encountered an ancient library rarity today
weather: ☀️ summer is nigh
critters: assorted sulfurs, monarchs, painted ladies, very large swallowtail
i love academic libraries that don't clean out their old stock. i think if this one did, most of the shelves would be empty, and remain empty for years as they scraped for funding to replenish them.
anyway, today i found a pre-WWII book about flower folklore which still had several uncut pages. i've never encountered this in a library book, even in very old ones. i kinda felt bad that no one had read it thoroughly enough to bother cutting all the pages. what i could access was charming and even refreshing. what's old is new again, i guess.
getting to the books on plants and gardens requires passage through the history and philosophy sections.
nietzsche, of course. and spengler and paglia and rand. and every other infohazard for cult-joiner personalities who "escape" the right-left dichotomy by becoming spiritual school shooters. the last decadent days of rome. the last decadent days of vienna. the franco-prussian war and its ongoing consequences. the history of india as told by the british in twelve volumes. colonial histories, diaspora histories (famines, death marches, dismembered limbs). no continent has escaped britain's attention. a few shelves of russias past and present. gibbon's decline and fall, shirer's rise and fall. the ideology of conquest. political psychoanalysis. disease changing the course of history. persia and the greeks and the arabs and the ottomans and almost everyone else, i'm sure, to their consternation since the days of the elamites, who could have written a colonized autobiography, had those been invented yet. the end of the islamic golden age. the belgian congo. the great game. dead-end knowledges and the backlash against renaissance humanism. modernism as backlash. postmodernism as backlash. all philosophies as a string of backlashes chewing each other's fingers off forever. the great game episode 2: this time it's about oil or a red heifer or some shit and you get to endure its wide-reaching consequences because you have no choice and fuck you.
you can't take it all in at once because you can only read twelve volumes so fast. but it's all here, and it's all on your phone too, and you have to put it all in your head for moral reasons. bearing witness is supposed to do something, especially when you do it in public, and it kinda feels like it does something, though only to you. observation may change the behavior of a particle but it no longer changes the behavior of the powerful. bear helpless witness because that feels like doing something when, actually, you have few options that will do anything, and nothing you can do will do anything--not outside your own neurons. thrash a little while you drown in the tar, or don't. it makes no difference.
then you escape like you're being born. you face a wall of green spines:
south american ferns, mojave succulents, edible plants of the outback, north american indigenous horticulture. tiny flowers of the arctic circle.
ornamental trees, the world's tallest trees, fruit-bearing trees, american native trees, trees of the remotest islands, dr. seuss trees, trees you've never seen before.
hothouse orchids, striped tulips, bulgarian rose farms. subsaharan flowers of every shape and color.
traditional beekeeping. how to plant a pollinator garden.
a picture tour of greenhouses around the world.
flower poems. flower language. flower folklore.