Helprin

"I love plants, but have always hated it when people go from one to another saying their names. Quite often, people, especially very rich people, are overcome with joyful contempt when I don't know the name of some lousy fucking plant. "You mean, you don't know that this is a palustral hilychrysum?" I always reply that these plants about which they are so irritatingly reverent don't know what they are, either. And just because, two hundred years ago, a clerk in a Danish arboretum called the vegetable we are discussing a palustral hilychrysum doesn't mean that it really is a palustral hilychrysum. The plant is what it is, palustral hilychrysum be damned."


September 18, 1997