Richard POWERS's quotes (sethmessenger.fr - Some short news to get away from it all).

#37396
It is then that Adam understands: The human species is deeply ill. It won't be long. It was an outlier. Soon the world will be restored to sound intelligences, collective intelligences. Colonies and beehives.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37397
Adam can't get away from the book. Which demonstrates over and over again how the so-called Homo sapiens fails to solve the most basic logic problems. On the other hand, men excel at quickly determining who is included or excluded, in grace or disgrace, worthy of being praised or mercilessly chastised. Ability to put the most basic rationality into practice? Almost nil. Ability to lock others in boxes? Remarkable and tireless.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37398
Humans carry within them a whole legacy of behaviors and prejudices, plated and tinkered with from previous stages of evolution, which follow their own outdated rules. Seemingly erratic and irrational choices are in fact strategies created in the past to solve other types of problems. We are all prisoners of the bodies of cunning and upstart opportunists fashioned to survive the savannah by controlling each other.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37399
If you want someone to help you, convince them that they have already helped you more than you would know how to say. People are willing to make efforts to perpetuate their legacy.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37400
Chinese proverb: "When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years earlier."

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37401
Douglas Pavlicek replants a clearing as vast as downtown Eugene, and greets every plant he affectionately borders. Hold on. You just have to last one or two centuries. For you guys, it's a breeze. We just have to survive. Then there will be no one to bother you.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37402
In a few years, a kid like him will be entitled to cognitive behavioral therapy for his Asperger's syndrome and serotonin inhibitors to round the angles of his clumsiness in human relationships. But he knows one thing for sure, before almost everyone else: The days of humans are numbered. In the past, the fate of the species may have been in the hands of the sociable, the well-integrated, the masters of emotion. But now all this is up to date.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37403
Extraterrestrials are landing on Earth. Aborts, on the scale of aliens. But they metabolize as if it were their last chance. They fly like swarms of midges, too fast to be seen, so fast that the earthly seconds appear to them years. To them, humans are just statues of motionless meat. These strangers try to communicate, but get no answer. For lack of signs of life or intelligence, they nest in these frozen statues and dry them like smoked ham, to make provisions for the long return.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37404
Extraterrestrials are landing on Earth. Aborts, on the scale of aliens. But they metabolize as if it were their last chance. They fly like swarms of midges, too fast to be seen, so fast that the earthly seconds appear to them years. To them, humans are just statues of motionless meat. These strangers try to communicate, but get no answer. For lack of signs of life or intelligence, they nest in these frozen statues and dry them like smoked ham, to make provisions for the long return.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37405
We know so little about how trees grow. Almost nothing about how they bloom, fork, renew and heal themselves. We learned a little bit about a few, taken in isolation. But nothing is less isolated, more sociable than a tree.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37406
As surely as the westerly wind, the things that people know and take for granted will change. There is no such thing as knowing for sure. The only reliable things are humility and a watchful eye.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37407
All day she works in the woods, the teeming back of Augustats, the tick skull, the mouth filled with leaf residue, the pollen eyes, the face draped in cobwebs, the arms of sumac bracelets, the knees cut by slag, the nose lined with spores, the back of the thighs stung in braille by the wasps, and the heart as joyful as the day.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37408
Billions of years ago, a single outlier cell capable of duplicating itself learned to transform a sterile ball of toxic gases and volcanic slag into this populated garden. And everything you hope for, everything you dread, everything you love has become possible.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37409
We cross the Milky Way together, trees and men. [...] Every walk with nature, you get much more than you're looking for. The most direct access to the universe is a wild forest.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37410
You and the tree in your garden come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, your paths diverged. But even today, after a huge journey in separate directions, you share with this tree a quarter of your genes...

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37411
When the lateral roots of two Douglas firs meet underground, they merge. Through these self-grafted knots, the two trees combine their vascular systems to make one. Woven together underground by thousands and thousands of kilometres of living fungal threads, the trees feed and heal each other, protect the lives of the young and the sick, gather their resources into a common metabolic pool...

