The Overstory by Richard Powers.

5/5 rating. 502 pages.

Book #26 of 2022. Read June 7, 2022.

This is an incredible novel about the intersecting stories of a small group of people and their discovery of awe for trees.

The main characters include everything from a computer scientist, to a professional of trees (dendrologist), to an engineer, and a war veteran. These people follow a plethora of ways into falling in love with nature, but all eventually find the beauty and magic of trees and forests.

The first portion of the book is meeting the characters in seemingly disparate situations. But as some people join the fight to save the planet, they begin to meet one another, and often in very interesting ways.

This book was amazingly philosophical, and I loved so many quotes from it. They often spoke to the interconnectedness of all things. I learned a bunch about trees, forests, and living things. But I also realized how much we take for granted and want to keep the awe that is shown by the characters alive in my life.

My favorite quotes:

“But nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.”

“Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful.”

“Yet here she is, asking for trouble. Acting like what she does might matter.”

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

“We don’t know what people can and can’t do. So little has been tried!”

“We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.”

“The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing – nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.”

“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

This book literally changed how I look at nature. It is one of the best books that I have ever read!

Quotes:

“Makes you think different about things, don’t it?”

“Not everything we plant will take. Not every place will thrive. But together we can watch the ones that do fill up our garden.”

“Patience is the maker of all good things.”

“The boy sits frozen by possibility. They can release any process they want into the world, any willful thing. The only impossible thing is how to choose.”

“The boy never stops to answer. He’s busy making worlds.”

“Life is talking to itself, and she has listened in.”

“There are things in here worse than wolves and witches, primal fears that no amount of civilizing will ever tame.”

“Improve forest health. As if forests were waiting all these four hundred million years for us newcomers to come cure them. Science in the service of willful blindness: How could so many smart people have missed the obvious? A person has only to look, to see that dead logs are far more alive than living ones. But the sense never have much chance, against the power of doctrine.”

“You’ll want to learn what your work’s been up to, while you were gone.”

“She’s alive, and she doesn’t know why.”

“The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.”

“People have no idea. Still the Age of Wood. Cheapest priceless stuff that ever has been.”

“And there, in the dark woods, waving his tiny bean and feeling a hum from the towering black column, he knows the answer. The branch wants only to go on branching. The point of the game is to keep playing.”

“Now his life has a luxury he’s never had: a destination, and someone to head there with.”

“The woods are calling, and she must go.”

“The words refuse to come, tonight. She should simply sleep, and see what her dreams might say.”

“Forests panic people. Too much going on there. Humans need a sky.”

“But hope and truth do nothing for humans, without use.”

“She remembers the Buddha”s words: A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things.”

“The charm and optimism of a guy who does not yet know what people will do to other people, to other living things, once terrors and hurts and needs set in.”

“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“This is what people do – solve their own problems in others’ lives.”

“The afternoon vanishes; they’ve both been on forest-time too long to count on mere hours anymore.”

“You’ve made me think about life in a different way.”

“Then Nick is alone with this woman who has commandeered his life.”

“‘I never knew how strong a drug other people are.’ ‘The strongest. Or at least the most widely abused.’”

“When the wind stops, the stillness suspends them between two eternities, entirely in the cares of here and now.”

“I’ll follow you anywhere.”

“You’re studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is people.”

“We don’t make reality. We just evade it.”

“The Northwest had more miles of logging roads than public highway. More miles of logging roads than streams. The country has enough to circle the Earth a dozen times.”

“There are other, much deeper deceptions at the heart of humans.”

“She struggles for a few seconds to hear the answer, before softening into whatever happens next.”

“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 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.”

“His heart contracts back down to the size it was when she found him. Silence, he decides, is better than lies.”

“Nothing in the world can tell her how many more days like this lie ahead, or how many more she can last.”

“That’s the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.”

“The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.”

“The sight fills him with a horror inseparable from hope. Somewhere in all these boundless, compounding, swelling canyons of imprinted paper, encoded in the millions of tons of loblolly pine fiber, there must be a few words of truth, a page, a paragraph that could break the spell of fulfillment and bring back danger, need, and death.”

“Between two and four a.m., when he would otherwise lie awake feeding on his own insides, he can mark several neighborhoods.”

“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.”

“All that’s left to sell up here is nostalgia, those recent yesterdays when tomorrow seemed the answer to everything a human might even want.”

“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.”

“Auden: A culture is no better than its woods.”

“They press on to more collecting. But every trunk now appears like an infinitely lifelike sculpture too complex for any sculptor but life to have made.”

“How does a man rise or fall in this life?”

“There are so many names for the thing that everyone is scared to death of, and everyone wants to tell you theirs.”

“What is it worth to be looked at, without judgment, for as long as you need?”

“Enlightenment is a shared enterprise.”

“A guy in a dirty suit jacket and shorts, his hair bound up in a bungee cord, cuts behind her on the sidewalk, talking out loud: voices of cell phone – choose your schizophrenia.”

“Something marvelous is happening underground, something we’re just starting to learn how to see.“

“The past tries to kill her – all the people they were or had hoped to be.”

“The way across the wet grass in stocking feet is long enough for her to wonder how she can still be here, buried alive, tied to this frozen man year after year, when all she ever wanted in this life was to find her freedom.”

“I know no good way

to live and I can’t

stop getting lost in my

thoughts, my ancient forests…” -Wang Wei

“Chance, that comedian with the perfect timing.”

“Then he sits still, trying to be only where he is, here, home.”

“He’s reached the age when dead is the new normal.”

“Trees stand at the heart of everybody, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics.”

“How can something so small matter so much to him?”

“Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.“

“Here I am, near the finish line, loving life again.”

“How life managed to add imagination to all the other tricks in its chemistry set is a mystery Dorothy can’t wrap her head around. But there it is: the ability to see, all at once, in all its concurrent branches, all its many hypotheticals, this thing that bridges past and future, earth and sky.”

“He didn’t look hard enough. He loved too little.”

“It’s a big question, to be sure. Too big for people alone. But people aren’t alone, and they never have been.”

“Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force again unlawful and imminent harm.“

“What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer.”

“Do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, and ensure as you have all the long day of life.”

“You have a right to be present. A right to attend. A right to be astonished.”

“In fact, he read once, back in it, the night the woman came to trouble him into life that the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.”

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