But he raises the pitch in his peroration. Our love of flowers, he says, is “a form of inherited wisdom scribed by evolution into our nerve endings and brain chemistry. In the presence of flowers, our senses glow. Beauty awakens inside us” and “we’re freed momentarily from the husk-like ego.” You feel like cheering. More Haskells, please, and more flowers.
— Adam Nicolson, from "A Passionate Floral Manifesto" In “How Flowers Made Our World,” David George Haskell makes a case for their soft power. (NY Times, March 25, 2026)
Look at them on days like that, when the wind is blowing through the boundaries of fresh and stiff, and you will see them for what they are: wind-runners, wind-dancers, the wind-spirits, alive with an evolved ability to live with the wind, in it and on it, drawing out its energy to make their own feathered, mobile, ocean-ranging magnificence.
I thank God I met Homer again that summer. He was suddenly alongside me, a companion and an ally, the most truly reliable voice I had ever known. It was like discovering poetry itself, or the dead speaking. As I read and reread the Odyssey in translation, I suddenly felt that here was the unaffected truth, here was someone speaking about fate and the human condition in ways that other people only seem to approach obliquely; and that directness, that sense of nothing between me and the source, is what gripped me. I felt like asking, “Why has no one told me about this before?”
-- Adam Nicolson, The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters
“…because, as the Odyssey knows, to live well in the world, nostalgia must be resisted: you must stay with your ship, stay tied to the present, remain mobile, keep adjusting the rig, work with the swells, watch for a wind-shift, watch as the boom swings over, engage, in other words, with the muddle and duplicity and difficulty of life. Don't be tempted into the lovely simplicities that the heroic past seems to offer.”
"There is no distinction between life and mind. Life is mind and there is no boundary in the continuum of life at which you can draw a line to say 'Here is mind' and 'Here is none'. Life-and-mind is a single condition in which the living share. We are mind. We live in mind. To live is to be mind. Mind is the distinction between what lives and what doesn't, so that thought, that stream of consciousness that ebbs and flows in us, is the medium of being."
New discoveries are adding millennia to our past. The implications should change our future.
This an intriguingly speculative, wide-ranging article, and the accompanying podcast might even be better. In the latter, Samo Burja posits two models of civilization, Steven Pinker vs. Robert E. Howard. For the Pinker model, civilization is an inherently teleological logic and automatic process, getting better all the time from a few basic premises as we hop, skip, and jump our way from Athens to Rome to Florence to London to New York; the Howard model, which is supported by the discovery of scattered, lost civilizations more ancient than the consensus date for the arrival of agriculture 10000 years ago, some buried in the sea, suggests by contrast that civilizations rise and fall all the time because their material and cultural infrastructure and the knowledge to sustain them are extremely fragile. Some are forgotten; what survives of others is arbitrary; Plato, Burja suggests, may have been the equivalent of a blogger (a thought I find comforting rather than disturbing).
Burja emphasizes that we find only what we’re looking for in the past. Ideological frames necessarily distort even empirical findings in archeology, which, given that it’s an expensive science, they also physically control and constrain. Totalizing worldviews from Marxism to Islam seek to suppress inconvenient facts, for example, while modern nations from England to China wish to establish sometimes spurious ancient lineages.
He also ruminates on the role of iconoclasm in destroying evidence—and of destroying civilization in the first place. Ironically, pervasive iconoclasm stemming both from Athens (the aforementioned Plato) and Jerusalem (the First Commandment) might account for western dynamism, even as iconoclasm declares war on civilization at large, as all the book-burning, church-bulldozing, and statue-toppling from the Library of Alexandria forward would suggest. Having been reared just before this century that symbolically began with the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, I fear the iconoclastic impulse, as I’ve said here before; I like libraries and museums; I want to preserve the works of humanity, not destroy them in the name of a bodiless ideal, be it reason, God, or justice. But I admit in theory that the dross has to be burned off from time to time—that the prohibition on idolatry encodes a real insight—no matter how much I want to keep myself and my works from the flames. (See my prose poem or flash fiction from 2015 appropriately titled “Iconoclasm.”)
While this whole topic of ancient civilization is beyond my expertise, I did touch on it in my recent piece on the Iliad, for which I also read Adam Nicolson’s Why Homer Matters. (Fun fact for the Woolf-pilled: Nicolson is the grandson of Vita Sackville-West.) Despite the title, which suggests some Western-Canon-style argument for the value of the classics, Why Homer Matters is more an investigation into the civilizational origins of the Homeric epics than anything else; Nicholson hypothesizes that the epics embody and preserve the divided consciousness of an originally nomadic people—the Greeks in his view went south to the Mediterranean from the Eurasian steppe—who became a settled agricultural and urban order, hence the Iliad’s central conflict between the warrior band and the city.
