I. The Prophet and the Hedgehog

• Saeculum: a word originating from the Etruscans referring to the length of time of the living memory of a person (or, perhaps, of a tree)

If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, and gardens.

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 biology, and the realms of the senses.

II. Going Underground

Think of the Carboniferous as a sixty-million-year inhale by plants, sucking carbon dioxide from the sky, and the last two hundred years as a monstrous human-engineered exhale, undoing what the plants did so long ago.

III. Bread and Roses

• We need them both— nourishment for our bodies and our minds, practical sustenance and moments of joy.

IV. Stalin’s Lemons

V. Retreats and Attacks

VI. The Price of Roses

Beauty is not only formal, and it lies not only in the superficial qualities that are appealing to the eye or ear; it lies in patterns of meaning, in invocations of values, and in connection to the life the reader is living and the world she wants to see.

Totalitarianism is impossible without lies. So it is significantly a language problem and a storytelling problem that can be fought to some extent with language…

Words at their best uncover things and show them clearly. At their worst, they do the opposite…

VII. The River Orwell

• Need to read Nineteen Eighty-Four!