Quotable: How Good is Your Glue?

(I’m procrastinating . . .)

When gardening, I am often struck by how wondersome the whole process is and how little of the work I actually do. Transplanting lettuce seedlings yesterday called to mind this passage, which I keep bookmarked in my copy of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Enjoy.

“Intricacy, then, is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.

You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up solar energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?

You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted—just a replica—it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk in the ground halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them of clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex, the exposed portions (closed cone) reddish brown, often wrinkled, armed on the back with a small reflexed prickle, which curves towards the base of the scale”? When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the replica limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella.

You are a starling. I’ve seen you fly through a longleaf pine without missing a beat.”