That I don’t know what it’s like to be a tree had never quite dawned on me, it was just one of those things I don’t know much about, like art history, Chinese cookery, how it feels to hold a grandchild in your arms for the first time. I don’t mean any of this facetiously. I was at a coffeeshop this week, typing on my laptop at a table outdoors, under shade provided by a pair of fulsome olive trees, and it struck me, considering that a tree is alive in ways somewhat similar to how I am alive, that I know very little about a tree’s perspective on existence. How time and age feel or do not feel. If sunlight registers as heat or daily bread. If respiring, breathing, can be, like it is for me, mostly automatic and occasionally forgotten – perhaps at night when photosynthesis has ceased. And what if there are parts of its body it doesn’t like. What if it can hold its perception of danger beyond the immediate moment, or, like humans, like me, maybe it needs to shorten its event horizon to get through an ordinary day.
The most recent novel by Richard Powers, The Overstory, is extremely good at investigating the life of trees. Unfortunately, the novel is worse, in my opinion, at what it’s like to be human, but at trees it excels, and as I sat in the coffeeshop, I remembered an effect of reading that book that felt delicious: to imagine life from inside a tree’s mind. So I stopped typing for a solid three minutes. I stared at the trees above me, I wondered how, from a tree’s perspective, a moment on this planet was perceived. I didn’t really get anywhere, but it was probably the nicest moment of the day.
And I remembered how I read somewhere that Powers writes his books by dictating into transcription software while lying in bed – which is something I really don’t understand at all!
Book publishing sidebar: Sadly, due to the coronavirus, we decided to postpone this past week’s Everything Now event at The Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles (new date tba). But there’s plenty of good news, we’re back on the bestseller list, there’s a foreign edition coming out in Poland soon, and other things are rolling, so the beat goes on!
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but if you’re in a book club, and your bookclub elects to read and discuss Everything Now, and if we can make the scheduling work out, I’m happy to attend for a Q&A portion via speakerphone or Zoom or what have you.
Anybody interested, reach out via my publicist, or just reply to this email, and we’ll set something up. Thanks again to everybody for the support!
What the what? A (mostly) weekly newsletter by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin of (very) short essays about things he finds beautiful.
Rosecrans’s new nonfiction book, Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, is available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Other books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a list at Bookshop.