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37412
Patricia's trees are much more sociable than she herself might have suspected. There are no individuals. There are not even separate species. All that is in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from the many flavours of cooperation. Trees don't fight any more than the leaves of the same tree fight. To believe that finally nature does not have so much blood on fangs and claws. First, these species at the base of the pyramid of life have no fangs or talons. And if the trees share their reserves, then every drop of red must float on an ocean of green.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37413
It's easy to love people who take plants seriously. But Dennis, too, loves him. With his rare gestures, his abundant silence, he blurs the line between these two almost identical molecules, chlorophyll and hemoglobin.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37414
She takes her trembling hand in the dark. It's so good to the touch, it's what a root must feel that discovers, after centuries, another root with which to embrace underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, invented separately, ever more ingenious, and each of them generates new things.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37430
The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37431
That's what's scary about men: just put them together with a few simple machines, and they lift the world up to you.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37432
Life will cook; The seas are going to rise. The lungs of the planet will be torn from him. And the law will let all this happen, because the damage will never have been imminent enough. For the impending, it is too late to the rhythm of humans. The law must consider the impending to the rhythm of the trees.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37433
Future ones where our robot descendants use us as fuel, or we're in infinitely distracting zoos, as protected as the one adam just enrolled in. Futures where humanity heads to the mass grave, swearing that it is the only species of creation that can speak.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37434
They branch and duplicate, these algorithms that Neelay makes fly through the air. They are only at the beginning, like the simple cells in the morning of the Earth. But already they have learned to do, in a few short decades, what took a billion years to the molecules. Now all they have to do is learn what life wants from humans. Vast question, for sure. Too vast for humans alone. But humans are not alone, they never have been.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37435
Fruit trees manipulate us to spread their seeds, and it is the ripening fruits that have given us access to the vision in color. By teaching us how to find their bait, the trees taught us to see that the sky is blue. Our brains evolved to decipher the forest. We have been shaped and shaped by forests for much longer than we are Homo sapiens.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37436
And here's a marginal scoop. You can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. Trees connect underground. There are brains down there that our brains aren't programmed to perceive. That solve problems, that make decisions. The plasticity of the roots, the fungal synapses. What else can I call it? If you connect enough trees, the forest becomes conscious.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37437
One reporter once asked Rockefeller how much it was, enough. He said, "Just a little bit more." And that's all you want: eat and sleep, stay dry and be loved, acquire just a little bit more.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37438
We now know that trees communicate and have memory. They taste, they smell, they touch, they can even see and hear. We, the species that discovered this, we have learned so much about these beings with whom we share the world. We are beginning to understand the deep links between trees and humans. But our separation grew faster than our connection.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37439
We now know that trees communicate and have memory. They taste, they smell, they touch, they can even see and hear. We, the species that discovered this, we have learned so much about these beings with whom we share the world. We are beginning to understand the deep links between trees and humans. But our separation grew faster than our connection.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37440
There were six trillion trees in the world when humans appeared. There's half of it left. Half of which will be gone in a hundred years.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37441
Trees are aware of our presence. The chemistry of their roots and the fragrances that their leaves give off changes as we approach... When you feel good after a walk in the forest, it may be that some species try to hit on us, or bribe us. So many miracle cures come from trees, and we have barely scratched the surface of what they have to offer. Trees have been trying to get in touch with us for a long time. But they speak at frequencies too low for humans to hear.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37442
This world is not our world with trees in it. It is a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37443
You can fix the hour hand, Mimi notes, without taking your eyes off it during a whole clock cycle, and not once do you see it moving.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37444
Everything is property; a one-year-old already knows that. It's a law as powerful as Newton's. Walking down the street without money on you is a crime, and no one in this world would imagine for a moment that in real life it could be otherwise.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37445
Ownership, mastery: nothing else matters. The Earth will be monetized until all the trees grow in straight lines, three people have the seven continents, and all the great living organisms are raised to be felled.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37446
The job of the psyche is to keep ourselves in a blessed ignorance of who we are, what we think, our behavior in this or that situation. We all operate in a thick fog of mutual confirmation. Our thoughts are primarily shaped by a residual hard core that has evolved to the principle that all others must be right. But even when we point out this fog, we are no more able to find our way there.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37447
That's what it all comes down to. I've been through a lot. I've lived everywhere. In Africa in the Stone Age, and at the edges of other galaxies. I believe that very soon - not right away, but soon - if the software continues to improve and give us more space, we can, I am convinced, transform into everything we want.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37448
A tree is a miraculous creature that shelters, nourishes and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the executioners who shoot him.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

#37449
And there's one thing about apple seeds: they're unpredictable. So are their offspring. Stable parents give birth to an uncontrollable child. The sweet can turn sour, or bitter to creamy. The only way to preserve the taste of a variety is to graft a cutting onto new roots. Olivia Vandergriff would be very surprised to learn that each apple with a name comes from the same original tree. The Jonathan, the McIntosh, the Empire: so many strokes of luck to the great roulette of the malus species.

Richard POWERS
(The World Tree)

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