The Sense Of Time

Time, of course, is itself a creature of paradoxes — at once the relentless forward momentum of our mortality and the greatest antidote to the anxiety of aliveness. When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive.

It may be that flowers betoken precisely this elemental duality and through it cast their enchantment upon us. After contouring their astonishing evolutionary history — so astonishing that the baffled Darwin called it “an abominable mystery”