āSay the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day. First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesnāt show up until three or four a.m. Even then, itās just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morningāa million million years of branchingānothing more exists than lean and simple cells.
Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town.
The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakoutābackbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run.
Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour.
Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals.
Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.
By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And thatās when the tree of life becomes something else again. Thatās when the giant trunk starts to teeter.ā
