Steve Totten

“But he did not sleep well, in his big black-walnut bed. He startled to the night noises of an old frame house--the easing walls, the steps of bodiless assassins creeping across the wooden floors all night long.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“Nature, never a flat plane, has always more folds and faces still hidden from human view. The world is a prism, not a window. Wherever we look, we find new refractions.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“It’s that lack of faith in the public that always results in an erosion of the level of public discourse. A faithlessness in the public is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remove complexity, and the capacity for complexity degrades farther. I think people can be trusted to handle a complicated truth. Plants are not omnipotent, otherworldly creatures. They are also not just like us. But neither are they neither of these things. There are elements of reality in both images, and fallacy in both too. This is hard stuff: one needs to welcome ambiguity and delight in the lack of easy tropes. Complexity is the rule in nature, after all. Thinking through this requires occupying a mental space of in-betweenness rarely tolerated in our contemporary world concerned with linear narratives and known entities. Báyò Akómoláfé, a Yoruba poet and philosopher, wrote about this in-betweenness, contemplating the way all creatures are in fact composite organisms. The state of nature is one of interpenetration and mingling that defies easy categorization. It occupies a middle place, both in the material reality of the world and in our understanding of it. “The middle I speak of is not halfway between two poles; it is porousness that mocks the very idea of separation,” he writes. Akómoláfé outlines our collective biological reality as a state of “brilliant betweenness” that “defeats everything, corrodes every boundary, spills through marked territory, and crosses out every confident line.” It reminds me of Trewavas, telling me in his living room outside Edinburgh that scientists don’t know enough about plants to say anything dogmatic about them.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – A Popular Science and Natural History Study of Botany

“The man who holds the knife is not always the real murderer.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man