Robert Moor on Trees

There's a great story of Richard Feynman doing this experiment with ants on his bathtub where he put a sugar cube on one side and he watched the first ant make this really wiggly, windy trail and find the sugar.

And then over time, as the other ants followed that first ant's trail, they shaved off all those curves until it had a perfectly straight line.

Well, a tree will never do that.

A tree has to hold on to its past mistakes just by its basic biological mechanism.

It can't straighten out its wood.

And of course, as I want to do, sort of draw this deeper philosophical lesson from that, that there is ways in which our lives are like that as well.

We can't choose to fix our past mistakes, that the past is what it is.

And we have to sort of learn to grow beyond it rather than hoping to travel back in time and make it something different.

It's not as if the Mona Lisa is going to suddenly acquire wrinkles.

These are living things, and the art form changes over time.

And what's fascinating about bonsai is they change hands.

Some of these trees are 1,000 years old, so they've changed hands from one bonsai master to another over time, and they're constantly revising one another's work.

I mean, I don't think we have an art form comparable to that, where you would have one author rewriting another author's work again and again over the course of a millennium.

Maybe something like a folk tale would be comparable.