The Family Tree

I think... girls have a hard time being interesting. It’s actually easier to be famous, or notorious, than it is to be interesting. In our world, girls climb very well until they hit puberty-sexual maturity-and then they begin to fall out of the tree. They start role-playing instead of thinking, flirting instead of learning. They start admiring how smart the boys are-or how athletic or how handsome-instead of concentrating on their own intelligence.

Do you realize it’s been only a century that we’ve been able to go from house to car to office to car to wherever, with the heater on, and the defroster on, protected from the rain and the cold? It hasn’t been much longer than that we’ve had lighting for streets. Think of all that darkness, all that world out there, all that mystery that we’ve turned into well-lighted concrete bunkers, safe and warm and dull.

Men are biological. Women are biological. We pretend our minds are in control, but that’s a very tenuous control at best, and a civilized society can’t be built on uncontrolled biology. I see it in my work: intelligence betrayed by lust, by jealousy, by macho ownership; otherwise trustworthy men who can’t be trusted at all around women, or vice versa. Hell, look at Congress. Well-intentioned, progressive, admired law-makers who end up losing it all because they can’t control how they react to women! And I certainly don’t trust most women around men

Recent history takes a while to set. People really don’t know what just happened. They only figure it out later.

Once we’re grown, all we can hear are what the poet described: the echoes, dying.

When one’s world was impermanent, difficult endeavors, like procuring justice or balancing the ecology, need never be attempted. One need only make contributions to the ascendant hierarchy, cast one’s eyes heavenward with an awed and anticipatory expression, while continuing to behave as selfishly as one liked. When everything is going to go pop, one needn’t bother to provide for or preserve for the grandchildren.

Though this new forest grew mightily, elsewhere the mighty jungles fell. Elsewhere the coastal rain forests that furred the body of the world were torn and riven. Elsewhere the last of the old growth the last of the world’s own garment were ripped away. It was in this time, now, that the mother of us all was stripped naked and left to die in shame of her children, she who had been robed in glory like this, adorned like this. I bent my head upon the roots and wept, sorrowing for the trees.

Our ancestors have much to answer for. Why? What did they do? ....Long ago, they used machines and drugs to keep the unhealthy and unfit ones of us alive. In that past time it was believed that all persons must have children. It was a right deemed so precious that it was forced upon even those who did not value it or should not have had it. If one of our people became pregnant, our people used all their knowledge to assure the young would be born, no matter how sick or disabled. Then, if the young lived, they injected them and dosed them and radiated them and transfused and transplanted them, to keep them alive, and then, when they were grown, they used all their skills in assisting them to have children of their own.

Existe el jardín. Y existe la cizaña. ¡Y a menos que seas despiadado, la cizaña siempre gana!

They make a mess,” Jared told her. “Tulip foliage dies and turns an ugly yellow. Pansies aren’t hardy. The bloom stalks on lavender drop their buds. Violets seed themselves.” His tone of voice made it clear that seeding oneself was a perversion.

Si una cosa he aprendido, sin duda, es que la vida no es un cuento.

Decirle a la gente lo que realmente piensas es a menudo una idea malísima. Como solía decir la abuela, la gente sensata vierte aceite en aguas revueltas, no nitroglicerina.