## Metadata - Author: [[John Fowles]] - Full Title: The Tree - Category: #books ## Highlights - I come now near the heart of what seems to me to be the single greatest danger in the rich legacy left us by Linnaeus and the other founding fathers of all our sciences and scientific mores and methods—or more fairly, left us by our leaping evolutionary ingenuity in the invention of tools. All tools, from the simplest word to the most advanced space probe, are disturbers and rear-rangers of primordial nature and reality—are, in the dictionary definition, ‘mechanical implements for working upon something.’ What they have done, and I suspect in direct proportion to our ever-increasing dependence on them, is to addict us to purpose: both to looking for purpose in everything external to us and to looking internally for purpose in everything we do—to seek explanation of the outside world by purpose, to justify our seeking by purpose. This addiction to finding a reason, a function, a quantifiable yield, has now infiltrated all aspects of our lives—and become effectively synonymous with pleasure. The modern version of hell is purposelessness. ([Location 544](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=544)) - I see trees, the wood, as the best analogue of prose fiction. All novels are also, in some way, exercises in attaining freedom—even when, at an extreme, they deny the possibility of its existence. Some such process of retreat from the normal world—however much the theme and surface is to be of the normal world—is inherent in any act of artistic creation, let alone that specific kind of writing that deals in imaginary situations and characters. And a part of that retreat must always be into a ‘wild’, or ordinarily repressed and socially hidden, self: into a place always a complexity beyond daily reality, never fully comprehensible or explicable, always more potential than realized; yet where no one will ever penetrate as far as we have. It is our passage, our mystery alone, however miserable the account that is brought out for the world to see or hear or read at second-hand. ([Location 749](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=749)) - Scientists speak of biological processes recreated in the laboratory as being done in vitro; in glass, not in nature. The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity. ([Location 778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=778))